Website and/or business owners, this one’s for you! Are you making any of the SEO mistakes below? Read on for the first part of this series.
You Don’t Have Enough Content
Listen up: Google rewards websites that are constantly publishing quality, relevant content. It is simply not enough to have a basic website with a few static service pages if you want to rank highly on Google.
Our Melbourne SEO agency always starts by recommending that our clients bulk up the content on their web pages. This often means fleshing out each service or product offered and writing about it in great detail. Not only will this give your site visitors a better idea of what you’re offering and exactly how it works or what’s involved, but it gives you far more content to optimise. You’re simultaneously providing useful content and setting yourself up for SEO success – it’s a win-win. Remember to aim for at least 300 words per page, and preferably 500.
Once you’ve improved your website copy, consider integrating a blog into your site and posting new articles regularly. Again, this will give you more optimisation opportunities as well as prompt Google to look at your site more favourably and consequently rank you higher.
If you don’t have anyone on your team who can product quality content for your website, consider our copywriting services in Melbourne.
Example of a site incorporating beautiful imagery.
You Don’t Have Enough Images
Having heaps of useful text on your website is great, but don’t forget to add some visuals too!
Including photos and/or videos on each page of your site makes it easier to read and digest the information provided. What’s more, they can help capture a user’s attention and keep them from bouncing (aka leaving your site).
And from an SEO standpoint, incorporating images into your website is crucial because you can optimise the image alt tags for the keywords you want to rank for on Google. Not having images means you miss out on this SEO perk.
Where to find relevant images? Check out a stock photo site like iStockPhoto, or hire a corporate photographer to take custom photos of your workplace and staff.
An easy-to-navigate website by Melbourne Myotherapy.
You Make It Difficult For Visitors To Navigate
The main goal for any good website should be to provide useful content that is easy to find. If someone clicks onto your website and cannot immediately find what it is they’re looking for, don’t expect them to stay on your site for long. Most people aren’t willing to spend much time scouring a website for the information they are seeking and are probably more likely to click back onto the Google search results and check another site instead.
When someone clicks onto your site and doesn’t spend any time perusing it, they “bounce”, and thus your site’s bounce rate goes up. This is exactly what you don’t want to happen because it means your site isn’t retaining its visitors, your visitors aren’t being exposed to most of your content, and they’re not converting into sales.
And worst of all: a high bounce rate can negatively impact your SEO. Google deems sites with a high bounce rate as less useful, and therefore less worthy of ranking high in the search rankings. So if you check your Google Analytics stats and notice your bounce rate is high (e.g. above 60%), consider restructuring your website so that the menu bar is organised into sensible categories and content is easy to find and digest.