70 SEO Strategies For You To Try

70 Search Engine Optimisation Techniques, Strategies and Tips for WordPress

I decided to write this after many years of delivery SEO training to business owners. I’ve always said that SEO isn’t rocket science but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. I decided to put together all of the tips and techniques that someone with little experience can implement themselves.

I know from delivering training courses to business owners that people understand the importance of SEO but don’t have the time to learn it. Which is why I didn’t write a traditional book, I have put the content across in 70 short action points. This is a book that you scan through and in a few minutes be ready to dive right into the world of optimising your website to rank on search engines.

Starting off with the basics…

The homepage is one of the most important pages of your website. If your homepage doesn’t clearly state who you are, what product or service you offer, what geographic locations you serve or contain any keywords, then your site will be missing out on potential traffic. A lot of website designers are currently creating fantastically designed websites that look amazing but contain very little content; these can be a great user experience but what is the point if your website isn’t getting very many users? I recommend having at least 400 words of content on your homepage
Install the WordPress plugin Yoast. This will allow you to quickly write page titles and meta descriptions for every page and post on your website.
You have 70 characters available to you when writing page titles, this includes the use of spaces and punctuation. The meta description gives you the opportunity to create 160 characters of keyword rich content that makes search engine users want to click to visit your website.
Unless you have a very good reason for doing so, don’t optimise for your company name. The job of a search engine is to put the correct website in front of users, if they are running a search for your company name they should find you with ease (your Google Business listing can take care of this but we’ll come onto that later). As mentioned in point one, your homepage is one of the most important pages to optimise, having a well written, keyword focused page title and meta description has delivered considerable results for many companies that I have worked with.

Here’s an example for a firm of accountants based in Liverpool:
Page title: Accountant in Liverpool | Chartered Accountants This approach allows us to cover a few things, there’s a much higher chance of ranking for the search terms:

‘Accountant in Liverpool’ ‘Accountants in Liverpool’ ‘Chartered Accountant in Liverpool’ ‘Chartered Accountants in Liverpool’.

Meta Description: Looking for an accountant who can help you and your business in Liverpool? Quote ‘xyz123’ to get a free assessment worth over £250.

The meta description plays a role in SEO, many argue that it doesn’t play a part in rankings, however I have always seen significant gains when meta descriptions have been updated. It’s a time consuming job if you have a website with a lot of pages but it can pay dividends.

When writing your meta descriptions include a call to action that makes users want to click your website rather than the competitors.
In your meta description include your contact number, it will give some people the option to just call without the need to click through various websites.
Write a sentence or call to action in all capital letters, it really makes people stop in their tracks when scrolling down the search results! I wouldn’t recommend doing this on every page of your site, select a few pages or posts that you really want to push.
Your website needs to load quickly. Website speed is a ranking factor, if your website takes a long time to load it will not show on page 1 of search results. There are a few ways to make your website load faster.
Use a WordPress plugin like ‘Smush Lazy Load Images’ – this optimises and compresses images making your website load faster.
Go through your website and make sure you don’t have any images on the site that have a huge file size, I’ve quickly improved the site speed of many websites by doing this process and finding numerous images that were each a few megabytes in size. If you aren’t skilled on Photoshop use a freelancing platform like Fiverr or PeoplePerHour to get someone to reduce the file sizes of your images without reducing the quality or dimensions.
Don’t upload videos within your website, they will slow your website down dramatically, upload your video to a platform such as Vimeo or YouTube and embed your video using the platforms features.
Install a caching plugin such as ‘WP Super Cache’
Gain high quality backlinks with minimal effort and no outreach. Sign up to Help a Reporter Out (HARO) – helpareporter.com – you will start receiving 2-3 emails a day with requests for soundbites/snippets of information. You will be an expert within your niche, check the emails as they come in, see which questions you could answer or provide insight and reply with the relevant information along with a link to your website. This is a fantastic way to start building up a strong amount of high authority, relevant backlinks that will also show you/your business as an expert within your industry. What’s not to like about that?
Build internal links within your website. This provides your websites users with a simple and effective way to navigate your website, for example if during your content you mention ‘contact us’ then the two words should be a clickable internal link that takes users through to your contact us page. This has the obvious advantage of providing a better user experience, and hopefully more leads/sales as well as providing an SEO boost.
Some pages of your website will be more authoritative/win more traffic than others. This could be a good blog that you wrote a while back that still gets traffic, a particular service page or something else, but generally a few pages on your website will be doing better than the rest. Putting an internal link into these higher authority pages to a recently published page or post will provide newer content with a nice boost. Let’s say you have an old blog article that performs very well called: “How to win more website traffic from doing SEO” you could place an internal link within this content to a relevant blog article that either isn’t ranking yet, or plan a new piece of content that could compliment this high performing article and make the reader want to click to read the next piece of content e.g. “How to convert your new SEO traffic into sales”.
Final one on internal linking. As mentioned, there are a few reasons why internal linking can provide a user experience benefit and give a search ranking boost. The ultimate goal with internal linking is to make your website ‘sticky’. If visitors are using a search engine, landing on your website and then immediately leaving or leaving very soon after this can be a red flag to the algorithms and there’s a good chance your website will lose rankings or stay as it is. Counter to this, if search engine visitors land on your website, then click through to read the next article, then perhaps click another link to watch a short video and then click another link to sign up for a special offer/call to action/deal/discount it will identify that your site is highly engaging and you will be rewarded with a higher ranking. In summary, don’t just place internal links for the sake of doing so, think about your website visitors ‘journey’ through your website, look at the pages they’re landing on, what could you place on that page to make them want to go and click to find out more?
Moving onto outbound links. It’s a good idea to provide links to relevant, high authority websites in your sector/niche. I wouldn’t recommend doing this on service or product pages of your website as this could lower conversion rates; I would advise placing external links within blog content. To go a step further, send an email to the blog or website that you have linked to, letting them know that you have done so and sending them a link to the relevant page. This is a great way for them to find out about you/your website, like you and potentially link back to you (just don’t ask for a backlink when you email them).
Freshen up your website homepage, about us and services pages. The majority of companies I’ve worked with over the years put a great deal of effort into writing content, designing and building their website…then they don’t touch it for months or years. Keep the main pages of your site fresh, whether you go in and add some new testimonials, embed a YouTube video, put in a further 200 words of keyword rich content, however you do it keep your website fresh and give the search engine crawlers some new content to discover, as long as the new content is interesting, useful or insightful you should be rewarded with a higher ranking.
Freshen up old blogs. Go back to old blog articles and make them interesting, up to date and relevant. There are many sites I’ve worked on that that have created time sensitive pieces of content e.g. ‘How to win more customers in 2018’ that performed very well at the time but of course now seems dated and irrelevant. This can very quickly be updated to the current year, and make some alterations to the content and or add some further information. It’s considerably quicker and easier to rank existing, aged content than it is to rank a brand new piece of content. Go through your old blogs and as in point 19, improve them, add content, include a video, generally make them more engaging.
Build an FAQ page. This is a great approach for both user experience and SEO. Think about what your potential customers ask you the most and write a clear, detailed and useful response. If your potential customers ask you similar questions repeatedly, you can rest assured that there will be a lot of people using search engines trying to find out the answer; if your FAQ provides the perfect answer to a question, you should gain a good ranking, even better you will gain ranking for a search term that should have a strong conversion rate.
Fill up your FAQ page. Don’t just think about the handful of questions you’re usually asked, go to Google, type in your sector or industry and read the suggested search terms, these phrases will be getting searches. Aim to find 10-20 questions that people are asking about your niche and answer these questions within your FAQ page.
Use your FAQ page to rank for rich snippets. Rich snippets are growing in popularity and are a great way to take up a lot of the space on page 1 of Google search results. By using questions and answers, or bullet points it increases the likelihood that you will rank for rich snippets.
URLs – there’s a few things to do to ensure your URLs are setup correctly e.g. if you were a men’s clothing store you may have URLs that look like this: example.com/shoes/mens-boots – this would be a URL that is setup correctly. If you don’t have permalinks setup correctly your URLs might look something more like this www.example.com/shop/products/784555215567.html which obviously looks awful and can confuse search engines as to what your website contains. It’s a very quick thing to change, within WordPress on the left menu go to ‘Settings’ – ‘Permalinks’ and select ‘Post Name’.
If your website has been live for a while, making any changes to URLs will cause the dreaded 404 error as the page example.com/shop/products/784555215567.html would no longer exist on that URL, it would be: www.example.com/shoes/mens-boots see point 26 for what needs to be done.
Ensure there are no 404 error pages on your website. 404 errors can come about when you have had a particular page or blog on your website but for whatever reason (such as in point 25) it no longer exists on that URL, or the page has been deleted. We do not want search engine users landing on 404 error pages! Firstly because they will almost always immediately leave the website and go somewhere else, secondly, if visitors are using a search engine then clicking your website, landing on a 404 error page and immediately leaving, what will that tell the search engine about your site? That it doesn’t contain the information the individual was looking for and that it’s potentially a low quality site as a good number of visitors are navigating away seconds after landing on it. As a result, your website will lose rankings.
Use Google Search Console to find any 404 errors on your website. If you don’t have Google Search Console setup yet, make sure you get it setup as soon as possible, it is a hugely powerful tool which we’ll be looking into further. When logged into Google Search Console click ‘Coverage’ and then click ‘Excluded’ – here you will see the 404 errors on your website. You can then take a look at what these pages are and why they are no longer working. The quickest solution is to install a 301 Redirect WordPress plugin such as ‘301 Redirects – Easy Redirect Manager’ and you can then select each page that has a 404 error and redirect anyone who was going to land on this page to a more relevant page.
Image optimisation. You will have images on every page of your website, if you have a large site or a big ecommerce store you potentially have hundreds, even thousands of images held on your website. These images need to be optimised for search engines so they’re able to identify what this image is. Search engines can identify words written on a page but it cannot identify what an image contains unless you give it a description. When saving your image, give it a proper name for example if it was a mens blue T Shirt save the image as: ‘Blue Men’s T Shirt’ rather than it receiving an automatically generated name such as ‘768553772.jpg’.
Every image of your website also needs to have what is called an ALT Tag, this is the description of the image for search engines as mentioned in point 28. On WordPress it is very simple to do, go to the image, click edit and then in the space for ALT Tag give it a keyword rich name. Don’t be tempted to go keyword heavy/SPAMMY, give the image a natural name. If it was the men’s T Shirt again an example could be: ‘Men’s T Shirt Blue (Brand name included if applicable), 100% Cotton’. If you have a lot of images on your site then this will be a time consuming job and one that most people put off as it is time consuming, monotonous and doesn’t yield quick results. But it does give results! Make this a manageable project if you’re short on time, perhaps optimise two images a day or 100 images a week, whatever you feel is achievable.
Image Optimisation for Google Image Search. A growing number of people when using Google Search are moving away from the text based (All) search results and opting for the ‘Image’ based search results. I’ve been asking a lot of people and the majority have said that it’s faster and it allows them to select exactly what product they’re looking for. By implementing tips 28 and 29 your website imagery stands a significantly higher chance of appearing at the top of image based search results. There is a further strategy within this point, one which not many people are currently using and I have found to be immensely successful when trialled. We know that a proportion of people are using the ‘Image’ search results to find what they want, fantastic results can be achieved by creating an image(s) that stand out from the crowd, so when an individual is scanning the results your image stands out from the rest. There are many ways to do this, include a discount code, use red arrows that point to the centre of your image/message, place your contact number in bold. You can really get creative. This isn’t just for e-commerce businesses with a product to sell, I have had success working on this tactic with a range of sectors including accountants and solicitors; just think about what makes your potential customers stop in their tracks, then create an image that includes this call to action.
Optimising for user experience (UX) is critical. As mentioned in earlier tips, if your website brings in traffic that quickly leaves, it will damage your search engine rankings whilst also losing you potential sales or leads. Before we look into each tip, the first is to go to your website as though you are a visitor, how does it look? Is it interesting? Is it useful? Does it answer your questions or provide you with the product/service that you are looking for? Be critical, if you think it’s fantastic and couldn’t be improved, get a critical friend or employ an outsourced consultant to review your website and provide you with a report.
Font size. This is important, if it’s difficult to read the text on your website that explains what you do, many will leave. All the hard work, effort and energy that has been put into writing great content is immediately lost if you’re font size is so small that people struggle to read it and leave. Make sure your font size is easily readable, I recommend font size 14. There are WordPress plugins that offer website users the opportunity to increase the font size of the website if they’re struggling to read it.
Font colour. A light grey font on a white background isn’t a great user experience. For some reason this light grey font colour is often the default on WordPress; I recommend having black text on a white background.
Font used. Choose a font that is easy to read; trying to read a long blog with a Times New Roman font isn’t an enjoyable experience for many. Good options include ‘Sans Serif’ ‘Arial’ and ‘Helvetica’.
Break up the text on pages. Even when content is interesting, engaging and generally brilliant, the bounce rate of a webpage can still be extremely high if the text is all bunched together, here’s a few ways to do it:
Use Header Tags (like sub headings) throughout your content. This is a great user experience as it allows website users to scan down to the part of the content that they’re looking for which is relevant to them.
Put one or two lines of spacing between paragraphs.
Break up the content with images, infographics and embedded YouTube/Vimeo videos.
Moving on from fonts but sticking with user experience, the next SEO point is to install a ‘breadcrumb’ WordPress plugin such as ‘Breadcrumb NavXT’. This helps the user experience and reduces bounce rate as it’s a quick, simple process for your website users to navigate back through your site. Having breadcrumbs within a website has given ranking boosts for many websites that I have worked on over the years.
Having an SSL certificate on your website has been advisory for a number of years now. It’s hugely important for many reasons but it’s now crept into user experience as sites that do not have an SSL certificate in place will often display a warning message to people trying to visit the website saying ‘Warning! Website not secure’. This is a terrible user experience, will see you lose potential customers and suffer significant drops in search engine rankings. Page 1 search results are dominated by websites that have https. Getting an SSL certificate can cost as little as £40 a year, speak with your website hosting provider if you don’t have one in place.
The last point on user experience is to be useful. People are searching the web looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems. Let your website be the perfect resource that helps them with what they’re looking to solve or find out. Being useful and providing the answer to a question/solving a problem in an interesting way is a fantastic user experience. By creating content like this your website visitors will be far more likely to enjoy your content, you will keep visitors on your website for longer and you will start to rank higher and higher on search engines.
Landing pages. There was a time when landing pages were built purely for PPC purposes. I have trialled this approach for a number of years now and had great success, the landing pages do not need to be held within your main menu, if you built up dozens of landing pages it would make your menu cluttered. Whatever product or service you are offering, drill down into the detail of what it is that you offer, or in what geographic location that you offer it and create a dedicated landing page. I’ll take a locksmith as an example, a locksmith provides all sorts of services including changing locks (for homes, cars, business premises), installing locks (for homes, cars and business premises), helping people who are locked out of their home, car or house. The majority of locksmiths will have a services page that contains all of this information, however from just looking at these points we can see there are 9 services available here, ‘changing locks for your home’ ‘installing locks for your home’ and ‘locked out of your home?’ as an example. By creating a dedicated page with quality content a locksmith undertaking this approach would, in my experience, generate significantly more search engine traffic compared to just relying on a single services page. If you provide a local service, as a locksmith typically would, excellent results can be achieved by creating geographic specific pages e.g. ‘Locksmith covering Hammersmith’ or ‘Vehicle Locksmith in Hammersmith’.
If you provide a local service, optimising for search terms such as ‘near me’. This approach follows on with the logic of point 42, these would again be landing pages that probably wouldn’t be included within the main menu. Creating content like this has worked incredibly well for several clients I’ve worked with who offer a relatively local service, here’s a few examples: ‘locksmith near me’, ‘find a good accountant near me’, ‘looking for a driving instructor near me’.
Categories within blogs. Within WordPress, when you write a blog article it can (and should) be assigned to a category. A category can be given a highly targeted SEO search term e.g. ‘Solicitors in Manchester’. You will doubtless write various blog articles and assign them to a handful of categories. When some of these categories amass 5-10 blog articles they can start to achieve very good search engine rankings when done correctly. The most common mistake is to write a unique Category for each blog article you write, such as giving the Category the exact same name as your blog title. The Category section should serve independently, going back to the ‘Solicitors in Manchester’ example, you may write blog articles such as ‘Employment law solicitor in Manchester’, ‘Seeking legal advice in Manchester’ and ‘Solicitors near me’, these would all then be added to the ‘Solicitors in Manchester’ category.
Now we understand the importance of creating Categories and how beneficial they can be, let’s look at how to optimise them further for search engine raking. Within the WordPress login area navigate to ‘Posts’ and then ‘Categories’ to see what categories you have. You can then hover over each category click ‘edit’ and then fully optimise this area by writing a detailed description (300-500 words), adding an image (with an image ALT tag) and by having added the Yoast plugin you will be able to write a unique page title and meta description for each category. This can be a time consuming task depending on how many categories you have on your site but it is time well worth investing, this is an SEO tactic that has consistently provided me with some extremely positive results. If you do login and find that you have a significant amount of ‘Categories’, think about trimming them down and instead of having 40 blog articles spread across 20 Categories, see if you can turn it into 40 articles across 5 (SEO keyword rich) Categories.
Think wisely when assigning blogs to the correct category, don’t be tempted to assign a single blog article to numerous Categories, unless there’s a very good reason. Ideally, a blog article should be assigned to a single category.
Never, ever think there’s a good enough reason to leave a blog article as ‘Uncategorized!’.
Tags within blog articles. When publishing a WordPress blog/post you’re given the opportunity to add ‘Tags’ to each post. This is the place that many people new to SEO decide to get over excited and add tags for a wide range of search terms they want to rank for; seems logical but it’s actually a big mistake. Adding too many (more than 2-3) tags to your article will clutter up your website and potentially have a negative SEO impact. If you have published an article in the past that contains lots of tags, go and have a look at the page on your site, you will see all the tags either at the top or bottom of the article, it doesn’t look good! Anything that doesn’t look good is a poor user experience and as mentioned it can damage your websites ranking as the page may be seen by a search engine as ‘Keyword Stuffing’ which is the practice of filling up a page/area of your website with a bunch of keywords/search terms for the sake of it.
Finding what keywords and search terms that you want to rank for. I have a few ways of doing this and will go through each individually and how to check how many individuals are (roughly) running that search. My quick and easy way to find out what people are searching for is to use Google. Enter a keyword that relates to your business and it will bring up suggested search terms. These suggested search terms are phrases that people are actually searching for. If I was doing this process for the search term ‘Solicitor’ I would go onto Google and type in ‘Solicitor a’ and see what was suggested then ‘Solicitor b’ then ‘Solicitor c’ and so on.
Sticking with this process will also allow me to find ‘long tail keywords’. I love long tail keywords, you can quickly start to gain rankings for very specific search terms that are ideal for your business as these terms are far less competitive. If you wanted page 1 rankings for the search term ‘Solicitor’ you would likely struggle, you could much quicker achieve ranking for a long tail keyword search term such as ‘Employment law solicitors for employers near me’. Obviously there will be very few searches for this but there will likely be a good number of searches every week/every month and you can gain rankings much faster by going for long tail keywords. You can then of course start writing content that gains rankings for all sorts of long tail keywords that will collectively bring your website a significant amount of organic traffic.
Sticking with Google, run a Google search of your desired search term and on the results page scroll down to the bottom and it will provide you with ‘Searches related to’ which will provide you with a 4-8 search terms that you may not have thought of. By bringing these phrases /titles into your blog articles you can get a single article ranking for a wide range of search terms (more on this later).
Back to Google Search Console – login and then look at the menu on the left hand side, click ‘Performance’ and then scroll down to look at the ‘Queries’. Scroll to the bottom and select 100 rows per page. This will be a great start to see what your website is ranking for. You will likely see a wide range of search terms that you hadn’t previously thought of that you may be ranking for at the bottom of page 1 or on pages 2-3 of search results. By looking at how many ‘Impressions’ each term gets will show you what you should start working on. I love to discover a search term with a ratio of extremely high impressions and very low clicks, e.g. 500 impressions and 3-4 clicks. This tells me that it’s likely bottom of page 1 or on page 2. These search terms are comparatively easy to rank for as they’ll be search terms you’re already ranking for without actively putting work into them. I would then start placing this search term on page titles, meta descriptions, include it within main service pages and potentially write a 750+ word blog if it was something I really wanted to rank for.
Google Search Console indicates what search terms are getting traffic (that you are getting impressions for). Many who are new to SEO often assume what keywords or phrases they should be optimising for based on their assumptions. Thankfully there is a tool called Uber Suggest by Neil Patel that takes the guess work out of this process. Find this at neilpatel.com/ubersuggest – there is a free version available with a limited number of searches per day and a premium feature. Enter they search terms from your keyword research findings and then Uber Suggest will show you which search terms are getting the highest volume of searches. This is a fantastic tool and opportunity, if you are going to be putting time and effort into creating content and doing optimisation work, it may as well be for search terms that get frequently used.
Now that you have created a list of search terms that you would like to rank for and have verified that they actually receive a healthy volume of searches, it’s time for the work to begin, writing content. Whether you write content yourself, have a member of your team do it or outsource it to a freelancer will depend on how much time you have available and how confident you feel as a writer. I believe, whatever search term you want to rank for, there should be a dedicated page/post that is specifically for this search term. Let’s say you wanted to rank for the search term ‘How do I find a good accountant?’ then you should write a piece of content on a page/post of your website with exactly this page/post title.
‘How do I find a good accountant’ should be in your Page Title, Meta Description, Permalink (this will automatically take place if using the Yoast plugin if you give the page/post title this name), header tag within the content.
My favourite way to structure an SEO focused article for a term such as ‘How do I find a good accountant’ is to do the process in points 49 & 51 and see what other questions search engine users are asking that relate to this. I would then structure a question and answer article for 70-80% of the content, using each question (as a header tag) and then a 100-250 word, insightful, useful response. This process can get dramatic results, one article can rank for various search terms and bring in very healthy volumes of traffic.
I’m often asked how long a blog piece should be, there isn’t a set number of words. You could write 10,000 words and assume it will rank well as it is a huge piece of content that is filled with keywords, but if the content is boring or doesn’t provide any genuinely useful information it will not gain a high ranking. Counter to this you may only write a 400 word article but if it quickly summarises the issue, answers relevant questions and is a genuinely useful piece of content that search engine users land on and engage with (stay on the site, scroll down and read it) then it could gain a high ranking.
There has been a belief to run a search on what term you would like to rank for, see what pages are in the top positions, look at the content and then write a longer piece of content. Whilst this may work, you will almost certainly have better results by creating a better piece of content than those at the top, rather than a longer piece of content.
If you are going to be writing a good amount of useful, interesting content for your website then adding Schema Markup can provide you with a significant rankings boost. By adding schema markup to your WordPress site, it makes it more likely that your site will not only show up on page 1 of search engine results, but it will take a prominent position. Schema markup can take some time to learn but there are many plugins available. The best I have worked with is Schema Pro: https://wpschema.com/ – this isn’t a free plugin, currently it is priced at $79 a year but it can be a worthwhile investment. Schema markup tells search engines such as Google how to interpret the content on your website with no need to learn or implement anything complicated, you will be done in just a few clicks.
I’ve seen some nice uplifts from using the footer section of the website for SEO purposes. One tactic has been filling up the very last line of the site which is usually for the copyright bar e.g. ‘Copyright 2021 Jamie Rice’ can be turned to ‘Copyright 2021 Jamie Rice – SEO Specialist’ or whatever competitive keyword/phrase you want to rank for.
Within the footer area of your website there should also be a ‘Widget’ area that allows you to put further information in, some websites use these spaces to include their address, a contact form or social media links. I’ve found that by writing 2-3 short sentences that are keyword rich and placing them within one of the websites footer widgets can have good results. This content is seen on every page of your website so it’s clearly seen as of importance/use by search engines, so see what content you can get in there.
Whether your business operates locally or nationally, Google Business is a great tool to help you gain exposure. It’s a free tool, although there are some new advertising features that are gaining prominence and the results can be significant. Google Business is important for a few reasons, firstly for many search terms your business can site on the right hand side of search results and get a very high click through rate. Secondly, Google Maps search results sit ABOVE organic search results! This means that you could work very hard getting to the top of Google by using all of these SEO strategies, however a company that may put no time or effort into SEO could be ABOVE you in the search results just by ensuring their Google Business listing is optimised. Finally, it’s important because it increases your chances of getting a search engine user to click through to your website, if your Google Business listing and your website is optimised you should start to show in both the local search pack results as well as the organic search results. If you add a PPC (Pay Per Click) budget into the mix, you can see how your business/website could start to dominate the first page of Google search results for certain keywords and phrases.
Optimising Google Business can be done in a few ways and if done correctly can bring in significant amount of website traffic and calls to your business. Within Google Business you will see an Analytics area that will show you how much exposure you’re getting for your time and effort. The first tactic is very basic, make sure all of your information is filled our correctly and it is in (interesting) detail. Include your opening times, what days you are open, what products/services your business offers and write in a good amount of detail who you are as a business and generally why someone should do business with you rather than someone else.
Ensure all categories of images are filled in. There’s a mix of types of images such as showing pictures of the companies team members, work taking place, inside/outside the premises etc. Get these all filled in with images, I’ve seen fantastic results when I have taken over a Google Business account for a new client and included images within all the necessary areas. When you have uploaded the images, don’t leave it there and never log back in again, it should be an ongoing task, consistently login similar to how you may do on social media and add new photographs. Even if you only upload 1-2 photographs a month, it can have a very positive impact.
Get testimonials! Very few business owners like to ask for testimonials from people, but it’s very important to do. It’s increasingly common that the majority of businesses shown on the local search pack are companies with dozens of Google reviews. Start asking your customers for Google reviews!
A relatively new feature is the option to add posts within Google Business, similar to a social media channel such as Facebook. Start using this feature, even if you only share 1-2 posts a month, it can give your site a nice boost in the rankings.
Embed your Google Map within your website, generally this is done on the ‘Contact’ page but there may be other areas within your website where you think this could fit well. I’ve noticed a lift in rankings when I’ve done this; it’s also been a fantastic conversion rate tactic if you have a good amount of Google Reviews. Your star rating is visible within your Google Business embedded map, meaning that your website visitors can click and read independent Google reviews. This tactic alone has helped several clients bring in a few more website visitors a month and significantly more calls/emails/general enquiries.
Repurposing your content into video. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, if your business isn’t active on the platform, you are missing out on potential traffic and customers. There are many ways to create a YouTube content, whether you simply record videos off your smart phone, use screen recording equipment such as Loom, or bring in a videographer. Put simply there’s an option for any budget. I like bringing YouTube into the mix with an SEO strategy for a few reasons, generally I find it quicker to make a video compared to writing a 3-4,000 word blog article and I have found that YouTube videos tend to quickly gain rankings on search results. Think about your blog articles, calls to action and your knowledge within your sector, how could you turn this into a YouTube channel that is pushing content?
Getting your videos to rank. YouTube videos can rank both on Google search results and YouTube search results meaning there’s a lot of opportunity for your website/business to start gaining exposure and rankings if you begin publishing videos. The process of getting a video to rank is the same approach that we have looked at earlier in getting a blog article to rank. It is necessary to do keyword research to find out what people are searching for, write a good title (name for) your video and include a detailed description (200-500+ words). If you can do this and publish new content consistently then strong results can be achieved.
Create and upload a sitemap. This can be a potentially difficult job if you aren’t experienced in this area; which is why I’m recommending taking advantage of a free plugin called XML Sitemaps by Auctollo: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ – this allows you to quickly and easily create a sitemap that will make it easier for search engine crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and bring up your results more efficiently.

I hope you have found these tips useful and have started putting some into practice. If you have any questions I would love to hear from you – jamie@searchonlinemarketing.com