If you want to grow your business, it’s essential to have a website that’s not just visually appealing but  also functional. A well-structured and optimised website can help improve your Google rankings, meaning you’ll generate more traffic and – hopefully –  gain more customers.

Here are some SEO tips for your business website which you can implement quickly and easily.

1. Produce great content

Having high-quality content on your website is one of the most important elements of search engine optimisation. If your site features content that’s informative and written to a high standard, search engines like Google will see you as a useful source of information. As a result, potential customers will see you as an expert in your field. If you’re not a natural writer and need assistance to determine the quality of your content, we recommend using grammar checker tools such as Grammarly, Whitesmoke and Hemingway Editor.

Most pages on your website should contain over 400 words of content. However, if you really want to boost your rankings, then you should create a blog page on your website and publish blog posts at least once a month. If you can post more often, even better.

Although blog content should also be at least 400 words long, studies have suggested that search engines prefer content that is over 1,000 words long. A recent study has even concluded that the best blog post length is 1,760 words.

2. Optimise images

Site speed is a vital part of the user experience, so you need to keep tweaking your site to keep ensure it’s as fast as possible. One of the easiest ways to do this is to optimise the images you use. Ideally, none of the images that you have on your website should exceed 1 MB.

There are a range of free online tools that you can use to help reduce the size of your images. TinyPNG is a good website where you can upload your images, reduce their size and add them to your site without any reduction in quality.

3. Carry out keyword research

To attract as many site visitors as possible, you’ll need to ensure that your site is ranking for the right keywords. For example, if you run a dog walking business in London, your aim should be to appear high up on search engine results pages when people search for terms such as “dog walker London” or “best dog walker London”.

But how do you discover the “right” keywords? By carrying out  keyword research – but this isn’t as complicated as it sounds.

When you’re doing keyword research, here are the metrics you need to be mindful of and how they can affect your approach:

  • Keyword volume – this is the number of times people type a particular keyword into a search engine each month. You should prioritise keywords that are relevant to your business and have the highest volume. Balance is important here – don’t just target keywords with the most volume as they’ll have a higher difficulty. Speaking of which…
  • Keyword difficulty – depending on the keyword research tool you use (more on this below), it may provide details on how difficult it is to rank for that keyword. The difficulty is dictated by how many other websites are targeting it as well. This may affect your decision on which keywords to target. If you want to try and rank quicker, then you might want to focus on keywords that are easier to rank for. Having said that, investing time and effort in targeting trickier keywords could benefit you in the long run.

In order to get accurate information, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool. Google Keyword Planner is a good place to start – this provides keyword volumes and keyword suggestions for free. If you’re willing to pay for a keyword tool, then SEMRush and Ahrefs are good choices.

4. Optimise your site for mobile

More and more people are doing most of their searching on mobile devices. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your site is able to display and function properly.

The main thing is to make sure that your site is responsive. This means that it automatically changes dimensions depending on the device you’re using (for example, mobile). If you’ve used a website builder such as WordPress or Wix, your site should be responsive automatically. However, you should double check if you’re not sure.

To check if your site is mobile-friendly, Google has this free online tool where you can check and then identify any issues you may have.

5. Install Google Analytics

Once you have your site the way you want it, the next step is to set up Google Analytics so then you can track your progress and make informed decisions on what improvements you want to make.

Adding Analytics to your site is very simple and you can get it all set up in no time. Once you’re set up, you can then check out Google’s beginners course so then you can learn the basics.

Specialist Small Business Insurance From Ripe Small Business

While having a well optimised website is very important, having the right kind of insurance is even more vital. With our specialist small business insurance, you can tailor your cover to suit exactly what you and your business needs.

You can give us a call on 0800 668 1552 or go through our quick online quote process and get the cover you need within minutes.

Please note the information provided on this page should not be taken as advice and has been written as a matter of opinion. For more on insurance cover and policy wording, see our homepage.