SEO for Business

Why is SEO for business important?

When performing a search on a website like Google, you’ll be presented with what Google deems to be the most relevant websites. You’ll also be shown advertisements where websites ‘bid’ on that particular keyword.

The image on the left shows the paid results, and the organic (SEO) results.

A successful ecommerce website needs traffic to convert into paying customers. Ranking highly in search engine results (SERPs) guides users onto your website, where you hope to convert them into customers.

Ranking on the first page of Google massively outweighs the second. 30% of users click on the first position in Google. 17% of users click through to the second position. If your page is on the second page (position 10+) you will have a click rate of less than 1%.

40% of users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load – try and make sure you don’t have any large images or media on your homepage.

Writing Quality Content for the User

Try to write as if you are solving a question – attempt to answer that question. E.g “Where can I buy bikes online?”  Match your content with their search.

Ensure a large proportion of your content is relevant to the query.

Make your content as engaging as possible, by using images, video, eye catching design – the longer a user stays on your website, the more likely it is that Google will think you have answered their query, indicating this is the right page to show users searching for that particular term. This also encourages people to share your page.

Give users another location to move onto next, this prevents them from bouncing (entering, then leaving your website) and also helps you promote other areas of your website.

You can use these techniques to target new key words, and begin to write quality content where Google will reward you. Bear in mind there are many, many factors that affect SEO. Writing content that matches keywords won’t propel you to the #1 spot on search engines, but it does carry a significant contribution – and it’s generally quite easy to do once you get the hang of it.

Want to learn more about SEO?

On Page Search Engine Optimisation

Note – This may require some understanding of HTML, and having the ability to view a page’s source. If you don’t have access to this, contact your webmaster.

Title Tag
The title tag is displayed at the top of a user’s web browser, and in search engine results pages.

The title tag is often represented in HTML as <title> Title here </title> It should be no longer than 65 characters. Your most important keywords should be near the beginning, and each page title should be unique.

Meta Description
The meta description is the snippet of information of roughly 155-250 characters of information that summarises a page’s content. This is shown underneath search engine results. In HTML it is displayed as;
<meta name=”description” content=”A page’s description, usually one or two sentences.”/>

Links/URLs
Try to use links within text, this is called anchoring, it can be shown in html like this;
<a href=http://www.example.com/keyword.html” title= “keyword”>Keywords in Anchor Text</a>

Image Links
With image links, it maybe tempting to use several keywords behind the image – don’t do this. Use keywords that are relevant to the image;
<img src=“image.jpg” alt=“image description” title=“image tooltip”>