No matter what industry your Singapore business is in, you need to focus on search engine optimisation. Why is this? Well, according to research, the top listing on Google has a 33% chance of being clicked. And this means that the lower your company is in the rankings, the more traffic that you are likely to miss out on.
If you ever wonder why your competition often outranks you, then you may want to consider how consistent you are about improving your SEO. The good news, it doesn’t always take months to improve your rankings. In some cases, you can increase your chances of ranking in a matter of hours.
Use Your Competitor’s Easiest Keywords
At one point, businesses were not allowed to bid on their competitor’s branded keyword. In fact, there was an official ban on this practice. However, in 2008, Google lifted this ban and site owners could bid against other brands. The only rule was that the company could not mention their competitor’s trademarked name in their ad copy.
This is great news for Singapore marketers because bidding on your competitor’s keywords gives your brand traffic that is made up of customers who are searching specifically for a service or product that your brand and competition offer. According to research, branded keyword phrases are five times as likely to convert users into leads which means that the chances of retention and conversion are extremely high.
The key is to create copy that incorporates your competitor’s weaknesses. This is especially the case if they fail in an area that you excel at. Make sure that your copy is eye-catching and that you use keywords that are searched by the customers to find both of your brands.
When you’re searching for keywords to use from your competitor, you need to first be on the lookout for the easiest keywords–ones that can easily help you create content. Look for keywords that are similar to yours and that you know will convert well. Look for keywords that have low difficulty, high volume, and a high organic click-through rate.
Optimise Your Mobile Speed
With Google is now embracing mobile-first indexing and internet offering lightning-fast internet connections there is no better time to experience a growth in your mobile audiences. This is especially the case since there are still a lot of Singapore brands that are lagging behind when it comes to mobile.
It’s important to keep in mind that not only can a slow mobile loading time affect user experience, but it can also have a huge impact on your rankings in the search engine. Over 50% of Google’s search activity happens to take place on mobile devices. So it’s a good idea to make sure that people are able to search your site quickly.
What tends to get in the way of loading times are large images. The good news is that there are sites like Duda that can help you to launch your mobile optimised website in no time. It can ensure that your images are automatically compressed and resized which allows web pages to render within a matter of seconds. This means that you won’t have to worry about how many images will be served to various devices. You can also use CDN, or Content Delivery Network, if you would like to ensure that your images are loaded as quickly.
Local SEO
Of course it’s a good idea to spend time on global SEO, however, this doesn’t mean that you should neglect your local SEO. According to statistics, over 50% of consumers who perform a local search on their mobile phones will actually visit a store within the same day. So if your Singapore business isn’t ranking for keywords in the local area, you could be losing out on a significant amount of customers. Even worse, your competition could be taking advantage of these lost sales.
There is no doubt about it, improving your SEO can take time. However, there are a few simple steps that you can take in order to start improving your local SEO. For instance, you can make your brand more visible through various local listings. Just make sure to insert all of your local keywords into your unique descriptions across several listings and ensure that your images are up to date. You can increase the quantity and quality of all the links directed to your site by doing things like giving presentations to business students at local colleges and universities or leading discussions at regional business meetings. Perhaps the simplest way is to claim your Google My Business profile and optimising this profile.
One of the quickest ways to decrease your rankings is to include duplicate content on your website. So you need to pay special attention to your content marketing. If you’re using WordPress, which happens to be known for its tendency to create duplicate pages, there are certain tools that you can use to control this issue. For instance, Siteliner helps you to discover broken links and blocks of duplicate content. And the best part about it is, it will give you a free analysis.
Once you find an issue, then there are a lot of options you have for fixing it. For instance, you can use 301 redirects to repair duplicate content. Have you moved content from one URL to the next? Well, 301 redirects can prevent Google from seeing your duplicate content. You could use canonical URL tag attributes. Does your website have two identical content pages that feature different URLs? Well, you can use canonical URL tag attributes in order to signal to Google which of these pages you would like to have shown in search results. You may also use Noindex and nofollow tags. You may want to ensure that the search engines don’t crawl certain pages.
Conclusion
A great SEO strategy can actually be the difference between getting your website to the top of the search results and not showing up at all in the search results. Not only that, but it can either ensure that your click-through rates and conversions are as high as possible or that people leave immediately upon entering your page. The key to executing the perfect strategy is taking advantage of all the resources that are available to you.
While many Singapore business owners want to achieve high rankings and conversions, not all are willing to spend the time that it takes to achieve these results. And this is unfortunate when you consider that it doesn’t always take months to make the changes needed. In some cases, it only takes a matter of hours. When you have made the changes suggested in this articles, make sure that you force Google to re-crawl your site so that you can see the results.
