Posted on 27th April 2022
by James Walker
You don’t need to be a digital wizard to improve your website’s position in Google! Here are our 5 top SEO tips! They are easy to follow and aim to maximise the impact you get from time spent optimising your website.
Each of your webpages should have a unique focus keyword or theme. Using Google’s Keyword Planner can really help with this.
You are ideally looking for relevant words that have high levels of searches, with low competition. Once you have decided on these words, ensure the on-page text content continually refers to your chosen keyword or phrase. For this page for example, I would need to ensure I keep referring to SEO ranking factor, whilst ensuring that is kept in context.
Build your content around your chosen words, it’s the foundation of a well optimised webpage.
The page title should be unique and emphasise your key phrases. It’s the first thing most of your audience will see if your webpage appears in Google, so first impressions count!
Similarly, the description should continue to refer to the page’s keywords, summarising the page content quickly and ideally within 155 characters.
The URL should also match the pages title, which within the page’s HTML should be wrapped in a <H1> tag.
This is probably the oldest SEO tactic, yet it continues to be an important SEO ranking factor.
Page loading time is an SEO ranking factor for Google, all things being equal, the faster websites will rank higher. Faster websites are likely to receive more page views and generate higher levels of conversions.
If you have purchased an off the shelf website theme, or use a website builder, you’ll inherently have functionality that will make customisation easier for you. The trade-off is page ranking because Google rewards unique content.
Wherever possible, we recommend engaging a professional website developer to support this task. They will input only the necessary level of HTML/CSS to avoid bloated websites and improve the website speed at its core. Your optimisation endeavours could potentially be in vain if you don’t have the right foundations in place. However, if you’re not able to use the expertise of a developer, other ways to improve speed and your SEO ranking factor are to properly size images, remove unnecessary JavaScript, move to a faster hosting provider, and use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Your website should absolutely be responsive and mobile-friendly, a desktop only website would be pushed down the ranking by search engines as more than half of users now access the web through mobile devices.
You can check your website’s page speed here.
Your website should aim to build an audience that engages with your content enough to prompt further contact, ideally gaining you new customers.
Content is everything on your website; blogs, videos, graphics, reviews, essentially everything that relates to your organisation!
If your website content is static or dated, you are likely to lose your audience and diminish the impact of any investment that you have made into your website and associated online marketing. Think about how you would react to a website that hasn’t published new content for a while? Perhaps an offer promoted on the site has already expired, there could be a lack of current news / blogs, or seasonal references may be out of date. Either way, these experiences don’t reinforce that your business is communicative, proactive and in touch with the latest developments.
So, it’s important to invest time in updating your blog and content. This matters to your SEO ranking factor and your audience.
By building new content around keywords relevant to your USPs, you’ll be working towards becoming an authority on your specific niche, which will lead to searches ranking your website highly.
It’s not just what you’re saying about your organisation through your own website’s content, it’s also how other websites refer to your website.
If your website is referenced and linked from other public facing websites with high trustworthiness, such as bbc.co.uk, it will improve your SEO ranking factor. Similarly, being referenced on less favourable websites will be detrimental to your SEO.
Use social media to your advantage by posting regularly and linking back to your website or blog, it’s a great way to improve your off-page SEO. Additionally online reviews of your business, such as those on Google linking back to your website are another great way to improve your seo ranking factor.
It’s really all about improving a search engine’s perception of site quality, either through links from other websites, social media marketing, guest blogging or influencer marketing. You might want to consider writing a PR piece yourself and getting in touch with one of those sources with authority, in the hope that they publish your content and link to your website.
If you have a challenges with your SEO ranking factor, or more simply, you’re not getting the results that you hoped to get from your website, feel free to get in touch for a chat.
