10 easy ways to improve SEO (and why you should do them today)

Digital marketing can be a minefield – new acronyms seem to pop up every day! That’s why we want to explain the ways that you can improve your SEO.

This includes what it is and the ways that you can improve your SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation. Basically, this is a checklist that allows search engines such as Google to look at your website and see if it is legit or not. From there, they can rank the most trustworthy sites on the first pages.

Why is it important? 

SEO is vital because sites such as Google help people discover your website and products! Ideally, you want your site to be on the first page of Google, as people are more likely to click on the first results that they find.

Having great SEO is particularly vital for small businesses, because it is a long-term strategy that will allow you to keep up with competitors, even if their company is larger. 

Our top 10 tips to improve your SEO: 

But how can you improve your website’s SEO? Here are some ideas:

1. Look at what you have already – look at what’s already on your website. Are any of your links broken? Do you have a page full of old information? Quickly fix these problems, and check that each page has more than 200 words of content. 
2. Examine load times – the first three seconds are the most important when it comes to your website. If it doesn’t load quickly, potential customers are more likely to leave and go to a competitor’s site instead!
3. Optimise images – a great way to improve load time is by reducing your image sizes. Make sure that every image has a description, as this will help search engines categorise them.
4. Use outbound links – outbound links are simply links to other people’s websites. If you link to a trustworthy site, search engines are more likely to think that your website is trustworthy, too. 
5. Use internal links – similarly, you should link to other pages inside your website. This lets Google and other sites know that your pages are relevant to each other.
6. Have a blog – blogs are great for SEO, because they can target questions relevant to your main site. For example, if you sell coffee, you can have a blog titled ‘best way to brew coffee’. That way you can target keywords other than just ‘coffee’. 
7. Use keywords – speaking of keywords, these are basically the words that people will search in Google. They can be products (‘cat toys’), questions (e.g. ‘what’s the best cat toy?’), very specific searches (‘cat toy shops in London’), and a lot more. You can read more about keywords here!
8. Use meta descriptions – meta descriptions are the small paragraph that appears below a page’s title in search results. They describe what the reader will find on that page. Make sure that your meta descriptions include your keywords, and try to make them interesting! 
9. Check your site is mobile-friendly – more people use search engines on their phones than on their computers. You need to make sure that your website looks good and performs well on mobile. Google has a useful site that will help you do just that. 
10. Set up analytics – finally, make sure that you’re tracking your analytics. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to compare the number of visitors to your website before and after you improve your SEO.

By using these tips, your website will have a much better chance of reaching that coveted first page of Google. 

If you need any more advice on how to improve your SEO, or would like to use our services, feel free to contact us. We’re more than happy to help out!