SEO targeting in St Neots isn’t really too hard depending on the business. As when businesses SEO in St Neots, it becomes a niche in itself. You just need to make sure to cover most of our SEO strategies.
How to SEO in St Neots
- Optimise your website by covering the basics;
- Do your keyword research for St Neots and Cambridgeshire related terms;
- Produce local quality St Neots related content and make sure it’s SEO friendly.
Cover the basics
Submit your sitemap
Google & Bing’s Webmaster Tools
Google and Bing both have their own webmaster tools page. This allows you to submit your website’s sitemap to their search engines in order for them to list your website.
By doing so, you not only get your website listed, but they also provide search data of what people are searching for when clicking your listing.
This data could be useful to see if your listings are triggering any clicks through St Neots related search terms. This should further guide you, in case you need to increase the use of St Neots related content on your website.
Keyword optimised content
Heading tags
Heading tags are tags placed on your website, telling search-bots such as Googlebot that “this is the page’s topic”. It also helps generate some structural hierarchy for your content.
These tags should be placed on your website’s homepage in particular with the keyword St Neots included, although this has to show some relevance towards the page topic of course.
Meta titles & descriptions
The meta title and description tags are what show on Google’s search page.
Essentially we need to cover the most relevant keywords for your business services, including business locality; which would be St Neots/Cambridgeshire.
If you’re using a website built on WordPress, Yoast SEO is a great WordPress plugin to use.
This plugin makes it really easy for non-web-developers to optimise their meta titles and descriptions, without any coding experience necessary.
Website content
Website content is important, you need to make the text on your website obvious that your business operates and relates to St Neots.
This not only includes heading tags (of which we’ve already covered above) but general paragraphs other elements too.
Image alt text
In terms of images on your website, you can better optimise these with keywords.
Images require accessibility to view for visually impaired visitors and screen-reader devices. To describe what an image is related to, we can use alt text to do so.
Being able to show relevant imagery of St Neots when talking about your business services will allow you to insert the keyword St Neots into your image alt text, whilst also covering the accessibility aspect of SEO.
Again, if you’re using a website built with WordPress, most websites will allow you to edit the images in the media section in order to add relevant alt text.
Latent semantic indexing (LSI)
Whilst on the topic of content, it’s important to cover LSIs. These are alternative keywords that have a direct relation to the primary keyword.
For example, if we were to target a page’s SEO for the term SEOs in St Neots; we should also be trying to cover the related keywords.
These would be keywords such as SEOs in the Cambridgeshire, PPC St Neots or digital marketing St Neots, for example.
A quick way of gathering these LSI keywords is by typing your keyword into Google and scrolling to the bottom to find the related searches.
Mobile responsive website
To see if your website is mobile responsive, you can use Google’s tool to find out.
This is classed as a ranking factor for Google and it also falls under the accessibility category requirement for websites.
Fast website loading times
Website loading speed and performance is also a factor for SEO.
For some larger businesses with lots of Cambridgeshire based web-traffic, it might even be worth finding a hosting provider with their servers located in Cambridgeshire.
This would help visitors from Cambridgeshire access the website faster as they’re closer to the hosting server.
If your website is built on WordPress, there’s a big repository of great cache plugins you can use to optimise your website for speed and performance.
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to measure the speed of your website.
Why get bespoke design over template?
We’re always against template-based website design.
Not only does it mean websites look similar, but also that it could slow down your website.
This is due to templates loading unnecessary scripts and functionality that your website may never even require, yet it still has to cater to all as it’s a template.
They essentially go against the website’s speed and performance point we previously covered.
Other basic SEO strategies
We’ve previously written a blog article on website mistakes to avoid which covers the basics, as well as an SEO checklist for you to follow.
Therefore, as well as reading this article, it might be worth reading the others, in order to fully maximise your website’s SEO value.
If you have a WordPress website, we recommend using a website SEO plugin to help cover the basics of your SEO.
Cover the intermediate
Security & legal compliance
SSL certificate
An SSL generates encryption between the website the visitor. These are generally important for all websites, but eCommerce online shopping websites in particular.
Being compliant in security is classed as a ranking factor by Google, that’s why an SSL can help to improve a website’s SEO rankings.
Website’s responsibilities
Websites that provide contact pages, about us pages or possibly even privacy policies can help build a responsibility factor with Google.
This is documented in Google’s search quality rating PDF, of which they train real people about reviewing websites.
Obviously having a contact page is a good idea if you’re wanting to generate more St Neots related content for your website.
Possibly GDPR compliance
We believe that the impact of the general data protection regulation (GDPR) may have an impact on the website’s SEO rankings. Therefore it’s better to have this than not be compliant.
Get verified with Google Business in St Neots
Getting verified with Google Business builds trust with your business and Google.
This helps show that there is a real registered business address and physical location — helping to build that responsibility factor with your website and Google.
When registering your place of address, take note that businesses in the centre of St Neots may show up higher in Google Maps when searched for outside of St Neots.
If your customers are already in St Neots, for example, the outskirts (Little Paxton, Buckden, etc.), businesses near their current location may show up higher when searching for St Neots related search-terms.
Cover the advance
Error handling
Page-not-found page / 404 page
Having a 404 page allows your visitors to not just appear on a blank page when they encounter a broken link.
According to Google’s search quality rating PDF, even a 404 page can be manually reviewed. 404 pages that seem to score highly are those that include an effort to help the user.
For example, adding a search functionality on this page could possibly improve the score.
Broken links / 301 redirects
If you’re a business that’s just got a new website in hopes to improve SEO value, you may need to consider maintaining the SEO value too.
When developers build new websites for businesses with existing websites, some tend to forget about maintaining the old URL structure on the new website.
Therefore, you should ensure you’ve got a good web development team and also consider getting an SEO to look at things from the very start.
Changes to page URLs may cause confusion for the visitor. If they’ve accessed your website through Google and the page they’ve requested is now missing and they’ve not been told that it’s been moved, Google will remove the broken page from their search results.
In order to solve this, using a 301 redirect can tell both your visitors and search engines that a page has been permanently moved; redirecting them to the new page automatically.
Google’s Search Console can help notify you of any URLs that triggered a page-not-found error.
Be vocal about your accreditations and St Neots based partnerships
We’ve seen a vast majority of construction companies in Cambridgeshire do extremely well with SEO.
This got us investigating the correlation between them all and why they’re performing better in SEO, than other Cambridgeshire based businesses.
We’ve found that it could all be down to showing-off a company’s accreditations, qualifications and partnerships, which can help increase your expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (a part of Google’s official search quality guidelines).
For example, most building companies are generally members of associations and hold many local partnerships with companies such as CHAS and Build Base for example.
They’re also listed on websites such as Trust A Trader and Checked-and-Vetted, which as a bonus, helps them get authoritative and relevant links pointed back towards their website.
Ways to maintain your SEO rankings in St Neots
Produce quality St Neots related and SEO friendly content
Try video-based content
Video-based content is great as some prefer watching videos more than reading.
You could essentially create videos and embed them on your website, whilst be making a transcript to generate the content after.
This should essentially engage the viewer to stay on the page longer, in order to reduce bounce rates, whilst keeping Google satisfied with the indexable content.
Start a blog
WordPress websites are made primarily for blogging. Therefore using WordPress is great, if you’re wanting to start generating business news through a blog.
SEO friendly and St Neots related posts should have a better chance of ranking in St Neots depending on your chosen keywords.
Update your work
Make sure you update your website’s portfolios, case studies or any other business-related updates you provide for your clients.
This can be a great way to introduce relevant content, related to St Neots in particular.