Your coffee break can be a good source of downtime, but it can also be a super-charged optimisation time-slot. Even if you pick one coffee break per week to action some of our top tips, you can help your website rise up the rankings! Here’s our top 5 SEO Fixes you can action in your coffee break.
Ok, so why do website still matter? Are we all just using Facebook now? Here’s some stats to help you out…
- 97% of Internet Users search for Businesses online
- 61% of local searches result in a phone call to a business
- 9 out of 10 people will call or visit a business they find online
- Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website
SEO Fix 1 – Fix Errors
The biggest zap to your search engine rankings positions (SERPs) is your website being broken, out-of-date or full of errors. This is an opportunity to check how your website is performing. Open your website and start clicking around, is anything throwing up an error like “404” or “503”? There’s are special codes that tell us what’s wrong with the website. It might be as simple as a spelling error in the website link when you or your web team typed it in – edit the page and BINGO you’ll stop that error effecting your rankings.
A free tool we recommend is SEO Spider by Screaming Frog – https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
SEO Fix 2 – Keyphrases
Make sure what words and phrases you are using on your website marry up with what your idea potential clients are actually typing in the search box. This can be the biggest factor in low traffic numbers – if people can’t find you with what they think you do, or sell, you need to update your website to reflect what they are thinking!
Free tools we recommend are Google’s bottom of the search listing page called an LSI – latent semantic indexing, SEMRush and LSIGraph.
We love using KeywordKeg here at DigiEnable, but sadly it no longer seems to have a free version!
Also, a nod to asking your existing clients or customers what they would type in to find you – if your idea clients picks particular phrases, go with those! They will no doubt bring similar types of clients to your website.
SEO Fix 3 – Content (yes, it’s still KING!)
Getting more content, good quality and regularly will help increase your rankings. This could be in the form of a traditional blog, or could be you want to share news updates about your products and/or services, or you want a section simply called “updates”, however you style it, good content is not only helpful for your website visito
rs to learn more about you, but is also something you can easily share on other online platforms like social media, to prove your knowledgeable in your field.
SEO Fix 4 – Images
Long gone are the days now, that you will take a photo off your phone and upload it to your website straight away (nod with me please!). If you rename a file before uploading the image you can add your chosen keywords or phrases into it, then you can go ahead and upload it.
Then you’ll see in this screenshot we also add in keywords or phrases to the Alternative Text, sometimes called an Alt Tag or Alt Text – this is so people with visual impairments can use a screen reader to read out your website, and when it gets to a picture, read out the alternative words to the image. So this is not only great for your readers, but it’ll also let Google know you’re a good considerate website to push up those rankings ahead of your competitors that aren’t being so helpful!
SEO Fix 5 – Backlinks
Backlinks in simple terms, mean links from other people’s websites back to yours. You want as many links as possible from highly reputable websites – if you can get a link from a .gov or .nhs site, you’ve scored big on the rankings front. All good quality website will help you rank better and higher.
You could also offer to swap links with your fellow business friends or colleague; if you’re part of a business network you might have the opportunity to add your website to an online profile’ or even offer to guest blog for someone in a return for a website link.
Also bear in mind, you want these backlinks to point to an internal page rather than your homepage; and if possible have the clickable link as a word or anchor text rather than the user seeing the http… etc. – this will help gives some extra power to that keyphrase.
And 3 more bonus tips for you…
Make sure your website has an SSL certificate – the padlock that comes up on your address bar – Google says it will no longer rank unsecure websites
Be Mobile Ready – if your website is not mobile compatible or mobile responsive, Google now say they will not rank your website in the mobile version of search!
Rich snippets and Schema- some extra code you can add into your website to push optimised content into Google’s search feed
With these top tips you can help increase your “on-site” and “off-site” performance and help you climb up the rankings.
Need More Help?
So if you have any quick questions you can’t find the answer to, give us an email and we’ll always try and help you out with some answers and links (we are happy to do this for free, but a fair usage policy applies).
If you’d like a more in-depth and bespoke online training session for you or your teams, contact us for more information on how our online training sessions and consultations can help.