Optimising your website for search engines can make or break your business. Get it right, and you could be seeing a stream of high-intent leads landing on your website every month. Get it wrong, and you could be relegated to the bottom of search results and forced to pay for all of your website traffic.
The first thing you need to understand is that the SEO industry is always changing. Search algorithms are updated daily, with a few named updates per year. This means that an SEO needs to be on top of these updates and responsive to change. It wasn’t long ago that keyword stuffing was a viable – if spammy – way to boost your website rankings. But times change, and SEOs must be able to keep up with this.
If you have the capacity to hire SEO expert help, then you can start to build a long-term strategy that will get results. But what if you want immediate results? In this guide, we’ll outline some of the steps you can take right now that will help to boost your search engine rankings today.
Speed up your website
A fast website is non-negotiable by today’s standards. If your website is slow to load, users won’t stick around, particularly if they are using a mobile device. This means that your bounce rate will increase and Google will take this as a sign that your website isn’t very good.
If you want to get around this issue, you need to speed up your website. Some of the simplest ways you can speed up a website are to compress your images and minify your website files. If you run your site on WordPress, there are plugins available to do this for you.
Set up Google Search Console
Google Search Console gives you insight into the way users see your website before they even click on it. It will also show you how Google crawls your site and any errors that might crop up. It’s also where you’ll find out if you’ve been given a manual action webspam penalty. This can happen if your site is guilty of spammy SEO techniques. Setting up Google Search Console and keeping an eye on the data will help you to understand how Google and users see your website.
Make sure you have a sitemap
A sitemap used to be something that website administrators would share with their visitors. Now, it’s more often used to tell search engines what to look at and where to find it. If your site doesn’t have a sitemap, then search engines will have to rely on your internal link strategy to crawl your website. This can result in missed pages and a misunderstanding of which pages on your website as the most important.
Check your meta titles and descriptions
The meta titles and descriptions on your website serve a number of purposes. To start with, they tell search engines what the page is about. This can help to bring context to the crawling process. They also give website visitors a preview of what they can expect.
On the search engine results page, users will decide which result to click on based on the meta title and description. While these might occasionally be auto-generated by Google, you can also specify your own. Make sure every page and blog on your website has an accurate and up-to-date meta title and description that isn’t too short or too long.
Update your blog
Your blog is not just a place to share company updates. It can also be a powerful SEO tool. Updating your blog is a great way to let search engines know that your site is regularly updated and this will encourage the crawl bots to regularly check your site. Updating your blog can also allow you to target longtail keywords that could help to bring in high-intent traffic.
Write a guest post
Alongside updating your own blog, you should think about writing for other websites. One of the biggest perks of guest posting is that you will get a link back to your own website. This helps to show Google and other search engines that your website is trustworthy and authoritative.
Share your site to social media
When you hit publish on your blog posts, you shouldn’t just let them sit there unnoticed. Amplify the reach of your blogs by sharing them on social media. This is a really quick and simple way to increase the number of links going to your website.
Revisit your keyword research
Keyword research might be something that you do when you first build your website and then forget about forever. This is the wrong approach. You should revisit your keyword research regularly to see how your keywords are performing and if there are any new opportunities you need to consider.