Investing a bit of time to get some quick wins on the board, can do wonders for your local SEO – especially if your competitors are ahead of the game in their digital efforts. We’ve done you a solid and comprised a hitlist of 5 simple things to get stuck into to improve your SEO

Number 1: Optimise your snippets with meta descriptions

Snippets (those are the brief previews you see on Google search results) are generated from webpage content to match your search. So, the same page may have different snippets for different searches. Snippets serve kind of like a pitch for the page, to best convince searchers that the page is exactly what they’re trying to find.

Most of the time, they’re pulled directly from the page itself. But occasionally, Google uses the meta description HTML element if it offers a clearer description of the page. This mix ensures you get accurate and helpful previews tailored to your search.

You can’t write your own snippet directly, so having your Meta descriptions on point is a surefire way to optimize your snippet for each page.

• Write unique meta descriptions for EVERY page on your site. Duplicates are unhelpful.
• Meta descriptions don’t need to be directly in sentence format. You can list most relevant things like location, author, prices etc.

A searcher is far more likely to click on a page that shows the second snippet.

Learn a little more about writing better Meta Descriptions, and reach out to our SEO team with any questions about snippets.

Number 2: Look up the people also ask questions and answer them in your content

You’ve probably clicked on a few of these questions to find direct answers before, it’s just another one of Google’s ways to best answer your questions quickly and directly.

If Google pulls your answers, your ranking will benefit. Not to mention the traffic you can receive from being considered the most helpful indexed answer.

Google knows the questions people have when they search a specific keyword. Answering these questions well shows experience and expertise and can help drive organic traffic to your website.

What questions do you receive about your product or service?

Product and service pages are great places you can add your most common question’s, Answering these questions well can give your potential customers all they need so they have the confidence to get in touch.

Number 3 – Improve your site’s loading speed

Many people are surprised that loading speed is a ranking factor – but who want’s to spend time waiting for a page to load?! Neil Patel (for the uninitiated, he’s basically the God of SEO) studied rankings and page speed, to find that results up top of Google’s first page, load a lot faster than their page 1 counterparts down the bottom.

The good folk at Backlinko shared this list to improve site speed:

• Compress your site’s images
• Move to a better host (this makes a big difference)
• Reduce web page file size
• Delete unnecessary 3rd party scripts

Our SEO team can audit your website for factors that are slowing page speed down, and offer solutions to help get it back up to speed.

Number 4 – Bring your bounce rate down

We know what you’re thinking – easier said than done right? But there are a whole suite of things you can do to help keep people on your pages a little longer.

If your bounce rate is too high – Google thinks people don’t like your page, and that will see it tank in the SERP. No bueno.

Brian Dean compared pages with and without embedded videos and learned that pages with embedded video content have at least an 11% better bounce rate. Investing in video assets is great for page content, and with proper captions, descriptions and tags – can be beneficial for page ranking in more ways than one! Make sure you also post that video to YouTube – and optimize it properly, then you’re getting two birds with one stone.

For longer pages – add clickable links so people can get to the information they are looking for quickly. Bounce rates are often low because of information overwhelm. Make things clear for users to be able to get the information they are looking for.

Number 5 – Target new keywords

Most keywords are super competitive simply due to the sheer volume of people trying to rank for them.

So, staying on the buzzer for your latest industry terms and creating page content around new rollouts, updates or news is key to boosting SEO for your pages. For example if a new social media platform launches tomorrow – we will write a blog on “Your guide to This Cool Fun New Social Media Platform for NZ businesses” within that week – to not only position ourselves as industry experts in the space, but to get in on the keyword early while competition is low.

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