Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of improving a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal is to attract more organic traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing by providing an excellent user experience and providing visitors with high quality content within a fast, easy to use and accessible website.
Understanding Search Engines
Search engines use algorithms to determine the relevance of web pages in response to a user’s query. These algorithms consider a wide range of factors when determining how to rank pages, such as:
- Content and page structure
- User experience
- Inbound links and social signals
Keyword Research
Keywords are the phrases and terms users type into search engines. An effective SEO strategy starts with researching these keywords. I use a wide range of different tools to determine relevant keywords for each website I optimise. It’s important to review this list of keywords and phrases over time, making adjustments to the SEO strategy as required.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves improving individual pages within a website. The aim is to optimise pages in such a way as to improve their search ranking, resulting in more organic traffic.
On-page SEO includes:
- Improving content quality by sharing relevant and accurate information.
- Writing concise, focussed and keyword-rich titles for each page within a website.
- Writing effective and accurate meta descriptions for each page, including relevant keywords.
- Using appropriate HTML structure, such as a H1 tag containing relevant keywords.
- Developing clear and descriptive URLs that include keywords.
- Adding descriptive ALT tags to all images within a website.
Technical SEO
This aspect of SEO is focussed on technical aspects of your website’s development. It includes things like:
- Improving site speed and page load times.
- Ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly.
- Creating XML sitemaps and making them accessible to search engines. Sitemaps help search engines understand your website’s structure.
- Ensuring your website’s robots.txt file isn’t harming your SEO.
- Helping search engines understand the context of your content by adding Structured Data.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO involves demonstrating your website’s authority and relevance. This is done by improving various ranking factors beyond the limits of your own website. These can include:
- Gaining high-quality back-links from other websites.
- Driving traffic to your website from social platforms and increasing engagement around your content within these platforms.
- Blogging on other websites, which can help you reach a broader audience.
- Acquiring reviews for your website, product or service on platforms such as Google.
User Experience (UX)
Search engines prioritise websites that offer an excellent user experience. Factors which may affect your search ranking include:
- How easy your website is to nagivate.
- Reducing your ‘bounce rate’ and increasing ‘time-on-page’ as these can signal good user experience.
- Content readability, it’s important that your content is easy to read and understand.
Monitoring and Analytics
SEO is an ongoing process. I use tools like Google Search Console, Google Lighthouse and Fathom Analytics to monitor website performance. Tools such as these help me monitor visitor behaviour and traffic statistics too. Regularly updating and improving website content based on these insights is essential to an effective SEO strategy.
Adapting to Algorithm Changes
Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. I stay informed about these updates and adjust my SEO strategies accordingly.
SEO involves technical, creative, and analytical skills. By improving both on-page and off-page elements and by optimising other technical factors to ensure a great user experience I can help your website visibility in search engine results. In turn this will drive more organic search traffic to your website.
Ready to Work Together?
If you’d like to get a better understanding of the search engine optimisations which could be made to your own website, or would like to get some regular SEO support please get in touch using the contact details below.
Alternatively, discover more of the marketing services I offer.