Actionable SEO Tips That Will Make a Difference
After reading our introduction to SEO, you may feel like it's a full-time job that you don't have the resources or capabilities to handle yourself. However, that isn't necessarily true. You can do as much or as little as you want; it's about being smart with your time.
If you have a 30-minute window once a week to dive into this, you want to make sure it's spent wisely, making changes that will help bring more people to your site. Below are a few simple ideas that will help you achieve this. The aim is for your website to be helpful, honest and a valuable resource for your customers.
Name, address & phone number
One of the most important things to check once you've created your free Google Business & Bing Places listings is that all your core business information matches across your digital footprint.
Your business name, address and phone number must be identical across all digital profiles. This includes your social media, company's house, Google Business, Bing Places and any other 3rd party directories.
Google uses this information to understand whether you're a real business and where you are located. The more accurately everything matches, the more likely you will appear in the search results and within the map listings if the search query is looking for a service near a specific location.
While you could check the key profiles yourself, a fantastic 3rd party tool from a company called Moz will check a good chunk of this for you for free. A link to this tool can be found here: check your local listing score.
This tool will look at the most popular business listing directories in the country, and if you exist in their database, it will point out if any information doesn't match. It will also highlight key directories that you're not visible on. If you can sign up for these free directories, that would be an excellent use of your time, as it adds further authority to your site.
This isn't something you'd have to do multiple times unless you're changing essential information about the business (name, address, phone number or website address).
Citations, links & reviews
Google, unfortunately, relies heavily on data from 3rd party websites to help them identify what a "good" site is. These votes of recommendation come in the form of links and references. The more high-quality sites give us these votes of recommendation, the better we'll perform in the search results.
If you do a Google search for your name, a few directory sites will already have you on their books. Do what you can to claim these listings (if you still need to) and update the information to ensure it's as accurate as possible. You'll notice that this ties in with the above action.
Some of these sites will also offer a paid membership to have a link back to your site. Unless this is a small one-off fee (£10 to £50), we'd recommend putting that budget elsewhere.
There are a few additional online directories that should be free to submit your details to (if you still need to be added to them). You can find them below:
Reviews of your business are incredibly important to highlight the work and services you offer customers. Try to build these out as much as possible, collecting reviews on different platforms to widen your brand's reach. You can gather reviews on many platforms, but Facebook and Google Business are fantastic free options.
You can request a review via email or word of mouth once the user has picked up their car. Email tends to have a better response rate as you can provide a link directly to the page where they can post the review.
Once they leave a review, try to respond to it. Whether positive or negative, having someone from your business actively replying to reviews demonstrates how approachable you are and how you interact with your customers.
On-page optimisations
To optimise the pages on your website for SEO, we need to ensure that every page targets a specific keyword or search term. The better the page targets that phrase, the more likely Google is to show your site in the search results.
Try to focus on one target keyword/phrase per page, as anything more will dilute the optimisation. Once you've decided what the target keyword/phrase is, try to include it at least once in the following parts of the page:
- SEO meta title tag – What is a title tag?
- H1 (main page heading) – What is a H1 tag?
- Within the body content of the page
- URL of the page (if it's a new page that you're creating)
When adding the keyword or phrase to the page's content, try using variations and combinations to target the diverse ways your users may search for it. E.g.
- Clutch replacement
- Replace a clutch
- Replacing your clutch
- Replace your car's clutch
Google will understand that these are all variations of the same headline phrase, but it gives you more opportunities to find what your users are searching for.
Internal links from other pages on your site are an important tool that often goes underused. If you have a full-service page that mentions an MOT or a clutch replacement, use that as an opportunity to link to the corresponding pages. Google will use these signals to understand how important the pages are and how they are related.
The more internal links a page has from relevant sources, the more important it is. These internal links will also help your users discover key parts of your site and keep them engaged.
Using Google Search Console, you can see the search terms your pages are currently ranking for and their ranking position. If you see a relevant phrase that you're getting impressions for but not clicks due to a poor ranking position, it could be that the page isn't optimised for that phrase. The simplest way to target it is to update the page's content to include it somewhere. This will give Google a better signal that your page is trying to gain traffic from that phrase and could improve your ranking.
When making optimisation changes, the most important thing to remember is that your content must be easy to read, relevant to the search term you're trying to rank for, and of as high quality as possible. If you need to compromise on any of these aspects whilst optimising the page, rethink the value of that optimisation. When you start compromising on quality, you're likely to see the performance of the site fall in the search results.
If you have any questions on anything in this guide or would like any help ranking your site in Google Search, please get in touch via the below email, and we’ll help wherever we can: seo@whocanfixmycar.com Written by Peter Boucher, Digital Marketing Manager at FixMyCar.
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