When you have a business, getting online and appearing on page one of Google is essential for digital success. With 46.6 million people in the UK online every day, can you afford to ignore an audience that size?
But how? How can you get your website to be there when people are searching? This can often seem like blind luck or just good fortune that others are having and not you, but this is very rarely true. Google shows what it considers the best results for each search term, based on hundreds of different factors. Google has become the market leader for search engines due to the success of these algorithms and continues to update its ranking factors based on the latest evidence and technology updates.
Falling foul of the Google algorithms can soon lead to a Google penalty of a drop in rankings. Gone are the days when companies could stuff the desired keywords in white text on a white background so that search engines would determine them to be the best option for that keyword when it is searched.
This and other techniques deemed ‘illegal’ by Google are called ‘Black-hat techniques. While they may work in the short term, it isn’t a good idea to use these techniques if you are wanting long-term success. Digital Pixels only deal with ‘White-hat techniques, that may take a little longer to show results, but ultimately, last longer and are more effective.
Underneath I have listed methods that you can use to improve the SEO of your business in Wigan. These techniques will work for any location, but being based in Wigan, it is always good to help local businesses.
On-Page SEO
One of the first things that I look to improve when doing an SEO audit is the on-page details that can make a big difference to a website. The main details are:
- Page title
- Meta description
- H1, H2, H3 headings
- Text and image keyword content
I see lots of pages where the page title is the name of the website, the main headings are ‘Welcome to my website’ or ‘Contact us’ etc.
Read in isolation, these words are pretty meaningless. Ideally, these areas would contain your main keyword and maybe a location extension – ‘SEO in Wigan’ for example.
Meta Page Title Improvements For SEO
A meta page title is the most important on-page aspect of SEO. Google reads the page title to categorise the web page and get top-level context as to what it is about. WordPress will – by default – use the title of the page as the meta page title, which would seem fair enough. But if the title of your page is home, or your about us, it could be that you are telling Google that the main keyword on that page is ‘Home’ or ‘About us’. As mentioned above, these words read on their own, most likely mean nothing to the services your website.
Meta Description
Whilst a meta description isn’t actually used as a SEO ranking factor, it is used to persuade your audience to click on your link rather than your competitors and this way brings a better click-through-rate to your website from Google.
Without specifying a meta description, Google will add a 160 character snippet of text from your page. Whilst the can be ok, it is better to provide your own compelling message to people seeing your advert. Here is a blog post from Hubspot about writing a good meta description.
Heading Tags
Heading tags provide context to the following sentences and are used by Google to further understand the web page. Using heading tags throughout your content is helpful for a couple of reasons.
1) Google places a higher emphasis on heading tags and will rank a page higher if it can understand the content better. Many times the question and answer snippet on the Google results page is taken from the heading on a website being one of the questions.
2) Content is easier to read in smaller chunks. Breaking up your content into smaller, more readable sections will make your time-on-page metrics much improved. Adding a header to some of these smaller chunks helps people find the section and the answers to their initial query they are looking for much easier.
Image optimisation for SEO
Images can also have SEO improvements in the form of the image title and Alt text. Making sure the title and the alt text of the image contain something descriptive to what the image contains and the page the image is on will make a big difference to the on-page SEO and help rank the website higher when performing a Google image search.
Create Relevant, Authoritative Content
You may of heard the phrase ‘content is king’ before now, well it is still true. But not all content is created equal! Unique, well-written content that offers value to a reader, will do much better than a post that has been cobbled together from somewhere else, with a few words changed.
Spending the time to research a subject properly and offer a solution to a problem, or offer valuable advice is a great way of building trust, generating links and appearing higher in the search rankings.
Writing content that will be of use to your audience will work wonders. If you have identified an issue in your local area that you can address, write about it. This post is titled ‘How to improve SEO in Wigan’ this will work better for SEO as it is more precise and addresses a specific problem – low rankings for businesses in Wigan.
Keywords
Hopefully, if you are writing about a subject that you are familiar with, keywords will happen naturally throughout the content. In my opinion, this works much better than trying to create paragraphs and phrases just to get a certain amount of keywords into the content.
What is important is to add keywords into the headings that should be in the content to help break up the page into smaller chunks, as well as provide context to Google and other search engines.
Get More Links From Wigan Businesses
As mentioned above, if your content is of a good enough quality, you will generate links naturally as people will link to it as an authority on a particular subject. This way of getting links can be very timely though and you need people to actually know that the content is there in the first place in order to link to it.
Another way of getting links from other businesses in Wigan is to ask them! As simple as that sounds, it is often overlooked. Being in business in Wigan, you will no-doubt already have a network of other businesses that you deal with – suppliers, distributors and others on the chain. Could they host a link to your website from their website? Maybe you could create some relevant content for them, that contains a link back to your website? That way, they get content on their website and you get a link back. Worth a try at least.
There are of course other techniques and strategies you could use to improve your SEO if needed. Have a look at some more options to improve your local SEO and see if any of these are also doable for you.
We offer a FREE SEO review for all businesses throughout Wigan, so if you would like a no-obligation appraisal of your current site, future opportunities that could be explored and some competitor research, please just get in touch via the link underneath.
If you read this far, then thank you. I appreciate the time you took to read this post.
