You need to be making efforts to improve your website’s search engine performance. Many website owners often overlook SEO, or maybe don’t even know what it is. If you fit that mould, it’s time you break out of it. Here are 5 SEO essentials every website owner should know.
What is SEO?
SEO, short for “Search Engine Optimization”, is an essential, yet often overlooked aspect of website management. SEO is the process of optimizing your website (or social media) in an effort to show up in more searches. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more, all have certain criteria that needs to be met in order for your website to show up when a user enters a search. Essentially, your goal is to meet the criteria in an effort to persuade these search engines to lead its users to your content.
How Do Search Engines Lead Users to my Content?
Search engines have “crawlers” that scan/read your website content and determine if it is relevant to a users search. When a user enters a search (often a question), the search engine attempts to answer this question by pulling up a list of options. The content is delivered as seen below:
Therefore, your goal should be to give the search engine the answer to that question. The photo above shows a “featured snippet“. If you can answer a users question accurately enough, you may be able to get that coveted snippet. Featured snippets are the holy grail of search ranking positioning 🤤.
1. Write Website Copy as if You’re Answering a Question
In order to better answer your target audience’s questions, you must first understand your audience. This might require you to ask yourself, “What does my audience need/want?”. “What problem does my offering solve for them?”. Think about the questions you often receive, and then make sure those answers within the copy on your website. You may have heard the terms “keyword” or “keyphrase” before. A keyword is a word that is inserted into your website copy that may lead users to your website. As a marketing agency, the word “marketing” is a common keyword you might see throughout our website. The more niche the keyword, the more likely your content will be delivered. A keyphrase is essentially the same thing, except it is an entire sentence (or “phrase”). Keyphrases can be far more effective, because you can make them more unique.
Here’s an example. You’re an Italian restaurant that serves the best fettucine alfredo in town. A valuable keyphrase for you would be “At *restaurant name*, we have the best fettucine alfredo in Toronto.” A hungry user types into Google “Who has the best fettucine alfredo in Toronto?” – and BOOM, your website (hopefully) pops up.
2. Improve the Readability of Your Copy
Is the content on your website easy to read? If you’re a WordPress user, a great plugin called Yoast can help you answer that question. There is a short checklist of things that you should be following to ensure your site content is easy to read. Yoast helps you check those boxes, but we’ll give you the gist. Some things you should be factoring into your content include:
- Keeping sentences under 20 words
- Breaking up copy with headers
- Using less complex words (if possible)
- Understand your audience and their knowledge level
- Limiting passive text
- Using transition words
- Avoid repeating words & more
Yoast can also help you with more technical SEO checks such as keyword distribution, link checks, image optimization and more. By checking all of these things off your list, you are improving your chances of your website appearing in more searches.
3. Add Alt Text and Descriptions to Your Images
On WordPress, alt text, captions and descriptions can be found by opening the images within your library. Alt text was created to describe the contents of an image to help people with visual impairments. So if not for SEO, you’re at least making your site more accessible to people with disabilities. However, filling out alt text, descriptions and captions also helps search engine crawlers better understand your images. As a result, you can manipulate and optimize these descriptions to your advantage. Make sure you are still accurately describing your images, but do your best to work in some keywords and keyphrases. People still use Google images ALL THE TIME. Having images from your site appear on the first page of an image search is a great way to get more traffic to your website.
4. Reduce the Size of your Images
While we’re on the topic of images, let me educate you on another important element of managing your media library. User experience plays a vital role in the overall health and success of your website. Long load times are a huge contributor towards lost traffic. If users are spending short periods of time on your site or leaving after one page view, you are less likely to convert on your goals. Search engines also pick up on this user behaviour. They want people to find the best content possible, and if they think that your site isn’t providing that, they likely won’t push as many people to your website.
I use photoshop to optimize my images via the “save for web function”. However, I understand not everyone has access to Adobe Suite. There are lots of free programs and plugins available, along with a fair share of paid ones. Reducing the dimensions of the photo and cropping out unimportant aspects of the image will also reduce the file size. Just be sure that if you go this route you are not reducing the size to a point that the quality is compromised. I typically advise my clients to keep images under 100KB as much as possible, but the smaller the better. Sometimes it’s not always possible depending on the required dimensions but do the best you can.
5. Analyze and Understand your Analytics
This blog is not going to serve as a tutorial for setting up and understanding your analytics, though that may be a good future blog. The point I’d like to make is that analytics are the ultimate diagnostic and playbook for understanding how you can improve your website’s performance and user experience. We utilize Google Analytics and Google Search Console religiously to monitor our sites. Analytics can help you understand how many people are visiting your site, how much time they are spending on it, what pages they visit most, where they are entering & exiting from, provide information about your demographic, and so much more. Google Search Console can help detect website errors, monitor site performance, and even provide feedback about which keywords and keyphrases that are leading people to your website.
It is important that you educate yourself on these platforms if you plan on using your website as a powerful business tool. You can also outsource this work to professionals if you do not have the time or interest in it. We hear those people at 1707 Creative do a pretty good job 😉.
Want to Learn More About SEO?
We hope these quick tips provided you with a better understanding of what SEO is and how you can use it to your advantage, there is a lot more to learn. If you’d like to talk to an expert about your SEO needs reach out! You can find all of our information on our contact page. We’re currently offering FREE 30 minute consultations to anyone who joins our email list.