Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a form of digital marketing which is not only fundamental to almost every business’ overall strategy, but which can be applied to almost every business with a website. The art and science of SEO is ensuring there is a fine balance struck between making a website ‘too technical’ and ending up with a website that looks fantastic but which cannot be found by prospective customers.
Whilst no industry is the same, there are those that are a fair bit more specific and which require a greater degree of detail, particularly when it comes to writing the inevitably needed content for the website in question. At Tudor Lodge Consultants, we have a broad range of clients across many industries including loans and finance, property, building and construction and recruitment. One such client whose needs are that extra degree more specific is Interim Partners.
Working with some of the UK’s largest businesses and targeting high level individuals (such as CEOs and executives) for interim roles in companies and organisations, a major challenge has been building a content strategy for the client.
However, the content and digital marketing team at Tudor Lodge have been undertaking SEO best practices with regards to content and this has helped uncover a plethora of content opportunities for Interim Partners. There are several successful practices to help ensure even the most unique sites, offering the most niche services can thrive online.
Content Research – Keep Things Natural
Content is one of the key components of any successful SEO campaign. However, before the content can be written and optimised, the research must be undertaken and must always be thorough. This ensures that the topics written about on the site in question is not too generic. For example, it is easy for a recruitment site to simply write about topics such as ‘what is recruitment’ and ‘benefits of recruitment.’ However, these topics are generic and do not standout to both user and Google.
The research undertaken should uncover natural topics through the medium of questions. For example, in the case of the recruitment website, something akin to ‘how to find a job with a recruiter’ matches questions users would likely ask and therefore favour searches via Google and other search engines.
User Experience – Engage Your Customers
Getting users to the website is the easier part of the process. Once a user is however on the website, the key is engaging and maintaining them. Websites that present a large number of 404 [broken/ dead] pages see their users drop off at faster rates to those that do not. Additionally, the speed of the site is arguably one of the most important factors today, with users not willing to wait for longer than 1-2 seconds for a page to load and present itself to them and this is particularly important on mobile and tablet devices; which tend to be used ‘on the go.’
Another site speed factor that is given a lot of weight is how the site’s pages load. This refers to the nature of the loading. Websites with negative user experiences will often loan in ‘layers,’ known as ‘rendering.’ This is negative for SEO and user experience as it means the page does not necessarily load its most important content first as well as that which is above the fold, atop the page.
Technical Factors – Remaining Up to Date
The ‘technical’ SEO factors such as meta data, links, crawl errors and fundamental landing pages certainly retain their significance but they are strongly complemented and supplemented by the various factors. It is therefore important to not focus too much on any single factor, rather to view SEO as a puzzle with each ‘ranking factors’ another piece to make up the fuller picture.