8 Steps to Improve your Search Engine Optimisation
This Video was created for our YouTube Channel, can be found here, please see below the transcription of video if you don’t feel like watching the video.
Introduction:
In this video I will explain 8 steps you can take to start improving your search engine optimisation without having to spend a ton of money or hire out an external agency to do it for you.
These steps should be done in order and apply to any business regardless of if they are B2B or B2C as at the end of the day Google ranks it all the same. I will be recommending different software and platforms you can use to improve your SEO, all of them will be free or have free alternatives. Any recommendations will be linked below in the description of this video. I don’t receive any kickback from these links, they are just ones I find in my day-to-day job as a digital marketing agency owner to be the most effective.
Now let’s kick off with step 1.
Step 1: Research – Know your rankings.
The backbone of creating any kind of meaningful and deliberate improvements in your search engine optimisation is research. There is a huge bank of data available to your business for free from Google that will show you a lot of key information about the performance of your website on its search engine.
To start with I would recommend you know where you rank on Google and where you rank for your top keywords. Visit the Google Search Console, look at the performance tab, it will show you the total clicks (how many users have clicked to visit your website on google), the total impressions (how many users have seen the link to your website on the search page), the click through rate and importantly the average position. Average position is where on the search page your website ranks, on average google shows 10 results per page and on average 70% of users don’t look past the second page. So, if your average position for your top searches is greater than 10, then may be a goal to aim for with your SEO.
Next, we need to find out some keywords. A keyword, also known as keyphrase query or search query is a word or group of words that users will type into a search engine to find information on a certain topic. Google will identify different keywords in the content on your website alongside several different factors such as inbound and outbound links, age of content, meta descriptions etc, and rank your website on the results page.
I would suggest visiting the google keyword planner or ubersuggest, which is a free tool that allows you to enter your websites url and it will show you’re the keywords you rank for, their total search volume and how competitive it is to improve your ranking in these keywords.
This leads us on to step 2.
Step 2: Define Keywords You want to Improve.
Now we should have the data in front of us with the different keywords we rank on Google and the total search volume. I would recommend targeting 3-5 keywords or phrases as part of your strategy to improve your search engine optimisation. This is a good number to begin with as you can focus your content on a few highly relevant search terms and there are enough to break up your content with variety that your target audience can consume.
Having a list of the 3-5 keywords means you measure then over the next 6 months with the Google search console and keyword planner to identify any changes or improvements in your ranking.
After defining your keywords, you want to move to step 3.
Step 3: Create Killer Content Around These Keywords.
You may have heard the saying that content is king and in the SEO world this is 100% true. One of the best ways you can improve your websites rankings is create high-quality killer content. The content can take the form of blog posts, images, graphics, and video content. The two I would recommend focusing on is blog posts and video content.
Blogs are great as it allows you to write specific copy for your niche and add the specific keywords into the body of the text. I would suggest writing blog posts using the expertise within your business. If you are experts in a chosen field then write about it as much as possible, break up the text with some quality images and boom you’ve got a quality blog.
Today, video content is such a useful tool for grabbing users’ attention and building up trust and authority with your brand. Google owns YouTube so creating high quality YouTube videos that use the same SEO techniques in this video will really help your business grow.
With both blog and video content consistency is key, if you keep a schedule for creating content it will get easier and quicker to produce. The easier and quicker it is the produce high quality content then the quicker and easier it will be for your website to rank higher on Google.
With the creation of new content we move to step 4.
Step 4: Update Existing Content.
Websites such as Hubspot, Digital Marketing institute, Wikipedia and NP Digital, all rank high on search engine results pages. They all share the same technique for improving their SEO and that is regularly updating their existing content.
If you take Wikipedia, they don’t create a new page every time there is an update to something they have on their site. What they instead do is have their users edit the existing page with new/up to date content and provide links to the source of this new information. Google loves ranking pages that have existed online for a long period of time.
What I would recommend is you do that for your site. Go through your old content be that blog posts or existing pages and update the content to be more relevant to the present. For example if you’re a real estate agent and your created a blog post about average house prices in your area. Instead of creating a new page, update this old content with current figures and rename the title “House prices in x – Updated for Summer 2023”. This will help drive a whole new audience of people to your site without having to rank a new page from scratch every time you have new information.
Go through your old content twice a year and see if you can update it with new or interesting information. Then promote that new content via social media.
We move on the step 5.
Step 5: Build/Generate More Backlinks.
An often time overlooked part of SEO is generating backlinks. A backlink is when another website has a link to your site on one of the pages. Think of a backlink as a vote or endorsement, another website is saying to their users, check out this site to learn more about xyz.
Building backlinks can be quite difficult but with steps 3 & 4 it can be much easier. Say you’re an engineering firm and you’ve been creating blog posts and videos that are proving to be quite successful and get strong engagement online. You could approach journalists and online publications and offer to write an article based on a specific topic in your niche in exchange for a feature on their website and a link to your own. You are providing the publication with free content which they love, in exchange for that endorsement/backlink to your site.
The google search console will let you see what sites are linked to yours.
Step 6: Tidy Up Your Code.
Improved Crawling and Indexing: Search engine bots crawl through websites to discover and index their content. When the code is clean and well-structured, it becomes easier for search engines to crawl and understand the website’s content. This can lead to better indexing and improved visibility in search engine results. As an addition tidying up your code can also lead to improved load times which will improve users experience on your site making them stay long and not click off while waiting for load times.
You can improve your code by:
Removing unnecessary code, review your website’s code and remove any unnecessary or redundant elements. This includes unused CSS styles, unused JavaScript code, and any HTML elements that are not being used.
Step 7: Fix/Edit Your Alt Tags And Meta Descriptions.
A simple and overlooked step a lot of websites do is they neglect to update their alt text or meta descriptions.
Alt text is the text that appears when you hover over an image that describes the image. From a SEO perspective this is another opportunity for you to include one of the keywords you have identified. I would recommend you add as much information that is in the image into your alt text as possible. Say you have a picture of someone drinking a coffee. Replace that with, woman with dark hair drinking latte, while sat on stool within trendy coffee shop that has high tables and low tables in the background. You have given Google that little bit more data to analyse and rank your webpage. Now, this doesn’t mean start adding in a lot of spam text and unrelated words to the image, Google can tell if alt text is spam and will penalise you page for it. So, keep your alt text relevant to what is in the image.
Meta descriptions is the bit of text you see before clicking on a website on the search engine results pages. Think of it as the person outside a restaurant or bar that tries to entice people to come in. You want to write great copy for this description that accurate describes your web page and includes the specific keyword you are trying to rank for. This final hurdle for a user to visit your website so make your meta description accurate and enticing as possible.
Now finally on to step 8.
Step 8: Be Patient & Consistent.
This is probably the hardest step out of all the steps in this video and that is being patient and staying consistent with your search engine optimisation. SEO is a long game; it can take upwards of 6 months of consistent work to start seeing meaningful improvements to your rankings.
Please be patient with your SEO but I can promise you in the long run taking the steps to improve your rankings will be worth it.
Ending:
Now that was the 8 steps any business can take to improve their websites search engine optimisation and rank higher on Google.
I hope you found this video education and have learned a few new things. Please subscribe to the channel for more digital marketing content and how Overlook Digital can improve your businesses digital marketing.