Ranking on Google can seem like an impossible task at times for some businesses, and despite your best efforts it still takes persistence and patience. However, well optimised blog posts can put you in good stead for improving your SEO ranking on Google.

Relevant and Engaging Content

Don’t just write any old waffle, know what your readers want to see and cater to that. Your blog posts should be well thought out, compelling and well researched to engage your audience and make them want to come back for more. 

Your content needs to be relevant to your business and niche and has to be something interesting to captivate your readers attention. Otherwise what’s the point?

Use Trending Topics

People want to read about relevant, new topics. Find out what is trending in your niche and write about it, putting your own unique perspective on the situation. 

Post Regularly

Writing one good blog post just isn’t enough. You need to keep on top of a blog to make it worthwhile. Keeping your most recent posts fresh and current is a great way to engage users and encourages them to flick through multiple posts.

Using Keywords

For each blog post, select a unique keyword relating to that topic and boost it throughout the post. As a general rule you ought to be featuring the key phrase every 100 words in some form or iteration. 

You can utilise free chrome extensions to find out what keywords are popular in your country, such as Keyword Surfer (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/keyword-surfer/bafijghppfhdpldihckdcadbcobikaca?hl=en) which tells you the volume of searches per month for a phrase per country, and the cost of PPC for this term as well as other similar search terms and their popularity. 

Using Images

Text heavy blogs can be heavy on the eyes, so break up text with relevant and eye catching imagery to keep your readers entertained and brings the text to life! And adding Alt-Tags to these images that relate to your chosen key phrase will help boost your SEO even further.

You don’t need to go and spend a load of money on expensive imagery, or use poor quality iPhone images, you can find a plethora of free stock images to use on websites such as pexels.com or unsplash.com 

Links

Having good quality links in your post, showcasing your research and giving credible sources for certain information is also an SEO goldmine. Google encourages us to connect with one another and to feed into each other. By using links this will show your credibility and that you are essentially ‘paying your dues’.

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With lockdown coming to an end, we’ve had some time to reflect on what we’ve achieved as a business during this time. The term ‘achievement’, however, means something completely different as to what it did pre-pandemic. Simply surviving and keeping a steady client base is the new achieving, especially for the creative industry. 

As a company, we’re all well versed to remote working and so fortunately working from home during lockdown hasn’t affect our day to day running. But being isolated as a team always poses problems. From low staff morale, to rubbish Post Office wifi cutting off team calls, lockdown has certainly not been easy.

The key to surviving in such a time is adaptation. Understanding what our consumers needed (in our instance, a surge in e-commerce websites) and gearing our marketing to this was key to ensuring a flow of new clients during this pandemic. Adapting for retail brands meant a fast turnaround in setting up an online shop, if they didn’t have one already. Adapting for restaurants and pubs meant setting up a takeaway business to make sure they were still providing for their customers and preparing for gradual reopening.

Despite the best efforts of some businesses, COVID-19 has close to destroyed their chances of economical recovery. The arts, as a prime example, is suffering a massive hit as theatres are closed indefinitely and actors are unable to rehearse or perform together because of social distancing measures. At such a time it’s important we support each other, and support the struggling industries that are given little chance to adapt.  

The current global pandemic has affected and will continue to affect practically every aspect of human life – how we interact with one another, how we work and our spending habits. With Europe and the US in critical lockdowns, we no longer have the option to go to the local clothes shop or hardware store for items. So many of these high street shops rely on a thriving premise with face-to-face customers. However, if these businesses are to prevail during this unprecedented global emergency, the need to harness e-commerce to continue making money is greater than ever.

Times are painfully uncertain, we don’t know whether normal life will be put on hold for a month or a year and so we have to accept our new isolation lifestyles for the long run. In the UK, all non-essential shops (i.e clothing, gift shops, homeware etc) are to be closed ‘until further notice’ – but when that is we don’t know. Times are painfully uncertain, we don’t know whether normal life will be put on hold for a month or a year and so we have to accept our new isolation lifestyles for the long run. In the UK, all non-essential shops (i.e clothing, gift shops, homeware etc) are to be closed ‘until further notice’ – but when that is we don’t know.

The nature of deliveries reduces human contact significantly, and so is a safe and viable way for people to still receive every essential they need from the comfort of their own home. Online shopping allows us to keep our distance from others to help prevent the spread of coronavirus by practising social distancing.

By promoting their presence online with an ecommerce store, shops can still make the sales they desperately need to keep themselves afloat and potentially thriving during the COVID-19 outbreak. Making your presence known is easier than ever by utilising social media to inform your local and nationwide customers about your new online store. In times of hardship the need to adapt is hugely important, and by harnessing e-commerce, so many businesses could prevent themselves from folding.

Write what they want to see

The absolutely paramount key to successful website copy is writing what your readers want to read. Writing useless jargon that is unrelated to their needs as a potential client is only going to harm your websites conversion rates. Instead of trying to be overly technical, get into the heads of your clients and think about what would impress you if you were in their shoes. 

Arrange your content effectively

Take some time to really think about what is the most important and relevant information that your clients want, and make sure this is the first information they come across. Your website should take users on a continuous journey, and so shouldn’t be disjointed or difficult to navigate. 

Don’t try to be smart

By overcomplicating your copy you can drive customers away. Web copy should be easy to digest, it isn’t a literary piece. You may think you’re impressing readers but it actually has the opposite effect and alienates them. Write your copy as you would speak to your customers normally – keep your copy true to your brand. 

Make sure your layout is optimised

Writing web copy has a unique format to help it convert. Keeping paragraphs on your website to an absolute maximum of 4 sentences is a priority. Additionally, making sure you don’t have any ‘wasted words’ is another important factor. Finally, using a second person voice makes text more appealing to readers – so using the words ‘you’, ‘you’re’ and ‘your’ makes copy more direct and engaging for readers.

Provide visual breaks for readers

Reading solid blocks of text can get boring for readers. By failing to break up text with engaging visuals your web copy can get lost in a solid block of unappealing text. Visuals can include graphics, unique formatting, images, and anything else to help distract the eye to a new element. However, making sure the visuals are relevant and add to the copy is important. Nobody wants to see the same overused stock photos they’ve seen on 10 other websites that day so be creative and use plenty of platforms. For some more unique stock photos take a look at https://unsplash.com/. 

Everyone is talking about SEO – but what does it really mean? SEO is simply search engine optimisation. This means enhancing your website to make it more ‘Google’ friendly in an attempt to rank higher than your competitors in the market when people search for your relevant businesses. There are thousands of algorithms, but here are just a few achievable and simple tips to help boost your business on Google.

1 – Blog Posts

Posting relevant, regular content via a blog medium can help boost your SEO monumentally. You can do so much with blog posts – by introducing keywords and relevant links you can impact your search engine ranking positively. 

Additionally, having a successful blog following increases the traffic to your website and user engagement which also boosts your SEO ranking massively. The longer people stay on your page the more of a positive effect the traffic will have on your SEO score. So writing engaging posts that people are more inclined to read till the end will be even more effective than just simple clickbait.

2 – Strong Social Media

Being active on social media is a crucial element of running any business. In addition to this helping promote a business’s online presence, this can also help increase an SEO ranking on google too. If links to a website are shared via social platforms this can increase its SEO rankings. 

3 – Fix any broken links

Broken links on a website can be extremely harmful to SEO rankings as it renders your website less current and less relevant.

You can address this issue in a couple of ways. First, you can spend the time yourself going through every link on your website to ensure they are relevant – but if you have a large site with a lot of hyperlinks this could take up a lot of time! In this instance you can use tools such as Dead Link Checker to be immediately notified when a link on your website goes dead so that you can address it straight away without having to scour through your site to find it.

4 – Mobile Optimise 

Without optimising your website for mobile, there’s very little point in having a website as over half of google searches come from mobile devices. Therefore, optimisation is key to increase engagement and how user-friendly your website is. If it is not mobile optimised then you will detriment your google ranking significantly. When considering your website design, make sure that you make mobile optimisation a priority

5 – Keywords

Using keywords can really help boost your rankings if done correctly. Don’t go overboard and fill your website with keywords that people will search when searching for your services or products, but make them fit into sentences contextually. Even change image tags to include keywords to help your website’s ranking.

There are a few keyword market research tools which allow you to find out what keywords are most regularly searched in your business field to help you along the way such as SEMrush.

Levitate is a website design consultancy in Cardiff, offering website design services as well as SEO services in Cardiff. To find out more, give us a call on +44 7494879520 or contact us today

We’ve reviewed some of the websites of independent restaurants in Cardiff and here is a shortlist of our favourite. Cardiff is a hub of unique restaurants and so we thought we’d share those who are not only excelling in making great food but also in having a stellar online presence!

1. Heaneys

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Heaneys website embodies the restaurant perfectly. Offering a clean, distinct design focusing entirely on their professional and stunning images of both their venue and their food. https://www.heaneyscardiff.co.uk/

2. Le Monde

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Le Monde offers a website exuberating class, perfectly representing their brand. Understated, well-balanced with a meticulous font selection. https://le-monde-restaurant.co.uk/

3. Anna Loka

Anna Loka’s no-nonsense website gets straight to the point. Vibrant, gorgeous food is highlighted on the homepage, enticing visitors as soon as they visit their website. This is a prime example of how to engage potential customers and get them through your doors by utilising your website! https://www.anna-loka.com/

4. The Dough Thrower

The Dough Thrower’s website is everything you want in a pizza restaurant website. It’s rustic and inviting – the second you open the site you’re looking into an authentic pizza oven with the perfect pizza bubbling away. A restaurant’s website that can you make you salivate is definitely doing its job. https://thedoughthrower.com/

5. Porro

Porro’s website feels almost like reading a handmade invitation with gorgeous watercolour-style backgrounds. This website feels unique and personal, all the while upkeeping a classy and clean design. https://www.porrocardiff.com/

6. The Early Bird

Early Bird’s website is almost as cute as the café itself. From the cute yellow icons filling the page background to their darling logo, this website is short and sweet, and everything it needs to be to sell this café and bakery as well as it can. http://www.earlybirdbakery.co.uk/

If you’re looking to improve your digital presence or website, get in touch with us today to discuss what we can do for you and a free quote for our services! We offer a 20% discount on all of our services to other Cardiff-based businesses. https://levitated.co.uk/contact-us/ #cardiffsmallbusinesses