Getting ready for Q4 is our theme for the month, thinking about year end and preparing for the start of 2016. There’s no better time than the present to think about some sprucing up of your website or social media profiles to improve search engine visibility. Getting to the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) takes time and effort, so to get the process underway, it pays to spend a little time reviewing your website and social media profiles to check if they’re current and what needs updating.
Social Media
Optimising social profiles is a relatively straightforward process and Social Media Examiner has done a good job of summarising what’s needed for business profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and looks at both internal search on those sites and external Google search. In addition, a few tips are also included for YouTube, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Websites
Websites are altogether more complex animals and require more work. Unless you’re equipped with oodles of free time and the right software to enable your site to feature higher in the SERPs, you’re going to need to engage a specialist in search engine optimisation (SEO) to help. There is a lot that you can achieve yourself, though, and it always starts with a strategy.
There is a lot of SEO you can achieve yourself and it always starts with a strategy. Share on XThe factors assessed when ranking websites keep changing, so keeping up with those changes is a challenge in itself. Generally speaking, however, ensuring that the site loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, has intuitive navigation, and is constantly refreshed with new content in an ongoing programme of new content publication will certainly go a long way towards ensuring the site is more appealing.
Think about the user experience (and no, user experience is not design, but informs it) and whether visitors to your website are getting lost. Take a look at your analytics and work out if they’re leaving the site and where they dropped off. You might need to rejig the navigation to make it simpler and easier.
Outsourced SEO services will add value by linking to the site externally and monitoring using purpose-built software to track progress and provide up-to-date reports. Results usually start to show signs of improvement after about three months. Invariably there are some on-site improvements that need to be made and external links created to and from the site to widen its reach.
In short, then, there’s no time to lose if you want to get busy readying your website for 2016. Get in touch if you feel you need assistance.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
