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Search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a crucial role in cultivating website traffic and ensuring websites prominently appear in organic search results. SEO is an integral aspect of any digital marketing strategy for all businesses and organisations, as it helps to ensure that your website is being seen by the right people.
So, Repeat Digital are here to help. In this article, we cover some of the most effective changes you can make to your website that will positively impact your SEO in 2022.
Keyword Optimisation
An important aspect of SEO is ensuring your website is keyword optimised. As explained in the Moz Beginner Guide to SEO, SEO is as much about understanding people as it is about understanding search engines themselves, as you have to consider what people will be searching for online.
Ideally, each page of your website should be created around a primary keyword and relevant secondary keywords.
Use tools such as Keyword Planner, AHrefs and Soovle to discover the most effective keywords and identify what people are searching for most frequently. Then, use your findings to optimise your website’s content, titles and meta descriptions by including the most relevant keywords.
Proper keyword research is incredibly important for boosting organic website traffic and ensuring your website will be seen by those who are interested in what you have to offer.
This is a key aspect of on-page SEO; optimising the content on your page to increase the chances of being discovered. By doing so, this helps search engines to understand the material across your website, so it can be paired with relevant search queries.
Improving user experience
Improving user experience is crucial to SEO. If your pages are slow, difficult to navigate or incompatible with certain devices, users will be less inclined to stay and interact with the website. Visitors will most likely abandon websites if the page takes longer than a few seconds to load.
Also, if your speed is too slow, Google will recognise this which will subsequently harm your ranking. To avoid this issue, visit Page Speed Insights to identify the factors affecting your website speed.
For instance, it could be the case that you need to start using better file types, as technology is constantly developing and we need to stay updated. Ideally, you want your page speed at a score of 80/90 upwards on Page Speed Insights. However, this will always vary, so it is important to check the page speed regularly.
Today, people are accessing websites on different devices such a mobile phones and tablets in addition to desktops. Therefore, your website should be accessible and responsive on all devices to enhance user experience and ultimately improve SEO.
Repeat Digital’s very own SEO Account Manager, Barney, has devised an analogy to illustrate this concept using a Bruce Lee quote, which originally refers to the formlessness of the human mind:
“Water has no shape; it becomes whatever it is poured into, whether it be a cup, a bottle, or a teapot. Water can flow or it can crash.”
In essence, much like the fluidity of water, you want your website to be adaptable so that it is able to ‘mould into different shapes’ and work well across all devices.
You should also identify and fix basic technical issues that could potentially affect user experience. For instance, fixing broken links and 404 pages.
Additionally, use clean URLs, titles and meta descriptions containing relevant keywords. A clean URL is one that does not include a mix of letters and numbers. Also, include interlinks throughout your website simply by highlighting keywords in the text and using the shortcut Ctrl + K to direct the user to other pages on your site.
These are small changes you can make that will massively improve user experience, helping your website and overall online presence to appear more credible and trustworthy.
Refresh low-performing pages with new content
As previously mentioned, understanding what people are searching for and the kind of content they hope to come across is a huge aspect of SEO. Your website should include high-quality, engaging and relevant content that is regularly updated.
An effective way to do this is by creating a ‘news’ or ‘blog’ page for your website, where you can regularly post articles sharing updates and information about your business.
Duplicate content is another thing to be wary of. This is content that appears in more than one place. In terms of SEO, duplicate content is incredibly unhelpful. The search engine becomes confused as it doesn’t know which piece of content to prefer and rank in the top results.
Duplicate content is often one of the main reasons for articles not being seen, especially if there are numerous posts. There may be opportunities to rework, combine, canonicalise or delete and redirect old content which can subsequently give traffic an uplift.
Having a site that is linked to other credible websites and domains is like gold dust in the world of SEO. Building connections in this way boosts your domain rating and shows expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E.A.T).
E.A.T is a fairly recent development. It is part of Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines: Google’s criteria for creating a high-quality website that ranks well. Demonstrating E.A.T can boost your position in organic search results as search engines recognise that your website is trusted, recommended and legitimate.
Therefore, it is worth putting time and effort into your content to ensure that it will be considered link-worthy by other websites.