Steps to increase the visibility of your website and digital footprint through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and your digital presence.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving your site’s ranking and visibility within search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. This includes editing elements such as metadata and content and links in your website.
Our business name, Ngakkan Nyaagu, means ‘to see’ or ‘to be seen’ in Wergaia (Ngakkan), where John Saulo (co-founder – NGNY) people come from and Gumbaynggirr (Nyaagu), where Liam Ridgeway (co-founder – NGNY) people come from. Our goal for our clients, through our digital service offerings, is to help businesses to be seen through their digital presence. SEO plays a big role in assisting businesses to be seen online.
Why is SEO important?
SEO will digitally help you be seen and be more visible to more of your potential clients and/or stakeholders. Sites with strong SEO show up higher in search engine results.
What you can do about your SEO
You can set up your Google business account and Bing business account to establish your presence and listing of your business against your official business details.
Using your digital footprint to drive traffic back to your website
Outside of your website, it is important to establish and grow your presence through other digital channels that are appropriate for you and the industry sector that you are in. Often this includes social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. But it is important to work out which of these are most appropriate for you and your organisation. This means understanding where your target market is visiting. When leveraging your social media and other channels, it’s important to ensure that you are linking your articles, blogs, stories, etc. back to your website. This activity will drive traffic to your website and vice versa drive traffic to your other digital footprints.
We recently talked to an organisation that is now three years old and is now doing six posts per day. They developed their brand awareness and services largely through their social presence and then used this to drive people back to their business. And this started off with only a couple of people aiming to get at least one post per day and then growing this. All in an effort to drive people back to their business. Three years later they have grown their business significantly and they now have a dedicated person in their business who performs the daily posts. So this is something that we can all aim to do, but do it gradually and start to build from there.
Make it easy for visitors to engage your website to address your Call To Action (CTA)
A Call To Action is the action that you would like your visitors to do when they visit your website, for example submit a contact form, make a purchase and/or sign up to a newsletter. Most importantly, you should have a clear understanding as to why you want to invest in a website. If you are certain of this direction then it is critical that you understand the purpose of your website. Here’s an article about understanding your purpose for having a website.
When you have increased traffic to your website, give them a reason to stay on your site longer and also a reason to keep coming back to your website so they are more likely to engage one of your CTAs.
How to get people back to your website and staying in it longer
You must post relevant and interesting content specific to your target audience that will drive this type of behavior. You might think of doing a weekly news or blog post so that people revisit. People then start to develop a trusted relationship with your website and brand and this in turn drives action for them to enquire and acquire your services/products or recommend others in their network to do so. But the key is to keep people engaged and make the CTA easy to understand and find.
Ultimately, you can do some small pieces of work to improve your SEO, but the other half of improving your SEO is ensuring that the website that you have invested in is the correct website that helps meet your business/organisation objectives. No point in enhancing your SEO to have people visit your website that doesn’t convert people to address a CTA that you are wanting people to engage with.
Some key things that you can do to enhance your SEO:
- Register your website with Google, Bing and/or Yahoo
- Review your content on your website and ensure that it is tagged appropriately
- Ensure that you are posting regular content in channels that are relevant to you and your audience
- Ensure that you have backlinks in articles and other posts that you have created.
- Ultimately, does your website address your objectives and the objectives of your target audience.