Ben the Intern’s top five tips to optimise your website

By HGB , Nov 21 2017

SEO plays an integral role in attracting visitors to your website. Our University of Waikato marketing intern, Ben shares his top tips for Search Engine Optimisation.

Here at HGB we have been engaging in a lot of website activity for clients and this has got us thinking about how best to utilise traffic flow. A trick to help maximise the number of people visiting your site is search engine optimisation, or SEO as it is more commonly known.  However, many people run into problems with SEO as they don’t fully understand how to use it.

If you want to increase traffic flow to your website, here are my five top tips:

1.  Page titles
Page titles are a very important aspect of SEO. Research suggests that in the last couple of months showing page titles are more important than ever before, especially for Google SEO. Exact page titles for low volume keywords can give you a competitive advantage in search results but this is something I will discuss in another post.

2. Think like your target audience
You may know exactly what your website will provide for your target audience and what the right words are to type in to find it, but your consumers may not. When you are thinking of what keywords to use, make sure they are in the style of how your target audience talks. For example, if you had a website for people aged 30-40, you need to use buzzwords that are more suited to them, as opposed to teenagers.

3. Keep things simple
First up, your website needs to have a primary objective. Even if your website has other services, to get the best results from search engines, your website needs to be clear and focussed on one primary function.

4. Use keywords carefully
Keywords are an essential part of search engine optimisation. This is because these words will be put into Google to try and find you and your website. Another reason keywords are so vital is because the majority of people don’t go past the first page of Google results. Find key phrases that relate to your website and use less competitive keywords which have a high search volume. This will help ensure people can find your website easily. Use these keywords in the first paragraph of your copy so search engines know this content relates to the title.

5. Mobile friendly websites
This last tip may be simple but is vital for maximum search optimisation. This is because most people have the ability to research what they are looking for on their smart phones. If your page isn’t mobile friendly you may not be getting as much traffic through your website as you may hope.