DIGITAL GROWTH
Get your website ready for business returning
Digital Growth Programme consultant Ian Lockwood (pictured) is our SEO expert. He has given us some actionable steps on what businesses can do to improve their website to appear higher in search rankings as well as making content relevant to its audience in the current climate.
While it is very much business not as usual for everyone now, at some point the economic taps will begin to open again and companies will want to be well-placed to make the most of it. SEO is famously a long game, with the benefits coming some time after optimisations have been made to a website. It’s also a process of continuous
improvement, where adding fresh content, making pages load faster and improving the user experience are the steps on an ongoing journey to better rankings. So, it makes sense to work on your website now to get the benefit when times are better. Perhaps the opportunity with the
biggest impact is to add more content to your site, whether expanding existing pages or creating new ones. The key is providing useful
information to users, answering their questions, going deeper into the topics your business touches on. I am not advocating padding out pages with waffle just to make them longer. Start by reviewing questions you
regularly get asked by customers; maybe you have email queries from people?
‘Try to write informative content that isn’t too salesy, that gives clear, straightforward explanations’
Or, make a list of all the things
you remember being asked by customers recently. Use tools such as
www.seoscout.com/suggest or
www.answerthepublic.com to find the questions and information
50 business network May 2020 Is your website relaunch ready?
users are searching for about your topics. Make a list of all the suitable
queries and group them together where they’re closely related, creating a list of pages to write. While it might seem natural to
write these pages as blog posts, I’d encourage you to consider whether some of them would make good pages within your main website. Many sites have had success with the ‘content hub’ strategy, clustering pages of related information around primary pages to create a much richer destination for searchers. It’s a bit more work as you must
add sub-navigation for these pages, but the rewards are considerably greater than just publishing blog posts. There’s an excellent guide to content hubs here:
https://bit.ly/emc-hub. For queries that are a little esoteric or beyond common
questions, blog posts are fine. You don’t have to publish them all at once – build a stockpile of content ready for publishing in the future when you’re busy with other things. Try to write informative content
that isn’t too salesy, that gives clear, straightforward explanations. Keep your sentence structures simple and be direct and specific
when answering questions. Google is more likely to understand and reward your content with higher rankings. It’s also a good time to conduct
a technical audit of your site. Run some of your key pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (
https://bit.ly/emc-psi) and talk to your web developer about implementing its recommendations. Review the coverage report in Google Search Console (
https://bit.ly/emc-gsc) to check for errors and wrongly-excluded pages that you can fix. If you want to go deeper, download Sitebulb (
www.sitebulb.com) and run a crawl to get more SEO recommendations for your site. Every improvement you make
now will pay dividends in the future, so there’s no time like the present!
If you want to learn more about the digital marketing techniques like these, join us at our next webinar. To see dates, visit www.leics-
digital.co.uk/events The Digital Growth Programme is managed by East Midlands Chamber (Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire). It is a programme part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the Chamber and Leicestershire County Council designed to help SMEs located in Leicester and Leicestershire embrace new digital technology to improve productivity to aid growth. For more information please visit
www.leics-digital.co.uk
Businesses based in D2N2 can access similar digital support by visiting
www.d2n2growthhub.co.uk
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