Google trends and strategies are constantly changing to improve search for users. This can, however, lead to some confusion for digital advertisers who want to ensure they are keeping up to date with any new SEO techniques needed to drive traffic. Understanding the most important search engine trends will help you to plan an actionable SEO marketing strategy.
As a digital marketing agency – we encourage moving away from outdated, black-hat SEO techniques like comment spam, keyword stuffing and thin content. We have created a list of simple, actionable SEO techniques that are likely to lead to real results for your business. So, let’s get started:
Create easy-to-read content for your audience
One of the most simple but important things to remember when it comes to SEO is keeping your content readable. If you want to increase your organic rankings – you will need to be producing content that is easy-to-follow, and of course, enjoyable to read. So, as a digital marketing agency – how would we recommend formatting and optimising your content?
- High-quality content – This might sound obvious, but nothing else really matters if your writing is low-quality. Things like grammar, spelling and structure are crucial if you want to be seen as authoritative in your industry. There are loads of online tools you can use to check over your work before publishing it , such as Grammarly.
- Short and concise paragraphs – Think of it from a reader’s point of view – shorter paragraphs generally tend to perform better. When possible, we’d suggest around 3-5 sentenced per paragraph. A paragraph is a group of sentences to support one main point or idea – so having any paragraph that is either too long or split – can lead to an idea being lost. Try to think of your most important points and group them together in neat and snappy paragraphs.
- White space – Similarly, too much text clustered together can be overwhelming and off-putting for visitors. If you think this might be the case, try to break up your text with things like images, videos, graphs or short quotes.
- Bullet points – There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of points, examples, facts or ideas – but when they’re listed in one long paragraph, users might lose interest. Generally, bullet points are useful if you’re listing three or more points.
Improve User Experience (UX)
It’s not uncommon for high bounce rates to be down to a poor user experience. However, it can also be quite tricky to determine what your specific UX problems are on your site. We suggest trying out some user-testing tools to help work out how users are interacting with your web pages, and how to make them want to stay on your site for longer. Here are two tools that we’ve used here at our London agency and would recommend:
Crazy Egg – Crazy Egg helps us understand more about user experience through helpful visual aids such as heat maps, scroll maps and confetti maps. You can learn more about what they offer here – but here’s a quick summary of what each of these can do for your site.
- Heat maps – These are coloured graphs to show where users have clicked whilst on your site.
- Scroll maps – These show are far a user scrolls down a page before leaving.
- Confetti maps – Confetti maps show what people are clicking on the most once they’ve on your site – and also where your clicks are coming from.
Using these visual aids can help you to determine the best layout and structure for your site. Plus, you might find that some content is no longer necessary or needs to be updated.
Google Optimize – Optimize is a helpful online split-testing tool that plugs into your site and allows you to experiment with different ways of sharing your content and working out how to improve it. It offers three different types of testing – A/B testing, multivariate testing, and redirect tests.
It is integrated with Analytics meaning you can use helpful data to quickly identify any problem areas on your site. You can find out more about Google Optimize here.
Increase your site speed
When users are searching for answers online – they want quick results. Site speed is one of the most important factors of a successful SEO campaign – it really can break or break your performance in search results.
In general, anything longer than three seconds wait might be too long for site visitors. Boosting the speed of a web page will encourage users to stick around for longer and therefore be much more likely to convert. These are a few things you can do to ensure your site isn’t too slow:
- Reduce your server response time
- Enable browser caching
- Enable compression
- Make sure you have the right hosting option
- Compress images
Don’t worry if you’re unsure – luckily now, there are plenty of SEO tools available to help increase site speed, including PageSpeed Insights and Test My Site.
Write longer content
From a digital marketing perspective – anything over 1,000 words long tends to perform better on SERP’s (search engine results pages). Now, we understand that it’s not always easy to reach that word count – and it’s equally as important that you’re not just producing content ‘for the sake of content’.
Refresh old content
If you’re struggling to write multiple blog posts whilst sticking to the longer word count – we suggest looking at your older posts and refreshing them. It’s likely that after a while, you might have more information or updates to add on to a post.
For example, SEO is constantly evolving and changing – so it’s more than likely that we may add to this post in 2021 with some more up-to-date techniques. This tends to work out well because it’s more likely your content already has some authority – and you can simply boost that as opposed to always starting from scratch.
Get in Touch
As with any digital marketing channel – SEO is complex, and how you approach it will depend on your brand, your target audience and the goals that matter the most to your business.
If you’d like to have a chat with us about your SEO performance or how you can drive more valuable traffic to your site, feel free to contact our London agency.