A beautifully designed website is meaningless if no one can find it. But how do people who haven’t seen your website before, find it? That’s where SEO comes in.
SEO efforts contribute towards your site ranking well in search engine results, to drive the right organic traffic to your website and satisfy your audience with what they’re searching for.
Understanding what works and what doesn’t with SEO is crucial to your success, but with so many sources and articles out there, it can be a bit of a minefield working out what you can do and what you’ll need expert assistance with.
Our guide is designed to help you understand the basics of SEO with actionable elements that your in house marketing team can work through.
SEO might appear to some to be a form of dark art but it actually simply refers to the process of optimising your website pages so that they appear in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and are seen by people organically (not an ad) as a result of them searching for something specific (keywords).
There are lots of types of SEO but they largely fall into two main buckets:
Onsite SEO Offsite SEO
Technical SEO can be… quite technical and you’ll find that the support of an agency can be useful for this. For this guide, we’ll mostly cover Content SEO and activities that you can do inhouse.
Search Engines like Google, were created “...to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
So if we think about it from a content perspective, you need to ensure that your content is relevant, accessible and useful.
Search Engines look at content and organise results at a basic level to include those factors to match queries that users put into them. There’s quite a few other factors and the algorithms’ exact workings are largely unknown but this is a premise that SEOs work upon. You’ll also hear SEOs talk about Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) Guidelines when discussing ranking factors.
To start, you’ll need to have a solid understanding of your target audience and what you can offer them. Once you know this, you can begin researching keywords related to your business. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Mangools to find terms that your target audience is searching for. Keywords have different intentions too - some are transactions whilst others are more informative, so keywords for product pages should have more of a transactional intent, whilst blog and services pages should contain keywords with a more informational intent. Your primary keywords should also have good search volumes that would be achievable for your website.
Keywords with particularly large search volumes are appealing but if your website authority is quite low, it will be difficult to outrank competitors with a much higher authority score. You can check your Domain Authority using a Domain Authority checking tool.
Equally, ensure that the keywords you use for your primary keywords have a monthly search volume - there’s no point ranking for something that people aren’t searching for.
Incorporate these keywords naturally into your content, including titles, headers, and meta descriptions. Title Tags and Meta Descriptions are the snippets shown in search engine results. Make them enticing and include your primary keyword.
It can be quite useful to have a list of all of your website pages so you can map out each page and the primary target keyword. This can help prevent cannibalisation (where two or more pages are competing to rank for the same keyword).
Headings are very important, so important in fact, that you’ll note that heading tags are numbered. H1s are your most important - this will be your title on a page and it helps Google understand exactly what your content/page is about. You should only have 1 H1 on a page. H2s are second most important - they should include your secondary keywords - there is no limit to how many but use them as your subheadings. The remaining heading tags can be used to further define your page structure.
Use Alt Text for Images as search engines can’t read them, but they can read the alt text you assign. Make sure every image has an alt tag that describes the image and includes relevant keywords where possible. These historically were created to assist with accessibility. Another thing to consider with images is compression. Try to compress your images to keep the file sizes small but do not compromise on image quality or resolution. Historically, it was recommended that an image had to be 72dpi but this is now an outdated notion with the evolution of smartphone devices and a need for more flexibility. Websites like Tiny.url can compress images to reduce the size of files, without losing quality.
Internal Linking, why is this important you ask? Providing a link to other relevant pages on your site will help keep users engaged and assist search engines with understanding your site structure. Topic Clustering is a very effective and strategic method of grouping similar types of content together through cleverly placed internal linking. When you’re writing a blog for example, think about other related blogs that you’ve written that can be included as a link in your fresh piece of content but don’t force it.
Another core aspect is link building to raise your Domain Authority. If you’ve got a brand new website and want to give it a little boost, having a link to your website in external directories can help. Acquiring do-follow backlinks from websites with a high domain authority score, can pass on some seo benefit to your website. However, it’s not a simple case of getting as many backlinks as possible from whatever source. The best backlinks to your website are always do-follow, are from a high authority website, link to a very relevant page on your website from their content and are from websites with high trust levels in your niche.
For example, a self-employed builder would benefit from a backlink from a website like B&Q to a blog page on his website where he’s discussing the best tools to use when building a house. This boosts page authority and can help that webpage rank better. Not only that, the traffic going to that page on the other website, will likely click on the link and be taken to your website, therefore helping with traffic acquisition.
If you’ve got a physical location, it’s good to have a Google Business Profile as there’s an opportunity to rank in what is called The Map Pack. The Map Pack is what you see when you search for a particular service and are presented with a list of businesses local to you that offer it. Google Business Profiles are also considered as Organic Search and optimising these can help with your local SEO. If you’ve got multiple locations, it’s best to set up an individual profile for each location and put a link to your specific location pages as your website address. Just make sure to run it through a UTM campaign builder tool first so you can differentiate the traffic in your analytics tool.
This does fall under Technical SEO but it’s important. Schema Markup is what is known as Structured Data. It’s a set of tags that a developer can add to your website that allows the Search Engines to get more information about what is on the page. The more the Search Engine understands, the more likely it is to rank you higher. There are different types of schema for different types of pages. For example, you might have a FAQ schema which shows the Search Engine that it’s a question and an answer which increases the chances of Featured Snippets and appearances in the “People also ask” sections. Product Schema can be used to pull together all the important Ecommerce related data together like Price, Attributes, GTINs, Categories, Production Dates etc.
Putting together a Content and SEO strategy will keep you and your team focussed. Content can get old and outdated, so it’s a good idea to plan which pages should be upcycled and improved, what new content is required and what content should be consolidated into a single more informative page.
You can always amend the strategy and pivot if you need to but the strategy is an important bit of admin.