Lesser-known SEO techniques that everyone can use to boost sales enquiries

Last week I wrote up a very short article on the SEO Basics webinar we hosted. As the name suggests, the webinar covered the very basics of SEO, and in this article I wanted to share with you some of the more advanced and lesser-known concepts and techniques that can help you improve your SEO ranking and therefore boost your sales enquiries.

I’ve also included a short list of quick wins that you can employ today in order to make a significant improvement to your traffic levels and sales.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text on or near an inbound link. So, for example if I wanted to link to our SEO page, I would probably have the link text be “SEO techniques” or something like that. It is important to understand what anchor text you have across the full range of incoming links to your site so that you can vary them whilst keeping to your primary keywords.

So in the above example, your HTML would be as follows:

<a href=”https://www.voodoochilli.com/seo/”>SEO techniques</a>

I see far too many non descriptive links, for example “click here” instead of naming the item or page that is being linked to. You can find out your anchor links by viewing your backlinks on the Ahrefs website.

Domain Authority and Backlinks

Domain Authority or DA is an estimation of the metric that ultimately determines a websites rank. So, for example a very popular website like the BBC will have a high DA score, and a new site will have a very low one. I say it is an estimation because it’s not like Google give us the number, like they used to when we relied on Google Page Rank.

Sites like Ahrefs and Moz.com will make this guess based on the number and quality of backlinks. The more, high ranking sites linking in, the higher the score. You can find out your own score by again using the Ahrefs website.

One way to increase your score and ultimately your SEO ranking, is to develop a strategy to build quality incoming links. At Voodoochilli we often work with our SEO clients to do this involving strategies that make content link-worthy. Be very wary of paying for links, not only does Google frown on this, if you are caught your site will be penalised and possibly even delisted (removed from Google). They also tend to be very low quality, so please avoid anyone offering to sell you links.

LSI Keywords

LSI keywords are associated keywords in content, both off-page and on-page that help search engines like Google to build a keyword profile. So using the SEO page example previously, we would need to ensure that content on it and linking to it relates to SEO. Examples would be algorithm, crawling, Googlebot, meta description etc etc. Even though we are not specifically trying to rank for those keywords, they help Google understand the overall subject of the website.

It sounds simple, and kind of obvious, but there is a lot more to it than first appears.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion Rate Optimisation or CRO is one of the most powerful techniques you can use to get more sales enquiries on your website. Essentially you want to look at ways to get more of your visitors to actually convert into a sales enquiry. There are many ways to do this such as experimenting with the content and layout. You can make significant gains by doing something as simple as humanising your content with a friendly photo, or simplifying the wording slightly. Ideally you should test this with something we call A-B split testing, something we cover in our SEO packages.

To put things in perspective, increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 2% is the same as getting double the amount of traffic to your website. If you can get from 1% to 10% you have literally increased your online sales enquiries by 900%! Such improvements are game changers for most businesses and definitely worth investing in.

Quick Wins:

As promised I’ve also listed some quick wins – things you can do easily today to make a significant boost to your overall SEO score.

Check if your site is secure – if your site doesn’t have a SSL certificate installed, Google will downrank your website slightly. You can check if your site is secure by typing https:// instead of http:// on your site. If you don’t get an error, then your site is secure. If not, you can buy a SSL certificate from your web hosting company for as little as £10 a year. It will more than make up that £10 in terms of traffic levels and consumer confidence.

Use a CDN – A CDN is a Content Delivery Network. The most popular one is CloudFlare, and basically what it does is speed up the delivery of your website content by caching copies of your site and serving the site from local servers. So, if your visitor is in America they will get a copy of the site sent from a server there, and if your visitor is in England, they will get one from this side of the Atlantic. CloudFlare is free and fairly simple to set up and one of the first things we do for our SEO clients.

Check if your site is responsive – A non mobile responsive website will be penalised by Google. To check if your site works well on a mobile device you can simply make your browser window smaller and see how it looks at different sizes. Many browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have tools built in to test this by pressing Ctrl + Shift + M

Check your Page Speed – one of the best ways to boost your SEO rank is to work on your website speed. Google has a pagespeed testing website you can use to check this, however bear in mind on some sites you may need resource heavy pages. Site switch lots of images or video for example will always be slower than text heavy pages. As mentioned previously, you can speed up your site by using a CDN such as cloudflare. Another quick way to do this is to move to a faster web host.

See if you are hacked – if your site is hacked you may become completely delisted by Google. One way to know if you have been hacked is to Google the site yourself and see if you are still listed. Then, view the Google Cache version of the site and make sure it looks right with no weird links to other sites. Some of these hacks are quite advanced and your site may look fine to you, but you could have spammy links intended to game Google. Make sure your site is up to date and if you are using WordPress, keep the number of plugins to a minimum.

Conclusion

This concludes my article on some of the lesser-known and more advanced techniques that you can use to boost your SEO score and increase your sales enquiries. If you would like to discuss your SEO with us, please get in touch or view our SEO page for more information.