Having a website without proper SEO optimization is like charging into battle with a dull blade; you’re not going to get very far. And in an ever-competitive digital marketplace, if you wish to outshine the competition you’re going to need every advantage you can get your hands on.
In this article, we’re gonna share 10 tips for optimising your website for SEO success.
What is SEO?
SEO broadly refers to the process of refining your website’s technical performance, backlink profile, and content quality / relevance with the intention of showing up in the appropriate search results on Google and attracting more ‘ready to spend’ traffic to convert into business.
Here’s how to go about it…
1. Do your keyword research
What products or services are you trying to sell? Who are you trying to sell them to? And what sort of keywords and search phrases are they pumping into Google when actively looking for those very products or services that you offer?
Using keyword research tools, you can put together an extensive list of short and long-tail keywords that are relevant to your target demographic. In doing so, you’ll have the foundation upon which you can start crafting your website’s content.
Think of it like square pegs and round holes: if your content doesn’t match your keywords; Google won’t make the connection.
2. Tastefully place your keywords
Those keywords need to be tastefully scattered throughout your website. You need them in your titles and headers (to clearly notify Google and your audience of exactly what your website is all about), and throughout your website sales copy. Just be mindful not to stuff them in for the sake of hitting a certain number. Keyword stuffing is poor form and makes content read terribly.
3. Optimise your URLs
You should also include clear keywords and instructions in your permalinks / URLs when creating pages within your website. For example, if you were adding this very post to your blog, it could look like:
“www.thisisyourawesomewebsite.com/blog/optimizewebsitesforSEO”
4. Create a good internal linking structure
Google is all about websites with a quality user experience. Internal linking is a great way to promote this. It’s not just about having a link to the content us page in your CTA at the bottom, but sending website users to various resources, information, products, and services. Proper internal linking should effortlessly guide your website users from one page to the next, and hopefully lead them toward a positive conclusion.
Help your website visitors navigate with ease.
5. Optimising for page load speed
Unfortunately, the time it takes for your website to fully load is not only a ranking factor, but a potential turn-off for your website visitors. If your home page takes longer than 3 to 5 seconds to load on a mobile device, many of your potential customers will be abandoning your website for your competitors.
6. Mobile optimization
Given that over 50% of all online searches are conducted on a mobile device, if your website is not mobile-first optimised, you’re missing out on a significant amount of potential business. Don’t let it go to waste!
7. Optimised imagery and video
Having beautiful on-brand imagery and informative videos on your website is awesome, but make sure they’re optimised accordingly. This means adding the relevant alt text so that Google can successfully crawl and index those elements, and also compressing them so as not to slow your website down too much.
8. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is arguably one of the most important aspects of your website’s health & hygiene. This includes critical tasks such as:
- Specifying preferred domain.
- Optimising Robots.txt.
- Navigation and structure.
- URL structure.
- Breadcrumb menus.
- SSL and HTTPS.
- Schema.
- XML sitemap optimization.
- And soooo much more.
9. Write premium quality content
Getting your keywords right isn’t enough to top those rankings; you also need to create high-quality content that truly resonates with your target audience.
Remember, getting more traffic to your website is fine, but it will be all but useless if they get bored and go somewhere else.
Quality content is all about capturing their attention, massaging those pain points, and offering an awesome solution by way of your products / services.
10. Update, refine, maintain
A website is never ‘finished’. You will need to continually update, refine, and maintain your website in order to keep it fresh and in-line with Google’s search algorithm. It’s also important to keep it healthy, hygienic, and secure.
If you can keep up with all of these onsite optimizations, you’ll be well positioned to start working on your offsite SEO activities and building a solid online presence.
Of course, there’s an awful lot of work that goes into optimising a website for SEO success, so if you are feeling overwhelmed and would prefer not to go digging around in the back-end of your website, we recommend hiring a Brisbane SEO company with a reputation for providing their clients with world-class results and let them do the hard work for you.