Technical SEO and crawlability – remove any blockers!
Let’s just start by saying that if Google can’t crawl your website, then your website is unlikely to be indexed in the Google search engine. So ensure no blockers are in place. This is commonly known as being a key factor in Technical SEO. You may also need to look at code quality using the W3C validator tool and make any amendments. This may be challenging when using a content management system (CMS) with lots of plugins installed.
Content is king and queen! Everyone says Google changes their mind constantly and SEOs need to keep up but it’s always been about content! Get this right and most of the battle is already won! Start building quality content sooner rather than later and get ahead of the competition!
Next you need to have enough quality content in order to rank well in search engines. Sure we’ve seen a few websites with just a few pages but lots of quality backlinks, which have done quite well in search engines. But generally, websites with more quality content will do better, as they tend to serve website visitors a lot better. Having said that, the web page quality much be quality. Think quality over quantity and avoid web pages with ‘thin’ content. The key to quality content is to make it compelling and, essentially, answer searchers’ queries. The ultimate aim should be to make your website a complete resource of information, an authority site, updated as new information appears and sell the founder/CEO/front person behind the company, as a thought leader in their industry.
Keyword Research and Competition Research are absolutely vital!
A key way of ensuring you’ll meeting you requirements of visitors is to do your keyword research. This is the absolute cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy. SEO shouldn’t be guess work, although taking a chance and being innovative to test ideas is always a good idea. At the very minimum though, you’ll want to at least match your competitors. And keyword research as well as competitor research are key factors in making this happen. Your content needs to be ‘shareworthy’ so others will naturally link to it. This makes backlink building and outreach a lot easier than if your content is forgettable or run-of-the-mill. Dare to be different and be a leader rather than a follower, in addition to just striving to present information on your website in a more engaging way than others.
User Experience – fewer clicks, easy to find content, clear and concise navigation, a search function on your website!
Once your content is covered (and remember you need to keep updating this to keep it fresh and current, and add new content on a regular basis), you need to ensure that your content can be found easily. This is known as usability or user experience. He fewer clicks to find content, the better. Also, ensure that your web pages load quickly, and you have a search function on your website as well as fantastic information architecture backed up by a usable menu.
Click Through Rates (CTR) – engage your users and entice them to click through to your web pages from search engine results pages (SERPs)!
Once your content is listing in search results you want to improve click through rates (CTR) by optimising your places in the search results and making them really stand out. Think about optimising your title, meta description and URL and introducing rich snippets and schema markup.
