What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The purpose of SEO is to improve your websites relevancy and authority on a subject to help it rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) eg. Google Search page. If you’re a small business owner or marketer with a limited budget, optimising your website for search engines is a great, low cost way of directing organic traffic to your website. Apart from your time and a fair bit of clever strategic thinking – it’s basically a strategy to get FREE website traffic.
To do this, you have to satisfy Google’s algorithms that are designed to give their users the best results based on the words they are searching for. Therefore, the content on your website needs to provide the answer to relevant search queries. In addition to your relevant website content there are three main areas of SEO you need to be aware of: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO and Technical SEO. It’s not as scary as it sounds – actually, it’s quite easy to get the basics right and I’m going to show you how.
Why is an SEO Strategy important?
SEO is a low cost way to smartly position your brand as a source of authority within search engines. Using your industry knowledge and brand positioning, you can can easily configure your website content to be found in a crowded marketplace.
Depending on your industry, some keywords and search terms can be incredibly easy to target. The trick is knowing which ones are right for you and your business, and knowing what is important to your target market and optimising your content that they are searching for. Developing an SEO Strategy is your first step in optimising your website content for organic traffic. Your SEO Strategy should include your chosen keywords, your target personas and your content plan. As well as checking off the SEO best practice tasks listed below.
Basics of Search Engine Optimisation
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO refers to the settings you make ‘on’ your website.
URL Structure
Your URL slug is the important part of structuring your website pages and content. Slugs are used by search engines to surface information to people who are searching for that relevant content. This is an example of a URL structure.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Depending on which CMS (Content Management System) you have chosen to build your website, you may be prompted to make sure the title tag and meta description settings are completed.
This is an example of a website page displayed in Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). You know the ones right? When you scroll past all the Ads to find genuine search results based on their authority and relevancy of your search term and not their marketing budgets – that’s where you want to be. They call this position number 1, as Google has ranked this page as the most relevant and useful for the searcher.
Headers, Internal Links and Images
These are the settings you make to the content blocks on your website page. It is important to think about the structure of your content when creating a page on your website. Think about the audience reading it and what might make good headings so they can jump to the part that interests them most? Can you use images may help explain or describe what you are talking about? What other information might you link to throughout your content?
Design your pages with your end-user’s experience in mind.
This is an example of a blog showing the header, image and internal linking on the page.
Find out how your website is performing today.
Off-Page SEO
This refers to the activity you do ‘off’ of your website.
Backlinks
A backlink is when an external website directs traffic to your website by publishing one of your URLs.
Social Media
Backlink Building
Online Directories, News sites / Bloggers, Industry authority websites
Local SEO
Google My Business Account are for businesses with a physical location that they want to be listed on Google Maps and shown in search results.
Technical SEO
This refers to the technical aspects of your website settings.
Security Certificate
An SSL certificate is required for you to have a https: protocol in your URL. Google will not return a site that does not have an SSL Certificate, modern browsers will display a warning to visitors for insecure sites. Meaning less traffic and less chance of being organically shown in SERPs.
Page Speed
If your web page is slow to load, visitors are more likely to leave the site. This tells Google that your site content is not relevant to the searchers enquiry and can negatively effect your SEO.
Make sure your page load speed is under 2 seconds. Use the Page Speed Insights tool to check your websites speed.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can potentially ‘blacklist’ your website so it doesn’t show in SERPs. It is important that your page content is either unique or uses canonical tags to highlight the primary content page. You can also add a ‘permanent’ 301 redirect to the more relevant or updated pages you want to be displayed.
Mobile Responsiveness
In 2022, research shows that over 60% of website traffic comes from a mobile device. It is important to make sure your pages are optimised for a small screen devices. Many CMS tools have viewing and configuration options to make a page responsive to mobile devises prior to publishing. If someone views your site on a mobile device and it is not displaying optimally – they are likely to leave the site quickly which damages your SEO. If traffic bounces ‘exits’ from your site quickly – that basically tells Google that your site did not provide the answer to the user and therefore should not be presented to other searchers.
Site Map
When building your website you need to start with your site architecture. This is an important tool to use when considering URL structure, interlinking opportunities, and how you want visitors to navigate your site. From your site architecture you can create a ‘Site Map’ which is a file of code that lists your important website page URLs.
Website Architecture
Google Crawlers / Spider Bots
Think of these as a friendly librarian. If the spider doesn’t know your content exists, how will Google know to return it in SERPs? Submit your Site Map to Google Search Console, ensuring every page is crawl-able from the homepage and indexed within Google Search Engines. Make sure your site map is clean and doesn’t include any published drafts or old URLs.
SEO Checklist Per Page
SEO doesn’t need to be as hard as it sounds. Start with this checklist to help you complete SEO best practices for each and every page of your website.
So, what are you waiting for?
I’ve worked with companies in both start-up and scale-up phases. I love helping new small businesses make sense of marketing fundamentals and empowering them to take their business growth into their own hands. Confidently scaling their businesses. Read more insights here. Subscribe to the Mood Marketing newsletter to receive insights direct to your inbox.