Do businesses in Tasmania need to think about SEO in 2023?

Statistics suggest that nearly 54% of all website traffic comes from search engines - and with this number on the increase, the importance of search engines like Google and Bing for businesses and organisations continues to rise.

With figures like this in mind, we wanted to explore just how important SEO – or search engine optimisation – is to Tasmanian businesses in 2023.

What is SEO?

We explain SEO as a combination of strategies you can make use of on your website that aim to improve the experience for visitors; as well as search engines.

Search engine optimisation helps your business, organisation, charity, products or personal cause get found online.

Providing a well structured navigation, fast loading site and considered content helps search engines index your website quickly and easily.

Importantly, this also provides visitors and potential customers with a better ‘user experience’ of your website – something that Google pays a growing significance to.

Why do I need SEO for my Tasmanian business?

We think search engine optimisation is important for Tasmanian businesses because:

• It helps you stand out from your competitors;
• It allows your website to get found online;
• It improves credibility and trust;
• It provides ongoing promotion that doesn’t have to rely on expensive marketing or social campaigns;
• It reaches your target audience.

In Google Analytics, acquisition of visitors (i.e. how people get to your website) is often broken down into four key areas:

• Direct
• Social
• Referred
• Organic

Direct means visitors who have come to your website from a direct link that they may already have saved or know off the top of their head.

Social and referred visitors find your website from either a social media channel (such as a post on your Facebook page) or ‘referred’ from another website; for example, if one of your blog posts gets linked to from another website.

Our focus here is on organic search - visitors who have found your website from a search term, word or phrase via a search engine (for example ‘best website design hobart’).

Statistics again highlight the need for SEO - suggesting that the top five results of a search engine equate to nearly 70% of clicks, while results below this accounts for just 4%.

Considering this, it’s fair to say that even a basic consideration to SEO can help achieve the goals of your website – whether that's to increase people contacting you, sell more products or raise more awareness of your cause.

How do I improve my search engine rankings through SEO?

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to SEO and how to increase your search engine ranking on platforms like Google.

There are many, many elements of search engine optimisation that aim to improve a website’s search presence, including:

• Researching keywords and search phrases;
• Optimising and creating content (such as videos and blogs);
• Reducing image and file sizes to decrease load times;
• Sitemap and Robots.txt creation;
• Title and meta description optimisation;
• … the list goes on.
  

Given the complexity, importance and benefits of SEO – across the globe there are businesses that focus solely on these services.

These can be incredibly expensive services, particularly for smaller businesses in Tasmania who may not have the budget, time or resources to engage these types of resources.

We’ve written a blog post on how small businesses in Hobart and across Tasmania can improve their SEO, however if you’re after a quick way to try to improve your website’s search engine rankings, here's some friendly tips:

4 Quick Tips To Improve Your Website's SEO:

1. Develop a list of 3-5 primary keywords or phrases you want people to find your website through (i.e. ‘best website designer in Hobart’ or ‘dog groomers in Launceston’);

You can also do a Google search for these search keywords or phrases to see what else appears, or analyse the top three search results to discover their primary keywords.

2. Review your website title, meta description, headings and content to see if these keywords appear.

If you find these keywords or phrases don't appear, you can revisit your content and try to better incorporate them in naturally (i.e don't stuff them everywhere);

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3. Analyse the size of the images or files on your website and try to reduce these (check out Google’s Page Speed Insights as a starting point).

We've also written a blog post on how to optimise images for a website.

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4. Ensure your website is accessible, as well as responsive (i.e. friendly to mobile, tablet and large screen views).

If you find your website isn't accessible or responsive, get in touch with your website designer or review your platform as this is a necessity in 2022.

Wrapping Up

Like many of you, as a smaller business here in Tasmania – we understand that finding the time to maintain your website and even think about SEO can be low on the priority list.

In short – we think the following requirements suggest that SEO may benefit your Tasmanian business or organisation:

• if you operate in a medium to highly competitive industry;
• if you're starting a new website from scratch;
• if you're currently not being found within the first 2-3 pages (or at all) for important search terms for your business/organisation;
• if you're running a specific marketing or social media campaign.
  

At Wakeford Digital, one of our overall goals is assisting Tasmanian businesses and organisations to grow off the back of their online presence; and this includes SEO.

If you’d like us to take a look over your website and identify some opportunities to improve your SEO, feel free to get in touch through our contact page - or social media such as Facebook or Instagram.

While we work specifically with the Webflow platform, we can point you in the right direction or give some advice if you manage your own website in platforms such as Squarespace, Wix, Shopify or Wordpress.

Alternatively, if you haven’t started your website journey yet or have been thinking about taking the first step – head over to the Discuss A Website Project page and we can chat further.

- Dom