How to optimise your website content for SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn’t a mystery – it doesn’t require a lot of shadowboxing or the ability to deceive Google into thinking that you’ve got the right content in your site. It’s actually much more straightforward than that. If you want to achieve consistent organic search traffic these are some of our tips on how to do it.

Start with the basics

If you want your content to be relevant then start by creating it around a searchable phrase. To do this effectively you need to know what people are searching for when it comes to your sector and there are lots of tools to help you do this. For example, you can search a keyword explorer site or look at the terms that your competitor is ranking for. Whatever the platform you use for this look out for the “keyword difficulty” metric – the lower this is, the better.

Use your keywords once you have them

When you’re confident about the right keywords to use make sure that you place them prominently. This is far more important than keyword density (which is largely redundant today) and will also instantly show a user why they’ve landed on this page with the term that they searched for. Key locations include the page URL and title, image alt text, subheadings in the content and also in the first paragraph.

Investigate semantic analysis

The basics of semantic analysis involve grouping each query into underlying and related concepts and including these in the content. Google has evolved to become much smarter with respect to understanding what users are trying to find with search queries and semantic analysis can help you to ensure that your content hits the right notes. There are lots of tools that can help with those so that your content is much more optimised, whether you write directly into them or use them to analyse existing content.

Include a range of content formats

Text-only is today very limiting and Google has content expectations that go far beyond this. That’s why it’s become increasingly important to include a range of content formats, such as images and videos. If you start including more video, for example, you’re likely to get more exposure on search engine result pages and achieve improved on-page engagement.

Monitor your progress

There are lots of different tools available to monitor how you’re doing in SEO terms. How does your organic traffic shift with the changes that you make? Google’s own Search Console is one of the most useful as it will help to identify which queries are bringing traffic to your site.

Backlinks still matter

Off-site signals – backlinks – are still used by Google to help establish authority for your site so they are still worth nurturing where possible.

With so many more people currently online and working from home now is the ideal time to take a moment to ensure that the content you’re posting has been fully and effectively optimised for SEO.

Whether you’re starting from scratch and want to optimize your new website, or want to get your current website performing better for SEO, get in touch with our team today on 020 7100 0726 to find out more about how we can help.