Canberra’s vastly growing residential and business community means business owners’ competition is growing fast. Therefore being in the first three spots on Google is the equivalent of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Every website worldwide wants the same, but it’s not the same environment as it was a decade ago or even five years ago. So businesses are turning towards finding a reputable Canberra SEO Agency to find the answers to their underperforming rankings.
The ethos of SEO and traffic hasn’t changed; just everything around it has a new landscape.
Here we will break down some of the basics that both an SEO agency and a business with capable people in-house follow to make short-term progress.
Anyone who has had a business for a while will remember the days when everything was about ‘clicks’; if you had traffic, you had rankings; that is not the case anymore.
Table of Contents
Here are important tips for generating traffic from SEO
Article Contents:
- User Experience
- Local SEO
- Constant Content Curation
- Building Contextual Links
- A Mobile-First Approach
- Images, Videos and Infographics
User Experience
We will start with User Experience. Although this only applies once people find your website, we feel it’s essential to start in reverse; as mentioned above, it is no longer ‘all about CLICKS’.
If you get lots of traffic to your site and people leave it quickly, Google will downgrade your rankings rapidly. So let’s get the basics right first, then move on to the traffic.
Google now ranks ‘User Experience (UX)’ as one of, if not its main priorities. It’s their users, and they want them to enjoy their visit and get exactly what they are looking for from their initial search; this is UX.
Google and you want to ensure that when someone finds your website, they get:
- Engagement – They are looking for their users to stay on your site. If they do, you must be engaging, informative and relevant; if not, you are no good to Google for that search term. They will find other companies who are, hence a drop in rankings.
- Informative Information – If your images and content keep people busy on your site and clicking through, they get what they searched for.
- Conversion – At the initial stage, conversion can mean different things. If you are eCommerce, then a sale is a conversion. For other sites, if someone contacts you through your landing page and enter information, and become a lead, that’s a higher conversion rate too.
Once you achieve the above, you, in Google’s eyes, are providing a high level of UX. Google even offers UX courses and certificates.
SEO is the driving force to make you visible to receive the initial click, and the website delivers.
Working with a reputable Canberra SEO agency, you team together to create unique content curation based on your products and services. Helping bring together SEO and UX for a seamless online experience.
Local SEO
As mentioned above, Canberra is on the move.
A vastly growing city and populous with a purported 12 houses a day must be built to handle the influx of people to the city and suburbs in the next 24 months alone!
So, suppose you are in business to provide services and products applicable to people close to home. In that case, local SEO needs to be a significant priority.
What is it?
It is basic SEO but set up initially by you through Google to make you visible for searches that Google adds ‘near me’ at the end when someone types a search.
Source: Google.com
In addition, here are some statistics from June 2022 that, for any doubters of how important this facet of SEO is right now, may be dumbfounded.
Constant Content Curation
A significant word in SEO is ‘Indexing’.
Whenever you update information on your site with new services or products, Google needs to index your pages for relevancy.
Google has to do this when you create a new website. Still, it is a continual practice to keep the best websites with the most poignant and relevant information at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Here are some tips about content curation and what it needs to embody:
- Up-to-date Information – Old is not good
- Engaging Copy – As we mentioned, you need to keep them there
- Information – Users are hungry for informative information
- Keywords – Content has to have them, but now not too many
When writing content in 2022 and 2023, you must ensure you write copy for your visitors, not your business. WHY? Gone are the days when you compromise quality writing to stuff as many keywords in there to get your rankings up.
Let’s be crystal clear; Google has changed its algorithms massively in the past five years. They can spot that you are writing for rankings, not for their users and using keyword stuffing; once Google finds this, your rankings will drop.
Suppose you have never written in this form. In that case, any reputable SEO agency in town will guide you through what Google now expects and vet all of it before it goes live.
Building Contextual Links
Google has recently shifted the backlink landscape, where links have evolved, and the importance of contextualised links has become more prevalent.
What are they, and how do you get them?
There are several ways to build contextualised links. Remember, Google appreciates your being informative, so your visibility and credibility with them will increase.
Here’s how you can earn them:
- Gathering editorial links from widely exposed and respected online magazines within the Canberran and the Australian community.
- Guest posting/blogging is an effervescent way to build links.
- Finding high authority sites within your industry as part of your Guest posting/blogging strategy.
- Searching for broken links on high authority sites and replacing them using your contextual links. Don’t worry; this is not a shortcut that may lead to penalties.
A Mobile-First Approach
Mobile usage in Australia has been steadily climbing in the last 15 years, along with the rest of the world.
Source: Statista.com
Not only that, globally, it overtook desktop and laptop searches many years ago, and so Google now favours mobiles first.
Suppose you already have a website and are now only hearing about this. In that case, that could be a monumental reason your traffic is down. Google has, for some time, indexed ALL websites using their mobile version of their site.
If your web developer did not optimise for ‘mobile-first’, speak to an SEO professional and jump on it straight away!
As you may have noticed, there is a difference in the way web developers develop your desktop version and mobile version. It is about using the space properly.
If you were to cram all the images from your desktop version onto mobile, you would not be able to see many essential factors, leading to a drop in UX. As we know from the start of this article, we can’t afford that.
For anyone starting on SEO and not having a capable in-house team or SEO experience, being able to hide certain items in cascading style sheets (CSS) may be a little too complicated, so help from an SEO agency would be wise at this point.
Images, Videos and Infographics
As the old saying goes, ‘pictures speak louder than words’. Well, not necessarily in the Google world, as so much importance is placed on content curation.
However, with people’s concentration spans being reduced (probably by the amount of choice now available online), the Millenials and Gen Z’s like images, videos and infographics to help engage them and educate them simultaneously, which improves your traffic and UX.
As statistics in that article from August 2022 attest to, a goldfish now has a slightly longer attention span than humans, so you need to think on your feet and deliver IMPACT!
Having great content but marrying that with images and videos and bringing them to life is the key to success.
So set up a YouTube channel as YouTube is now only second to Google in global daily searches. YouTube is a massive string to your bow to link to your website; plus, it can get shared or even go viral anytime and skyrocket your marketing.
Source: smperth.com
For those of you with existing websites with images that have been up there for a few years, you will need to check that they now fall in place with Google’s Images Best Practices. If not, they need optimising.
SUMMARY
With Canberra growing and internet usage up globally by over 70 percent since 2019, these are the absolute basics you need to be entirely on top of before you can move on to more technical optimisation that could take you to the next level. If you have a new or underperforming website, take these steps and get on track. However, our advice with the digital marketing landscape is to look for a Canberra SEO agency that knows the city and its marketing habits to get you going. Good luck.