Search Engine Optimisation
It's essential to optimise your website so it ranks well on Google and is displayed high on search results pages for your keywords.
What is SEO?
You may have a beautiful website, designed by a talented web designer. But can people find it? If you're not in the first page or two of search results, chances are your traffic will be very low. And that means your website is not doing its most important job: driving customers to your business.
This is where SEO comes to the rescue. Search engine optimisation is the process of adding code into your website to achieve high ranking by search engines. This coding works as signposting for search engines using their preferred language. The result? Search engines do a better job at serving up the correct content on your website higher in their search results to people searching for that information. Each individual page is optimised using keywords, meta tags and schema markup.
The process is not quick, but it's essential for gaining high rankings and it's a speciality of Tea Break Consulting.
First things first
Let's begin by assuming your website is mobile responsive. Google offers a free online tool where you can check just by entering your URL. If it's not, you'll need to fix that first so your site isn't penalised by search engines.
SEO tools
There are many free tools available to help you get up to speed. For finding the highest ranking keywords for specific pages, I use Semrush. But any keyword ranking tool should allow you to do this - just Google keyword ranking tool and you'll find many options.
I also like to use the free Monster Insights Headline Analyzer to develop a high ranking headline using my keywords.
If your site is designed using WordPress, you can install the Yoast SEO plugin, which provides an easy and very comprehensive guide to getting your SEO right for each page including:
- Text length
- Headline length
- Keyword usage
- Meta description length
- Readability analysis
It also automatically includes the correct schema markup. If you're using a different CMS, you can create your schema markup manually using a free online form. There are many available, but I like to use the Merkle Schema Markup Generatior,
If your page was published and crawled by Google before you added your SEO, you will need to resubmit it to Google Search Console.
Measuring results
There are multiple ways you can measure results. But by far the best is by using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. If you don't already have this set up for your website, Tea Break Consulting can do that for you.
The important thing to remember about websites is that they are ever-evolving. All of the content, including the SEO, can be modified or improved at any point. As your business evolves, so too should your SEO. With any major changes in your business goals, it's important to update headlines, keywords and meta tags so you rank for your new messaging in search engines.
