Skip straight the Pickle Power
Oh yes. That lovely 3-letter word that can really pack a punch. Of course, I’m talking about SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, it’s the process of optimising your website and content to improve its visibility and ranking on search engines like Google & Yahoo (but let’s be honest, who even uses Yahoo any more?). I mean, in actual fact, we’re all about Bing now. Its AI image generator was enough to convince us to dump Google (just kidding! We haven’t dumped you just yet Google <3).
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “SEO sounds boring, why should I care?” Well, let me tell you why. SEO is crucial for the success of your online presence. The higher your website ranks on search engines, the more likely people are to find and visit your site. This can lead to increased traffic, better brand recognition, and even more sales.
Although you can bid for the top spot on the SERP (search engine results page), in the form of ads, you can’t pay to get to the top of the organic results. Your place in the ranking is all down to how relevant Google thinks your webpage is in relation to what the user has typed into the search bar.
You could have the most beautiful looking website, but if it’s not relevant to what the user has searched, it isn’t going to appear. Just think of it like this. What are your users going to be searching to get to your website? As long as you write the content of your website with that question in mind, you are already halfway there! Easy, right?
So, how can you improve your SEO? Take some of our Pickle Power on board, and you’ll be rising high in the rankings in no time at all.
Use keywords in your content: Choose relevant keywords related to your business and use them throughout your website and content.
When we say keywords, we don’t mean single words. We mean phrases. Think about it like this: Let’s say you had a business offering violin lessons. The first word that springs to mind would be violin right? But just think – how many people simply searching the word ‘violin’ would actually be looking for violin lessons? Not that many. In fact, the majority would simply be looking for the definition of ‘violin’ or pictures of a ‘violin’. You don’t want to waste your words targeting phrases that your target market isn’t going to search for.
Now think about the phrase ‘violin lessons near me’. It’s much longer and much less people will search it, but the percentage of people searching it who are looking for your violin tuition business is almost 100%. These are the phrases you need to target and use in your website.
Create high-quality content: Google rewards websites that publish quality, original content that provides value to their users.
A great example is appliance stores that sell household appliances, for example fridges & microwaves. How many different websites will sell an LG fridge? More than you can count. The manufacturer will have its own description for their products and, more often than now, resellers simply copy the description onto their site. This makes the process quick but you forfeit originality, and that is something that Google loves.
If you just spent 10 minutes creating your own description, you will be so much more visible amongst your competitors. Think of it like being a red fish in a school of blue fishes.
Optimise your website for mobile devices: More and more people are using their smartphones to browse the web, so make sure your website is optimised for mobile devices.
Depending on how your site was created, there are a few different ways to do this. Generally though, all responsive settings can be found in the style area of your website. You should be able to switch between desktop, tablet & mobile in your design and style area of the site which will allow you to make changes that are only visible on the respective device. Great if you want to move things around on mobile to make it more user friendly to smaller screens.
Get backlinks from other websites: Backlinks from high-quality, reputable websites can improve your website’s ranking on search engines.
Having backlinks from reputable sites makes your own site more reputable. If the search engine recognises that other high ranking sites have links to your website, you will be favoured over a competitor that has no backlinks. There are many ways to do this. Perhaps write a guest blog on a website, or offer a link on your website in return for a link on theirs. Just make sure that the link makes sense. You can’t just plonk a link to your bike business on a blog that is about interior design. It just won’t make sense. But you could put a link to your bike business on a blog about ways to keep fit and healthy. It’s all about finding the right places to place your links. Places that your target audience might also be visiting.
Keep an eye on your website’s technical aspects: Make sure your website is fast, secure, and easy to navigate, as these factors can also affect your search engine ranking.
There are a few ways you can do this. For SEO, we like Screaming Frog SEO. Its free version is enough to gather bits and bobs of SEO information of your website, such as the number of meta descriptions you are missing, how many broken links (links that no longer lead anywhere) you have, and how many of your H1s are too long. It’s great to visually see what you need to do to improve the SEO of your site.
Another one for technical aspects is PageSpeed Insights, provided by Google. Simply enter the URL of your website and it will analyse the speed of your site both on desktop and mobile. It also gives you recommendations on what you can do to improve these speeds. Pretty handy, right? But don’t forget, this isn’t the be-all-end-all. Google doesn’t know the context of your site, so it may flag things up as issues, when really, they may be required for your site. Whilst we are on the subject of technicality, let’s not forget about accessibility. Super important for SEO but even more important to make your website accessible to all. Making sure your site can be read by screen readers and making sure the colours are visible to all is vital. Check out Coloors. It’s a great website where you can create colour palettes. It will give you a guide on which colours can be used together. Great for working out which of your brand colours will work well as background colours. We use coolors with all our clients as it’s a great way to visually see what combinations of your brand colours provide enough contrast to be used together.
Finally there is NordVPN. Or any VPN service really. It seems random, but if you own your business, the chances are if you google something linked, you will find your website pops up first. Get yourself onto a vpn and place yourself somewhere else in the world and repeat that search on an incognito tab → this will give you a much better idea of how you rank for your users. Knowing where you rank to a user who has no idea who you are yet is super helpful and this is a really quick way to find out how you look to your target audience.
So, there you have it! These are just a few tips to help you get started with optimising your website for search engines. Remember, SEO takes time and effort, but the results are well worth it, and it’s a great place to start if you don’t quite have the budget for PPC (pay-per-click advertising). So, start optimising and watch your website soar to the top of search engine rankings!
A Pickle Powered Summary
Search Engine Optimization: the process of optimising your website and content to improve its visibility and ranking on search engines like Google.
- Use keywords in your content
- Create high-quality content
- Optimise your website for mobile devices
- Get backlinks from other websites
- Make sure your website is fast, secure, and easy to navigate
Our favourite programs:
- Screaming Frog SEO (check SEO best practices on your website)
- Google Analytics (find analytics of your website)
- Google Load Speed (check your website speeds – but please…take it with a pinch of salt!)
- Nord VPN (view your website as an outsider)
- Coolors (colours and accessibility)
