Optimising your dive shop’s website to generate more traffic can sometimes seem like a daunting task, so the PADI marketing team wanted to break down the wall and provide you with some actionable steps you can take to improve your website. So, below you will find PADI marketing team’s top SEO tips for your dive shop’s website.

Optimise for Featured Snippets

A featured snippet is a special block above the organic search results that Google sometimes shows for certain queries, usually questions. Featured snippets simplify online searches as they display the users question without them having to navigate away from Google. Featured snippets (also referred to as ‘Position Zero’) contain a summary, the webpage title, a link to the webpage from which the answer came and a URL. There are three types of featured snippets:

• Paragraph: This is the most popular type of snippet and shows paragraph-type answers.
• List: Include bulleted or numbered lists, such as step-by-step instructions and recipes. An example of this is below.
• Table: These are reserved for numerical data like prices, rates, years and other comparison type charts.

Google pulls this information from one of the organic listings on page one of search results so, optimising your website content for featured snippets will give your content a greater chance of becoming a featured snippet.

Create High Quality Content

Creating and maintaining high quality content across your digital marketing activities is extremely important and should be placed as a priority. There are several key reasons for this, including:

Content builds relationships.

Helpful, authoritative content gives customers a reason to return to and continue to engage with you and your business. This creates return users, who are more likely to convert and purchase your products or services.

Importance of evergreen content.

Evergreen content is content that doesn’t need to be updated after it’s written. A good example of this is the ‘About’ section on your website. Content like this is ideal as it continues ranking in Google, generating website traffic and potentially conversions. Your circumstances can sometimes change, so in this case, adjusting your evergreen content slightly can actually have a positive impact on your SEO.

Versatile content helps to build your brand.

Placing versatile, high-quality content in front of the right audience can help heighten your brand’s authority, reputation and trustworthiness. When doing this, make sure your content isn’t too sales focused and vary your content types across blogging, emails and social media.

Emphasis on video.

Video content continues to dominate and shows no signs of slowing down. Consider the various ways you can incorporate video into your content – this can be anything from embedding video on your website or incorporating it in your email marketing communications.

Master the Basics

Mastering the SEO basics is one of the best things you can do to improve your dive shops website. PADI’s top SEO tips are as follows:

Page Title

Your page title is the first impression a searcher will have of your business, so you want to make sure titles are highly optimised. Page titles should be kept below 55 characters, important keywords should be used first (these carry more weight) and remember that searchers read this, so it needs to make sense.

Meta Description

This is the brief description that appears under page titles in search results. It should be kept at approximately 150 characters and each website page should have its own meta description. Remember, that if the description doesn’t seem relevant to the search, they most likely will not bother clicking on your website.

PADI’s meta description, shown below, is clear, concise and describes what PADI does in 153 characters.

Optimize your URL’s

Optimizing your URL’s is one of the simplest things you can do to improve your websites SEO. As a rule of thumb, always separate words in the URL’s by hyphens and remember that URL’s should be names after the page content – so try and use your relevant keywords.

Heading Tags

Keywords should be used in page heading, sub-headings and main page content where relevant. When writing page content, ensure that all headings are marked up correctly in HTML with heading tags <H1> through to <H6>. The example below shows how PADI’s ‘Diving in Indonesia’ page uses heading tags.

Image Tags

Every image on your website should have both a title attribute and an ALT tag. Title attributes should include keywords and ALT tags need to be a short descriptive sentence about the image. Make sure all images are named with keywords, separated by a hyphen before being uploaded. If you are unsure which of your images are named correctly, simply hover your mouse over the image for a few seconds to make the name appear.

Links and Social Metrics

The more people that link back to your website, the greater the ‘authority’ of your website will be. This ‘authority’ is based on an external source of keyword relevance. If similar industry websites link to your Open Water page with the hyperlink “Learn to Dive” – your website will be given authority. If you score well in both Relevance and Authority, this will significantly help your website move higher up the search results. Remember that social metrics also indicate a form of authority – so include those share buttons on your blog or website.

View the ‘Important SEO Trends in 2020’ webinar recording and download the ‘SEO checklist for PADI dive shops’ to learn more about improving your SEO. For more information about SEO or anything marketing related, please contact PADI Marketing or your Regional Manager directly.

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