What is SEO?

SEO implementation falls under 2 main categories, on-page and off-page SEO

• On-page SEO is the optimisation of each page on a website to rank higher in search rankings using a range of strategies designed to increase your site traffic.
• Off-page SEO is centred around driving traffic to your site from other sites. This is mostly dependent on other websites that link to yours, and is less controllable than on-page SEO.

By implementing SEO strategies that belong to each of these categories, your business will give itself the best chance of ranking highly in search engine results pages.

So, what can you do to optimise your web content for search engines?

Let us consider 7 key principles:

1. Keyword research
2. Keyword analysis
3. Link checking
4. Backlink auditing
5. Site speed
6. SERP snippet preview
7. Site auditing

Keyword research: Finding search queries that are highly searched for and generate large amounts of site traffic.

Keyword research generally requires an online tool to find words or phrases that are relevant to what your site offers (for example, Ahrefs keyword generator). By searching for a query, it provides the keyword difficulty (how hard it is to rank in the top 10), search volume (monthly estimate) and when the analytics were last updated.

We advise using long-tail keywords, as they are generally less competitive and an easy way to rank higher in organic search results. Many long-tail keywords have high search volumes with little to no competition, and can provide a significant boost to your site traffic.

Keyword analysis: Analysing how well your site’s keywords are performing by site traffic generated.

If you already have an SEO tool at your disposal, keyword analysis is imperative to ensure your website is always generating the most traffic it can. By using the keyword analysis tool in a tool like Semrush you can see the search volume per month, the traffic % that visited your website for the given keyword and where you rank for a particular keyword.

Using this information, you can keep or remove certain keywords based on their overall performance and the value they bring to your site. Continually keeping up with keyword trends is a great way to stay on top of search engine results and get the most visitors to your website.

Link checking: Ensuring any links on your web pages work as intended.

Making sure links on your website work is an easy way to keep visitors browsing and engaged. If you were browsing a website and clicked on a broken link, how likely would you be to consider it reliable and a good site?

Using a tool like SEO Minion provides an easy way to check links on any page, and group them into different categories based on their behaviour (working, broken, redirect etc.) and highlights them on the page. 

By fixing links with unintended behaviour, you can easily prevent customers from turning away from your website over an issue that requires very little technical competency to fix.

Backlink auditing: Reviewing what websites link to your website, and whether they are a benefit or detriment to your search rankings

Backlink auditing requires the use of a third-party tool like Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool to display a list of domains that link to your website, and a toxicity score which is assigned based on the quality of that website.

A higher toxicity score indicates a worse link, and these poor links are often detrimental to your search rankings as they result in penalties from search engine algorithms. 

By removing toxic links, your website’s “reputation” within search engines will improve and positively affect other website’s evaluations of yours when it comes to link building and sharing your content.

Site speed: Optimising the images and code on your website to decrease its loading time.

If you were browsing a website that took 10 seconds to load, how likely are you to keep using it? Site speed is an important factor in keeping customers interested in browsing your website, and this can be done through optimising areas of the website such as the images or code present on your webpages.

This process can be tedious if you are not experienced in this area, so using a tool like PageSpeed Insights can help you to fix these issues with their intuitive display and explanation of each issue found in your website.

SERP snippet preview: Editing your page title and description to describe what your site offers in a way that Google displays correctly.

While the majority of SEO work is on your website, factoring in how your website is shown in Google is crucial in drawing attention from customers. By including a relevant page title and description which match what your website offers, it makes it clear to customers that you offer what they are looking for and increases your conversion rate (ratio of site visitors to paying visitors).

This can be done using a tool like SerpSIM which shows a preview of how your website shows up in Google’s search results, and it offers to fetch your current preview or to insert your own and see how it would look.

By using SerpSIM, you can easily construct your page titles and descriptions to fit within Google’s character limits and take advantage of all the characters allowed.

Site auditing: Reviewing all pages of your site to find improvements. For example keywords, page content or usability across devices.

Putting together all the factors we have discussed above and more, a site audit is a full-scale analysis of your website along with all the SEO features that can affect your search rankings. 

While this is an overall principle rather than an individual factor to optimise, it is necessary to conduct occasional site audits to make sure every part of your site is working as it should be and is up-to-date with the best SEO practices available.