How to Optimise your Website for SEO

The first step in your Digital Marketing journey should be making sure that you website is set up for SEO.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of aiding your website to appear in the results of search engines, such as Google. This is not a one-time process and requires ongoing maintenance, tuning, continuous testing and monitoring. This makes website SEO challenging, but worth it, so here are some steps you should follow if you want to get the top of the search results.

Step 1: Find Target Keywords

To start the process, you need to decide the keywords you’ll be building your SEO around. These are significant words that users will use to search for your product or service. To do this you can you use Google’s Keyword Planning tool (you will need a Google AdWords account). You should then choose keywords that have a high search volume, but low competition. Why? Because these can bring you lots of visitors – while being comparatively easy to rank for. We would recommend 5 keywords with 100+ monthly searches per month for small businesses.

Step 2:  Check your current rankings

Once you have your list of keywords, you now need to find out where you currently rank. If you don’t have access to a ranking tool such as SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker, you can check your organic Google ranking using logging into your webmaster tools. Once you have looked at your current positions, you may find that you are already ranking well for some terms already. Therefore, note the ones your website doesn’t rank high for and concentrate your SEO efforts on those.

Step 3: Optimise your onsite content

The next step is to optimise your website for those selected keywords. These elements are often go overlooked by web designers and content marketers.

• URLs: these are one of the first things search engines look at, so it’s essential to make them as descriptive as possible, ideally with the keyword/phrase that you’re hoping to rank for. So instead of www.yourwebsite.co.uk/services something like www.yourwebsite.co.uk/seo-expert would help you to rank better as it contains a phrase that increases your search relevance.
• Page Titles, Alt tags and Meta Descriptions: These serve the function of advertising copy. They draw users to a website from the search engine results page (SERP) and is visible and important part of search marketing.
• Quality Content: No doubt the most crucial factor in determining whether your website performs well. You need to invest in regular, high quality, optimised content creation if you want to move up the pages.

Step 4: Get rid of toxic links

Next, you need to examine your backlink profile and get rid of the links that are dragging your rankings down. You can view these by heading over to Google Search Console. The links to your site report list links that the Googlebot has discovered during its indexing process. Take a close look at the list and pull out links that you think could be “spammy”. If possible, reach out to those webmasters and ask them to take the links down. Or, as a last resort, you can tell Google to ignore these links by disavowing them.

Step 5: Build quality backlinks

The final step is to increase the number of high-quality links pointing at your website can significantly improve your chances of ranking well. And, this is where we can help. Using our third-party network, we can help you to build natural offsite links back to your website. By reaching out to relevant websites and blogs in your industry, and placing content that users will find interesting and useful.

Step 6: Pass GO and collect £200

As we mentioned in the introduction, this is not a one-time process and it requires regular fine-tuning. We suggest that you complete this process monthly, therefore you can regularly analyse your progression.