How to improve your SEO in 5 easy steps.

SEO

Mar 2

SEO, search engines, paid ads… it can all be pretty confusing and overwhelming when managing your own website and marketing. Most of my clients come to me not knowing where to start and some of them have an idea but want to know what’s going to make the biggest difference on the lowest budget - either way, the one thing I always say is that SEO is a long game and by that I mean it’s not a marketing channel which you can just switch on and off and see results in an instant.

Building your SEO marketing takes time, effort and perseverance which is why it’s aply known as ‘owned’ or ‘organic marketing’. The good new is, with a little bit of research and understanding of your customer and market, there’s no reason why, as a business owner, you can’t improve your SEO yourself.

Here’s my 5 easy steps to start building a good SEO foundation…

1 - Check your website has a title and description

This sounds basic I know but you wouldn’t believe how many people miss out this step when using a website builder. This might be because your website title and description aren’t actually seen anywhere on your website - the only place you will see it is in search results and in the browser tab - so it’s actually quite easily done if you don’t know about it!

If you are using a website builder or template like Squarespace, Shopify or WiX, you will be able edit this info in the settings of your dashboard or your homepage (click the name of your website builder for more info). If you have access to the back end coding of your website and are editing this yourself, your title and meta description will look a bit like this…

<head>

<title> This is where you add your website name </title>

<meta name=”description” content=”This is where you add your meta (SEO) description.”>

</head>

If you’re still not sure what to do here, please send me a message - I’m here to help!

2 - Check the copy on your pages are formatted correctly

One of the biggest mistakes people make when using website builders is thinking ‘Header’ and ‘Paragraph’ options are to do with changing the size of your font. It is actually one of my biggest pet peeves of using website builders, as this is rarely explained enough to users and is the first thing I check on clients’ sites when auditing.

Otherwise recognised as ‘H1’ and ‘P1’, these terms are actually the hierarchy tiers of the content on your webpage, meaning they tell search engines which order to read the information in and what is most important relevant for the users searching. H1 (Header 1) and P1 (Paragraph 1) are the highest weighted (or most important) tiers on the page, with anything down to H6 and P6 being the lowest.

Generally speaking, webpage titles and subtitles should always be Header format, starting with titles as H1 and subtitles as H2, H3 and so on. Any sentences or blocks of text should be Paragraph format starting with P1 and so on.

3 - Answer your customer’s most ask questions

Let me start by saying that if you haven’t got an FAQs section or page on your website, then definitely start there. If this feels a bit daunting then start by putting yourself in your customers shoes and think about what you would want to know about your business, services or products. Better yet, have a look back over your emails or DMs from customers and see what they have asked or send out a poll and do some market research. The likelihood is if one person has asked it, then there will more people wondering the same.

One big tip here when putting together your FAQs is to word the questions and answers in clear full sentences as if someone was speaking to you or typing them into a search bar - don’t try too hard, they need to sound natural. Google will thank you for making their job a lot easier, by showing you to more customers in the long run!

4 - Add ‘alt tags’ to all your images and videos

Did you know the images or graphics on your website play a big part in your SEO too? No they can’t be seen or read by Google like an about page or blog post can, but they can be recognised by descriptive text called ‘alt tags’. Alt tags allow search engines to understand what is in your image or video and file it (also known as indexing) under the correct keywords, so that your image and website are shown for correct user search terms. It is also helpful to ensure when you upload your image to your website the file name is also relevant.

Optimising the media on your website is beneficial not only for improving your SEO but also for those with visual impairments who use screen readers to understand what’s on a web page. Adding text descriptions to your images helps make your website accessible to everyone.

If you are using a website builder you can edit your image or video alt text either in the settings attached to the image directly or in the webpage settings area.

5 - Create some new content

Ok this may sound like a bit of a copout (lol) and a lot easier said than done, but I couldn’t write a post on improving on SEO without including CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT!

And don’t get me wrong here, I know this takes time and (wo)manpower - usually a lot more than we have available - but it is important if you want to grow your organic traffic. People want newness, they want it to be of value to them and they want it instantly, which means we need to strive to give Google something to give them if we want to stand out.

Here’s a few content ideas which require short term effort from you but offer long term value for your customers as they will be available forever;