Why you need to optimise your website for search engines
You’ve spent a lot of time and money building and setting up your business model. Next on your list is marketing, and often the first thing you do is build a website. But do you ever think about how your website is going to work for you?
Unless potential clients can find it, a website is no more than a “cyber brochure”. Of course, you can direct traffic to your website by way of digital advertising, but in many cases, the target audience is not particularly well-defined meaning it misses the mark and fails to appear in front of potential customers. To truly capitalise on your digital real estate, it’s important to make sure your website is optimised for search engines.
What is optimision?
Optimising your website is a series of tactics and best practices used to improve your rankings, increase sales, and have a better website in general. Web optimization also plays an incredibly important role in digital advertising, and if your website is not set up correctly, it could negatively affect your quality score in Google Ads.
Unfortunately, very few website developers ensure that the websites they create are optimised for search engines – either during the build or after. In fact, in most cases, it is an afterthought, or it’s never even been considered.
Powering 35% of the estimated 1.3 billion websites worldwide, it’s safe to say that WordPress is one of the best content management systems (CMS) when it comes to search engine optimisation. But even though it gets a lot right, there is quite a lot more that can be done to improve your sites’ performance.
Are you optimised?
The best way to check if your website is optimised correctly is to run both a health check and a full site audit. There are many tools on the market, but we recommend using the WordPress site health check as it is a plugin that can quickly and easily be downloaded to your website. Performing a full site audit will provide you with a more in-depth analysis of what can be improved on your site. We highly recommend SEMrush’s audit tool.
Once you have established where the errors are, you’ll need to fix as many as you can on the backend of your site. Pending your overall marketing strategy, some areas may not be entirely necessary to address, so prioritising your to-do list is the key to addressing the major errors first.
A continual task
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is not a once-off tactic and requires monthly management to ensure your website content is kept current, fresh, and relative. In addition to changes you can make on the backend, writing regular articles (or blogs) with the correct keywords and phrases help keep your website updated and optimised.
Zebra 360 offers both a once-off website optimisiation and monthly management. For more details please contact us directly
