Boost your search engine result page (SERP) ranking by optimising your content with these three easy steps. This is how you can do some basic search engine optimisation yourself, using simple search engine optimisation tools.
Search engine optimisation can seem like wizardry to the uninitiated, and it’s true there are some elements best left to the experts, such as ensuring proper URL structures, user-friendly navigation, and fast-loading and mobile-friendly pages.
But optimising your content with keywords is something that anyone can do, and we’ll show you how. Consider this your 2018 SEO starter guide: search engine optimisation for beginners, where we show you how to do some basic search engine optimisation yourself.
Step 1: Keyword research
Brainstorm a list of words or phrases (collectively known as keywords) that relate to your business, product, brand or content subject matter. It doesn’t have to be a big list – one or two words might cover it. In the case of this article, it would be ‘optimising your content’.
Sometimes it is easier to come up with the short-tailed keywords (three words or less), than long-tail keywords (longer phrases). Short-tail keywords are definitely useful for attracting traffic to your site, but long-tail keywords are the bomb for attracting relevant traffic that is more likely to convert to leads or sales.
There are plenty of tools to help generate long-tail keywords: Google Ads Keywords Planner or KeywordTool.io are a good start. Entering your initial keywords into one of these tools will generate a series of other commonly-searched words or phrases that you can use to optimise your content for searchability.
In the case of this article, typing in ‘about search engine optimisation’ brought up the following suggestions:
search engine optimisation tips and tricks
search engine optimisation for beginners
search engine optimization about
how to do search engine optimization yourself
search engine optimization (seo) starter guide
You should spot some of these long-tail keywords in this article 😉
Step 2: More keyword research
Now type your favoured keywords into Google and have a look at the Google Ads that come up above the search results. What keywords have they used? Is there anything there that you could use in your own content (keeping in mind that quite a bit has been invested in making sure those ads contain words that will deliver a huge ROI). Now have a look at the top search results, below the ads, and see if there are any useful keywords that you can pick up from there.
The key thing to keep in mind when narrowing down your list of chosen keywords is your customer or audience. What is going to be most useful to them? What are they most likely to be searching for?
Depending on your product or service, it’s probably also a useful exercise for you to investigate the keywords your competitors are using.
Step 3: Prepare optimised content using keywords
You should now have a list of highly-targeted keywords that you can use in your content and the page’s title tag and meta tag attribute (the descriptor that appears in SERPS and explains to search engine’s what your page is about).
Incorporating as many of these long-tail keywords as you comfortably can across these three areas will encourage search engines to rank your site higher up on SERPs.
And here’s the good news: Google favours natural content that isn’t overly forced or manipulated to accommodate keywords or phrases. So if you have created content that meets the needs of your intended audience, chances are you have already incorporated some keywords that will serve you well when it comes to your SERP ranking. It may simply be a case of tweaking your content by altering just a sentence or two to incorporate a few more.
The bottom line
When it comes to optimising your content – at the risk of making things seem outrageously over-simplified – great SEO is sometimes as simple as providing content that serves a purpose for your ideal audience. If your content achieves those aims, it’s probably optimized already. Investing some time in keyword research is something that everyone can do, and incorporating those keywords into your content will pay dividends by boosting your SERP ranking and encouraging relevant traffic to visit your site.
If you would like help with your SEO ranking contact us.