The goal of having an online website is to become visible to your desired audience. More visibility means more impressions, however, being found in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) means nothing if you are on the second page or users are having a terrible experience on your website. This is where SEO features. Optimising these elements can help you with visibility, improved rankings and user experience.
1. Crawlability & Indexability
No amount of SEO can help you if your website is not found in SERPs. A simple way to find out if you are found in SERPs is a search in Google SERPs: site:https://www.yourwebsite.com . According to Google there are various reasons that could lead to your website not being indexed or missed by search engines such as:
· The site isn’t well connected from other sites on the web
· You’ve just launched a new site and Google hasn’t had time to crawl it yet
· The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively
· Your policy blocks Google from crawling the site
This is where your Robots.txt file and XML sitemap come into play. An XML Sitemap tells search engines which pages to index and a Robots.txt file tells them which ones not to index.
2. Mobile-Friendliness
With Google’s aggressive mobile-first approach, it is important that your user is able to access your website via desktop, mobile, tablet and any other device that can connect to the internet. That’s why a responsive website design is best practice. You can get your mobile report from Google Search Console or you can use other mobile friendliness testing tools.
3. Page Load Speed & Core Web Vitals (CWV)
Page load speed is a very important ranking factor. Google rolled out “slow” tags that appear in mobile SERPs for websites that are slow, that is why you need a great load speed. Core Web Vitals are more focused on the user experience on your website. The top three CWVs being Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift. Optimising all three CWVs and load speed will give your users great experience on your website. PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix are some tools to test your load speed and Core Web Vitals, they also provide some recommendations on how to improve.
4. Keywords & Content Optimization
Keywords are one of the most important elements in SEO to ensure success in SERPs. They help search engines determine what a piece of content is about and whether it is relevant to a specific topic. Keyword research will always be an important part of your SEO strategy. You can use keywords in different elements on your website such as your URLs, metadata, head-ing tags and content. There are a few tools you can use for keyword research like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Google Search Console and Semrush to name a few.
5. Internal & External Linking
Links are seen as signs of a relevant, healthy and authoritative website. That is why you need to have a link strategy to help your SEO efforts.There are internal and external links. Internal links refer to all links on your website that link to pages within your site while external links are hyperlinks pointing from one domain to another. Links help crawlers find your website and can give you visibility in SERPs. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important. Finally, your website’s visibility is one of the most important things to look out for in ensuring that your ranking in SERPs. Your audience needs to find you and in order for that to happen, you need to optimise your website and follow SEO best practice Visit our blog for SEO tips and digital marketing related news and insights. If you’d like to improve your SEO then contact us today.