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If you have delved into the world of SEO you have undoubtedly heard the term keywords. SEO expects simply love keywords – they make us happy and it’s what we live for! There is nothing quite like a strong keyword to start the day!
But what are they and why do they matter? Why is everyone so intent on keyword research and making content that uses keywords? We explain this SEO phenomenon below!
A keyword or keyphrase is a single word or phrase that has importance and is typed in on search engines like Google.
Let’s say that you want to find gardening supplies and plants in Essex – ideally at a garden center. Therefore, you search on Google, “Garden centers in Essex”. The keywords in this phrase are garden, centers, and Essex, with “in” being a stop word.
Google then processes this and looks for relevant websites that utilize these keywords while also using advanced AI to understand your search intent. You are then given a host of garden center websites in Essex!
In years past, keywords were even more important but the way they are used now has evolved as Google and other search engines have developed more complex indexing algorithms. Today, they are still highly important and should form the basis of your SEO strategies.
Customer insight is incredibly important in today’s world of eCommerce. The more you know about your customers, the better you can tailor your services, products, and web content to match their needs.
SEO services London and expert companies that specialize in SEO can help too with customer insight but you can also use your keywords to great effect.
There are many keyword research tools you can use and also simple things like looking at Google’s suggested searches can give fantastic insight. Keywords help show user intent and allow you to get into your customer’s mind and really understand what they want.
By looking at the words they use and what is most commonly searched for you can really target your customers and create far more effective marketing.
The main benefit of keywords still remains that they can help your web pages rank highly on Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Google analyzes web content for keywords and looks at how you use them.
When someone searches for a phrase, keywords are defined from the search string and then the most relevant results are returned that use those keywords. Without keywords, your pages and web content probably won’t rank as high.
Using keyword research tools like Google Keyword planner allows you to see potential new business opportunities. You can see lists of keywords and related phrases that you could use to reach different markets, or different demographics of customers.
This includes things like localized keywords for specific towns and regions you serve, or keywords for specific customer types.
As part of your SEO strategy you must strive to produce new content regularly. This includes things like blog articles, product information articles, new product pages, email campaigns, and social media posts.
Google looks favorably on active businesses that keep their web content up to date. This can be difficult to keep things fresh and continually think of new ideas without repeating what you have already written.
Keywords can help with this. You can look at the keywords you utilize and see which ones you have not generated content for yet. This then gives you a wealth of new content potential and the possibility to write blog articles etc. based on the other keywords.
While the way keywords are used has changed over time, their importance remains, and to create a successful SEO strategy you must do extensive keyword research and create web content that uses them effectively.
Consider using tools like Google Keyword Planner and Semrush keyword locator to better understand which keywords and phrases will work for your business, and potential areas of untapped customers that you could target.
WordPress is one of the most popular web development platforms due to its huge array of plugins, fantastic support, and simple approach to web design. Millions of businesses create their websites using WordPress but a common issue found is page loading speeds.
Oftentimes WordPress websites can feel a little sluggish and take longer to load even simple HTML pages. Why is this and what can your business do to avoid these pitfalls? We look at optimization techniques below and why they are important.
So why is speed important for your WordPress site? There are two reasons – for user experience, and for SEO.
Firstly, no one wants to waste time waiting for a web page to load! We have much shorter attention spans these days and instead of waiting for your site to load, many customers will simply click off and go elsewhere! Fast loading times help customer retention.
Secondly, Google favors websites with fast loading times and optimized pages. It isn’t a major factor compared to keywords and optimized content but every WordPress SEO consulting company knows slow sites = poor SEO.
The great thing about WordPress is that it is highly customizable and there is many tweaks and changes you can make to improve site loading times including:
Images are one of the main causes of slow loading times. It is vital that you optimize all images on your WordPress theme and each web page. You can use tools like Tinypng which uses smart compression to reduce the file size of your web images without a huge decrease in quality.
Did you know that each time a WordPress page is loaded it is effectively dynamically created on-the-fly? This can cause slow loading times due to the processing needed to formulate and display the code each time. You can use caching plugins that help with this and allow for page content to be cached for quicker repeat loading.
WordPress is the web development platform but you still need a hosting package from a third-party provider. If you find that loading times are slow, it could be a hosting issue. This is common if you use a shared hosting package where you are allocated space on a server and not guaranteed bandwidth.
Over time WordPress receives updates and this is true for any plugins you use too. Outdated plugins or using an older version of WordPress could result in loading issues. For example, the latest version may fix bugs that affect loading times. Always keep your WordPress version and plugins up to date with the latest patches.
If your web content allows customer comments this can greatly affect loading times. Having comments and positive customer engagements is great for SEO, but you need to manage them effectively. A great idea is to split your comments into pages – such as 10 comments per page. This reduces loading times as WordPress will only load the first 10 comments unless a user clicks on the next comment page.
There are many other tricks and optimization hacks you can use to improve loading times but the above five pointers are a great starting point. Don’t forget to use tools like PageSpeed Insights from Google that will highlight errors and parts of your WordPress site that is causing loading issues.
Sometimes we get an amazing event where big corporations come together and produce something beneficial and schema markup was one such instance. As you will see below, schema markup is an especially useful feature that can help improve your SEO and boost the usefulness and visibility of your eCommerce products.
Schema markup is a collaborative effort between multiple corporations including Google and Microsoft that is a type of semantic vocabulary. The aim is to improve SEO and create more engaging and useful content with much more description and information.
You can find full details on the official Schema.org website. Schema allows search engine robots to understand your content easier and it allows for the creation of things like rich snippets. There are different types of schema markup including:
The aim is for everyone to use the same structured data to allow for a more concise and useful display of information on the web. It’s essentially an additional set of coding that adds more detail about things like businesses, people, and products.
So, schema markup looks pretty cool right? But what actual use is it and how can it benefit your ecommerce SEO? We have listed five of the main positives below.
Primarily, the rich snippets generated from schema markup give users a much better browsing experience. How much info can you realistically get from a few lines of text and a link from a traditional search result?
Not too much! In contrast, rich snippets show product images, ratings, maps, descriptions and more – they allow users to make informed decisions and get more info with less effort.
As mentioned above, schema markup enables the creation of rich snippets. These are the pop-ups and boxes you see that appear on search results. You have standard search results that just show a link, a page title, and meta description.
Rich snippets take things much further and include images, customer ratings, and more. This gives customers more insight into your products and rich snippets are incredibly powerful marketing tools.
Not only can schema markup be used for product snippets, but they allow the creation of business rich snippets. These are fantastic to target local customers and can be displayed on things like Google Maps and Google search results.
Instead of a bland link, a customer can click on your business on Google Maps and see a host of useful information.
From an SEO perspective, an eCommerce SEO consultancy will tell you how Google and other search engines love schema markup.
The different markup categories and fields you can add give Google more data to work with so it can understand what your products/services are and how they work better. This ultimately allows for more effective ranking and product indexing which can help your SEO optimization.
Two businesses – one has a standard search result and doesn’t use any schema markup. The other has a professional rich snippet that shows a map of their location, glowing customer reviews and more. Which looks better? The second company of course! Schema markup gives you a leg up over your competitors.
If you have an eCommerce store then you can benefit hugely from schema markup. You can make your products stand out from the competition on SERPs, give customers a more detailed experience, and allow search engines to understand your products better.
There is a tendency in the world of SEO to concentrate solely on keyword optimization and while this is hugely important, we can’t overlook user experience and website usability.
Let’s look at a scenario to demonstrate. Website A has amazing SEO and great keyword optimization but users find that the pages load slowly, and the website is pretty tricky to use.
On the other hand, Website B has good SEO and keyword optimization, but a smooth website with lightning loading speeds and customers can enjoy a seamless browsing experience on any device. Which is preferable? Obviously website B! To make sure your customers have a great time using your website, we give six simple UX improvements that an SEO audit gives below.
I get so frustrated when websites load slowly – it’s infuriating. Just give me what I want instantly, is that too much to ask? An SEO audit will outline the loading times and performance of your website and show what changes you can make. Fast loading times help customers get where they want and what they want quicker which in turn makes them happy!
Ok cool, I’ve found a decent website that seems to have what I want, let’s look at the products. What’s that, Error 404? Ok… i’ll try a different link, web page not found? Hmmm. Ok, maybe I’ll go elsewhere.
In this situation, an SEO audit could have found these broken links and allowed you to fix them to avoid customer dissatisfaction and going elsewhere.
Today, more relevance is placed on the quality, relevance, and usefulness of your website content so an SEO audit helps show where your web pages are perhaps bland or don’t give customers much value.
You can use SEO audits to improve the quality of your blog pages, product descriptions, and general web content so everything has value to the end user and they can engage with it.
Readability is another factor that is taken into account with search engines like Google but it’s also something you should make easy so your customers don’t need a degree just to understand your content!
SEO audits show where your written content can be improved. This includes paragraph length, reading difficulty, an overuse of the passive tense, and general spelling and grammatical errors. You can make your content much more readable regardless of the person’s literary level.
I hate websites that don’t have a clear navigation and make it incredibly difficult just to find anything. Google hates this too and it likes websites that it can crawl and index quickly.
SEO audits look at things like site hierarchy, your internal linking structure, and sitemaps. You can then make improvements to make sure all your pages are accessible in a logical manner and that each page can be reached within a single or couple of clicks.
Optimization for smartphones and tablets is imperative in today’s smartphone era and Google also looks kindly on sites that do this.
With an SEO audit you can check that your site loads correctly on smaller screens and improve the usability so mobile users can still do exactly the same as desktop browsers. No one wants to try and use a desktop version of a website on a smartphone!
So SEO auditing services are not just beneficial to boost your Google rankings! They are also superb for giving your customers a smooth, engaging, and hassle-free experience when visiting your website.
This is just as important as ranking for those keywords and as search engines evolve, user experience and the quality of UX is taking a more prominent role.
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