Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a long term investment. A large number of organisations are misled to believe that a good SEO agency can guarantee them real estate within the top ten results in searches. As a growing business, you may be somewhat excited by this prospect, however, it’s not possible. On the other hand, by following SEO best practices, focusing on improving user experience and not attempting to fool ‘the algorithm’, we can maximise the chances of being on page one more often. This is where a clear SEO strategy will give direction and support the growth of your business. But, what are the key elements for a solid SEO strategy? In this post we explore the main points you need to include in your SEO strategy.
Key SEO Element #1: Regular Technical SEO Audits
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is the process of evaluating a website’s health in terms of its ability to be visible in searches and user experience. An SEO audit should be conducted regularly to ensure that your website doesn’t acquire any unintended issues. These problems can sometimes be caused by human error, and others by conflicts in code and scripts. Once you have had your website crawled (this is when your web pages are scanned), you will be able to analyse the results of that crawl, and generate a plan of action to tidy up any errors.
What are the benefits of an SEO audit?
As mentioned above, an SEO audit will help highlight any errors that may be impacting your website’s performance, and thus your organic ranking in search engines. Some auditing tools, like SEM Rush present website errors in a clean, clear way. Other tools, like Screaming Frog require a little more experience to decipher.
How do I do an SEO audit?
The easiest way to run an audit on your website is by using a website crawling tool. There are a number of free tools you can use, for example, ahrefs allows you to create a free account and run some audits, however for full usability, you will need to create a paid account. If you are interested in a free SEO audit on your website, head to our free SEO audit request page today and complete the form to get in touch.
You can continue reading about SEO strategy in our post, SEO – a powerful form of marketing.
Key SEO Element #2: A Tracked Keyword Strategy
What is a keyword strategy?
Although you can see how your domain is performing as a whole in Google Search Console , it’s important for you to take a more granular approach, and see exactly how your website is performing for certain keywords. These keywords should be defined and implemented in a website keyword tracking tool to form your strategy . These keywords should be specific to your target audience and relevant to your overall business goals.
What are the benefits of having a keyword strategy?
The benefit of having a tracked keyword strategy is that you can see exactly how well your website is performing in terms of search visibility for set keywords. If your website is not performing well for a desired search term, this illustrates the areas that you will need to audit in order to improve or begin ranking for this search term. It’s important when devising a keyword strategy to consider search volumes and keyword difficulty. Just using high volume, high competition keywords will mean you rarely see or acquire insights to help you work towards the more popular search terms. Some tools like Google’s Keyword Planner use the terminology of ‘Competition’ in a scale of low, medium and high, whereas SEM Rush’s keyword overview tool uses a scale of 0-100, with 0 being low competition and 100 being high competition.
How do I devise a keyword strategy?
Review your website, business and product offering. What do you want to appear for? For example, if you are an industrial fan manufacturer, appearing for a search like ‘fan’ is irrelevant as the intent for this search is likely to be irrelevant, however, appearing for searches like ‘warehouse ventilation system’ would be far more relevant and acquire more genuine leads. You can find out more about lead generation strategies in our post, 4 ways to generate leads.
Key SEO Element #3: Website Tracking
What is website tracking?
Website tracking, what a controversial subject. I’m sure you’ve heard or even been part of discussions over GDPR. Essentially, website tracking is a code or script you implement on your website to allow you to determine how well your website is performing and how users are interacting with your web pages. On most websites, in order for tracking codes to work properly, users need to accept cookies. Many internet users fear cookies, but why? This is much a lack of understanding about what they are and how you can use them to understand the way they are interacting with your website. Having this knowledge just means you can work to improve the information and experience we are delivering online.
Some of the most popular website tracking tools are Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster tools.
What are the benefits of having website tracking?
By having analytics tracking configured on your website, you are able to see how users are interacting with your website. For example, which pages have had the most visits, what actions users are taking and how long they are visiting for (to name a few). Other reports within analytics allow you to see what devices have been used to view your website, as well as insights on the demographics of website users. These are all great tools to help you determine your main audience.
How do I set up tracking on my website?
Setting up analytics tracking can either be easy or difficult. It totally depends on the content management system (CMS) that runs your website. Some CMS allow you to implement tracking codes using a plugin, whereas others require you to insert a script within the main code of your website. If you need any help or support with configuring analytics tracking on your website, the SEO team will be happy to assist you.
Key SEO Element #4: Content Strategy
What is a content strategy?
This is a heavily debated topic within the SEO industry, however, content is not evergreen. As times change, environments change too. That’s why it’s important to update old content and also introduce fresh, new content for your users to indulge in. For this reason, a content strategy will allow you to adopt a strategic approach to new content creation. This can be laid out on a calendar and tackle topics which relate to your audience at a specific time of the year.
What are the benefits of having a content strategy?
By having a content strategy, you will ensure that your business and website will be found for certain queries in the moments that matter. This helps to maximise leads and thus conversions for your organisation. Provided you write and publish specific, relevant and targeted content for your website, both your ranking and SEO performance will be enhanced.
How do I devise a content strategy?
A content strategy should sit alongside a keyword strategy and align with your brand voice. Take a look at how well your website is performing for your tracked keywords, review upcoming industry events or holidays, and consider trending searches. What can you write about now which will be topical at the time? For example, if you’re a manufacturer of consumer tech products and want to rank for something like ‘best DSLR camera’ during December, you may want to publish a post like ‘the best DSLR camera to buy as a Christmas gift’ during September. Take a look at our post for more tips on content writing.
Remember, with SEO, it takes time for content to rank, so if you publish new content that you want to rank tomorrow, the chances of that content being found are slim to none. Always plan to publish seasonal content 2-3 months in advance (where possible).
Key SEO Element #5: Website Usability
What is meant by website usability?
Website usability is possibly one of the most important factors. At a time of mobile first indexing (this refers to search engines crawling and indexing the mobile version of your website over desktop). Web designers and SEO managers alike spend hours at their desks finessing the experience on their desktop websites, and fail to consider how that might appear on a mobile device. Nowadays, on average, 54% of all web traffic is on mobile devices.
What are the benefits of having a responsive website?
Having a responsive website means you will not be limiting the number of users you can attract to your website. As search engines consider mobile experience over desktop, it’s crucial that you work to improve user experience, as well as to make all calls to action prominent. If calls to action are not prominent, on mobile devices, you will be greatly limiting your ability to acquire new leads, which can be detrimental to the growth of your business.
How do I check if I have a responsive website?
The easiest and most straightforward way to view the mobile version of your website is by using your browsers dev tools. In Chrome or Firefox, do the following:
- Navigate to your website
- Right-click anywhere on the page
- From the popup, select Inspect.
- You will then see a little toggle icon in the dev tools panel, which allows you to switch between mobile, table and desktop modes (image below).
If you find you are not happy with the appearance of your website on mobile, get in touch with the web development team at Digital Glue today, who will be able to advise you on the best way to improve your website user experience.
To conclude, there are a number of crucial key elements to an SEO strategy. It’s important that you consider and implement all of these within your plan in order to maximise the performance of your website, and thus reinforce the positive growth of your business.
