As we ring in another year and the dust settles on 2021, at Herald Chase we’ve been busy making plans for the next 12 months and beyond. Part of the marketing conversations have been our SEO strategy for the year ahead and we plan to make the best use of online search.
As Direct Mail specialists, you may not necessarily associate us with SEO but we’re huge advocates of a multi-channel approach when it comes to marketing and customer engagement, and always have been.
So we thought we’d take some time to talk through some of our SEO ambitions and really focus on some tips we can offer for any business looking to invest in SEO in 2022.
In short, SEO increases your chances of ranking on the 1st page of search engine results and helps people find your website much easier through that enhanced visibility.
SEO Explained
We’re sure everyone has heard the term SEO, but what does it mean exactly? Well, according to Google, SEO is ‘the process of making your website better for search engines’. Within SEO itself, there are 2 main categories; On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is the practice of enhancing and optimising the elements of your website within your control, for example; Metadata, Keyword Strategy, page speed and content creation.
Off-page SEO focuses on bettering your domains visibility through external channels such as backlinks and link building, marketing on social media, email & direct mail marketing and PPC (pay per click) or paid search.
So now you have a broad understanding of SEO and what it entails, lets look at some of the ways in which we’ll be trying to enhance and really optimise our SEO strategy in 2022:
- Pay attention to the user experience
This is one of the key focuses for any SEO strategy in 2022; ensuring that your website is as ‘user friendly’ as possible. Analyse the loading speed of your pages; in particular focuses on optimising videos and imagery, minimising the number of re-directs and enabling browser caching. These all help to enhance the user experience, but also consider click through percentages, average time on a page and bounce rates to really inform your strategy. Google Analytics is a fantastic tool to glean really useful information as far as this is concerned.
- Create engaging content
The importance of creating and publishing engaging, quality content should not be underestimated. It’s vitally important that not only is your content high in quality but also consistent. Optimise your content for search engines with targeted keywords and phrases that relate to your brand or business, but not in a way that seems contrived or in order to simply boost your visibility. It’s also really important that your content is easy to read and crucially, your content should demonstrate how well you know your target audience and understand their wants/needs/behaviours/challenges etc etc.
- Get Technical
Spend the time to really ‘get under the hood’ of your website and ensure you’re taking care of the details and technicalities. After all, a website operating at optimal performance can only impact positively on the user experience. Consider the following area’s to focus on to start with:
- Structuring of URL’s
- The security of your website
- Internal links to pages (ensure they are all working correctly)
- Long tail keyword phrases
What do tails have to do with SEO? We asked ourselves the same question. Well, we dug a little further and found out the tail’s refereed to in SEO are actually relevant sub-topics of a keyword. As an example, a long tail keyword could be ‘tyre fitters near me’. These searches demonstrate a user being in the final stages of their buyer journey; hence searching such long tail queries. Give some thought to your keyword strategy and how you can incorporate some long-tail keyword phrases of 3 or more words to rank for more relevant terms.
So there we have 4 basic tips to focus on if you’re planning to incorporate SEO into your marketing strategy for 2022. If you’re delving into the world of SEO for the first time, it can seem a daunting prospect but there are ways to simplify the process and build good habits on a macro level. Good luck on your enhanced online visibility journey!
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog, happy marketing!
