Introduction to SEO Quick Wins
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a long-term process, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some SEO quick wins you can implement right now to boost your search engine rankings. This post will review some easy changes you can make to your website in less than 5 minutes for increased SEO traffic and conversions.
We’ve previously talked about why your website might not be ranking so this is the next step in the process – what you can do to rank better.
Let’s get started!
Fix your page speed
Nobody likes a page that loads slowly. There are free tools, such as the ones below, that will tell you what is causing your page to load slowly and give you ideas on how to fix things. Ensuring your site loads quickly over both a wired (desktop) connection as well as a mobile (wireless) connection has become a ranking factor for Google.
- GT Metrix
- PageSpeed Insights
- Page Speed Test – This tests multiple pages at once which can be a real time saver!
Many sites score badly for performance and the simplest way to improve this is to install a caching plugin to speed up page loading. Check to see if your hosting provider offers this service or, as an alternative, you can add one of many caching plugins yourself. About 5 minutes of work and your site could be running much faster than before!
Optimise Title Tags
One of the most crucial on-page SEO elements is the title tag. This is what people see in the search results and is what you need to optimise to stand out and get people to click.
The points below should guide you in setting up your title tags.
- They should be unique and descriptive.
- They should be between 55 and 60 characters (spaces included).
- They should be in sentence case with no punctuation or capitalization at the start or end unless you’re using an initialism (such as “W3C”) or acronym that looks weird otherwise (like “HTML”).
- They should be relevant to the page—don’t use your company’s slogan as a title tag for a product landing page!
- Don’t keyword stuff. This is when you repeat words hoping that Google will give you extra credit for using the word repeatedly. Hint: they won’t! If anything, you’re more likely to get a penalty and lose ranking!
Add Structured Data Markup.
Structured data is code that sits behind the scenes to tell Google exactly what the page is about. Without structured data, you’re left with Google having to read your page and interpret what it finds. With structured data, you can explicitly state what the page is about along with extensive details on your company, products, services and more.
Structure data might not be the holy grail of SEO, but it’s certainly extremely valuable to put on your website.
Having said that, it’s not as easy as some of the other steps, but there are tools to help with this.
- Why it matters: Structured data markup helps search engines better understand the content of your pages, which means they can serve up more accurate search results. Here’s an example, if you have a page that lists the opening times for your business and tags those times with structured data. (e.g., using HTML5 microdata), then a user searching for “events near me” will be able to see your hours in their search results without clicking through to your page.
- How to do it: To implement structured data on your site, you’ll need to use a structured data markup language—the current standard is Schema.org—and link that code up with Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool. You’ll also need SEO software that supports Schema tagging (such as Yoast or Rank Math), so you can input the appropriate information correctly into each section on each page on your site.
Optimize your images
Alt text displays when an image isn’t visible for any reason, like if it’s not loaded correctly or someone has turned off images in their browser.
You should always include alt text on all your images. This allows visitors using screen readers to access your content without relying on the image alone. It also ensures that search engines can still identify what the image is about when they crawl through your website and read its content.
The title tag describes a page’s content with words in search results and helps users quickly understand what they will get on each page of your site (in theory). Remember to choose phrases that accurately describe what people will find there—it makes it easier for people who don’t know every single one of your pages well!
Optimize pages for featured snippets
A featured snippet is a box that appears at the top of Google search results when someone searches for something. The content inside it may appear to come from your site, but it’s not necessarily there because you wrote or published it. Instead, Google has identified what they think are the most relevant answer(s) to the question posed in the query and shown them. As a result, highlight their understanding of your page title/URL (and potentially even your body text).
How do I optimize my pages for featured snippets?
For this to work well for you, make sure:
- Your meta description tags are correctly written so they can be displayed as snippets in search results (which will help increase click-through rates). If they’re too long or difficult to parse into multiple lines without losing meaning or readability, then consider splitting them up into separate ones that each cover one aspect at a time (e.g., literary quotes vs book titles vs author names).
- Your page titles include relevant keywords that match what people might type into Google when looking for similar topics. So, if someone were searching “woodworking tools”, then including those keywords would help ensure better rankings by providing more context around what users might want from an article like this before digging deeper into its content.
The use of keywords
Keywords are a great way to increase your rankings, but only if you use them effectively. When it comes to SEO, there are a lot of ways to use keywords.
Page headings are often overlooked by content marketers who are more interested in writing compelling text, but it can be one of the best ways to increase search engine rankings for your site. You can also use keywords as subheadings throughout the body of your article to help break up blocks of text and make it easier for readers to scan through what you’ve written without losing meaning or readability.
Update your old posts with new information.
Republish them on new pages, republish them on new topics, republish them as posts about different things (like a piece of content related to your business but not the same), or even republish old posts as a post about something unrelated.
For example, if you do a lot of dental work and write an article on how to brush your teeth properly, you could republish that article under “personal care” instead of “dental care” once it gets more readership. This will help your SEO efforts because Google sees these pieces as separate pieces of content, which means they get indexed separately and thus help increase your SERPs ranking for both types of searches (brushing teeth vs dental care).
Another option is tagging each post differently so people searching for either or both terms can easily find it in their search results when looking up those two keywords separately (elevator company vs elevator repair company).
Add internal links between pages
While not as important as a backlink from another site, internal links help Google to understand the structure of your site and what are the important pages. By adding internal links between pages, you can, in some cases, dramatically boost the ranking of key pages on your site.
- Add links to new pages: If you’re creating a new page on your site, ensure that it has a link or two pointing back to the homepage and other important content.
- Add links to old pages: older content often gets overlooked when it comes time for internal linking, but it should not be forgotten! Even if the page isn’t getting traffic now (or ever), adding some internal links will help keep your site fresh and relevant in Google’s eyes.
- Add links to non-linked pages: If there are pages on your website that aren’t currently linked anywhere else, they could be ripe with opportunity. Give them some love by creating internal links between these orphaned areas of your site and each other.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. With these simple steps, you can improve your search engine optimization and drive more traffic to your website. And as you continue to make changes and monitor their impact, you’ll better understand how Google works and how it affects your business. You’ll be well on the way improving your website’s search engine optimisation.
If you’d like help to get your website ranking better and generating more clients, make time to catch up for a coffee and a chat to see how we can help.