8 Free Search Engine Optimisation Tips For Your SEO Strategy

Search engine optimisation is a primary promotion channel for my businesses and this is understandable due to:

• Free traffic that they don’t pay for, unlike pay per click advertising
• Receive over 4 times the traffic of pay per click ads
• Qualified visitors that have interest in the business
• Credibility for businesses that are at the top
So, it has many benefits over other online strategies, and if you are looking to increase profitability and see a boost in visitors and sales to your website, then this is the channel for you.

Here are 8 free search engine optimisation tips that will help you gain high rankings and outrank your competitors:

1. Get Top 3 Position

Always aim to be in the top 3 position for your main keywords because anything lower may not drive sufficient traffic to your website to reach your goals. The top 3 listings get over 70% of search click throughs and that’s for both branded and unbranded searches. Also, being in a top position boosts your credibility with target customers and prospects and leads to greater profitability too.

2. Do competitor research

It’s easy to check who your competitors are in the organic search listings and all you have to do is search with your target keywords. However, you need a more advanced strategy to identify them to assess and monitor their search engine optimisation strategy. Alexa can help you do this easily and for a low monthly fee of about £6 per month, you can compare against competitors for acquisition and engagement metrics like unique visitors, page views, country rank etc.

3. Optimise keyword density

For each page on your site, aim for 3% keyword density for your main keyword. This helps to ensure that your page is relevant to both visitors and search engines and leads to higher engagement and search rankings.

4. Optimise for 2 to 3 keywords

Optimising your pages for 2 to 3 of your main keywords should be sufficient to help you target long tail keywords and bring high volumes of visitors to your site. If you have a 100 page site for example, that could easily work out at 300 keywords you are targeting and that will bring you thousands of visitors each month.

5. Minimum 250 words per landing page

Aim for at least 250 words for over 80% of your pages to avoid being penalised for thin content. The search engines are looking at this to rank sites that they deem valuable to their searchers and if you have few words per page for many of your pages, then you will struggle to gain high rankings. This also helps to include your main keywords in the content and target both long tail and head keywords.

6. Increase page count

Google is now ranking sites with a high number of pages, higher than thin sites with only 10 to 12 pages for example. However, this differs from industry to industry and if you are a local service business it’s likely that a 12 page website will be sufficient to include all the content that you need and this holds true for your competitors too. However, if you are in a sector like personal health and you have a thin site, then you will struggle to gain and maintain high Google rankings over your competitors.

7. Make it responsive

Mobile responsiveness is now a big factor in ranking results on mobile devices. If your site is not responsive, then it will not achieve high rankings for your keywords and competitors will always outrank you. On platforms like WordPress, all you need to make your site responsive is a plugin and there are many free ones available to install in minutes.

8. Check Website Speed

Website speed is about ensuring that your site loads fast for new and returning visitors. Slow websites are a frustration for many visitors and this is a major reason why people leave and never return. So, ensure that your site loads under 5 seconds and aim for 2 seconds to ensure that the user experience is great for your visitors. Use a tool like the Google Developers Page Speed Insights that’s free and shows you what is causing your page to be slow and what you can do about. These are some of the common issues that you need to fix and it will show for both mobile and desktop versions:

• Leverage browser caching
• Enable compression
• Minify CSS
• Minify JavaScript
• Optimise images

This is an example of my own website and reveals that there is still room for improvement especially for mobile:

Summary

Need help creating and managing your search engine optimisation strategy? Get in touch to discover my SEO strategy solutions and how I can help you achieve high Google, Bing and Yahoo rankings and increase brand awareness and revenue for your business.