Are you spending hours researching how to get your website to page one of Google? Only for it to make no difference at all?!
I have been doing SEO for over a decade, and in that time I would estimate that 90% of my clients tried SEO themselves before getting in touch with us. Of those clients, most wasted their time or caused long-term problems following bad and old information published online.
If this sounds like you then take a few minutes to read ahead!
It doesn’t matter if your website looks the best, you sell the best products or if you’re the best in your industry. If you use old outdated or just plain lousy SEO techniques, Google will punish you. Pushing your website below page one, or worse… Your website could become penalised, something that WILL cost you thousands in lost revenue if it were to happen not to mention the hard costs of repairing the damage.
SEO and the Pareto Principle
I tend to look at everything I work on with the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) in mind. 20% of the work I do will provide me with 80% of the results. The Pareto principle rings true with SEO over and over again. For example, 20% of work in SEO can get some websites to page two of Google, if not the bottom of page one in some cases!
Figuring out what SEO tasks are within that 20% is where an experienced SEO consultant and website audit comes into action. All SEO companies should be carrying out a review first to figure out what exactly are the main problem areas are, if your SEO company doesn’t conduct an audit then this can be a red flag.
There are a few SEO tasks that come up time and time again these days. These tasks may require a little bit of time and research from your side, or you can get in touch with us!
1. Ensure your website is mobile friendly
In a lot of cases, Edinburgh companies don’t have a website which is mobile friendly. Google in 2015 announced that more searches on Google come from mobiles than computers and laptops. Google also announced there would be an update which saw mobile-friendly websites get an increase in position. As SEO’s we were all given around 12 months to comply before the update came into effect – that update has been in place since 2015.
If you don’t know if your business website is mobile friendly you can check here using Googles own mobile-friendly tool. If you have web design experience then great, crack on – if not then you may want to contact your own web designer or us to look at this as a priority.
2. Improve Website Speed
We all hate waiting around for a website to load and apparently, no one hates it more than good ol’ Mr. Google. The speed of a website plays a factor in SEO, only because it makes sense. If your website loads blisteringly fast and doesn’t have errors, then it will be a joy for your customers to use. Google will also consider you more trustworthy.
Depending on your website you might be able to fix speed problems yourself. For example, if your website is built using WordPress, there are hundreds of plugins that you can use. You do need to ensure you test everything and make sure you read all the documentation on the plugins you install. You don’t want to break the website after all.
There are plenty of website speed testing tools you can use, Google has its own, and another well-known one is Pingdom Tools. Just make sure you don’t make changes to satisfy a tool, as long as the website loads fast and uses caching you should be onto a winner. You don’t need to score 100/100 🙂
3. Consider moving to SSL/HTTPS
In 2014 Google announced that websites utilising an SSL certificate (HTTPS) would receive a ranking boost. Now, this doesn’t mean it will get you from page 5 to page 1, but it does mean it will show Google that you mean business and you want to be taken seriously. I have seen many times before when a website is at the bottom of page one I install an SSL certificate it will climb a few spots within a few weeks.
MOZ has a great post about moving to HTTPS with a checklist to guide you along so you don’t hit any of the banana skins and end up losing rankings in the process. This is something most business owners could take on, it may take a few hours or even days to understand what you need to do fully, but it is well worth it. If you have an SEO company, then be sure to check with them before you go ahead with this change!
4. Checking content meets the required quality
Content is King. This is a motto to live by when you want to get your website to the top of Google. Search engines love content, text, images, videos, you name it, and search engines will be happy to look at it. That being said, your content has to follow specific rules. In this case, we will talk about images and text content – videos, products, reviews, local business data etc. are for a different post!
Images can are easy to optimise by ensuring all images you use are the size you need them to be, sound simple huh? Well, you would be surprised how many times websites have images that are three times bigger than the website shows them to be. All photos need to be cropped to exactly what is required. So, if your gallery shows images at 350px x 400px then upload one that exact size! This helps save on website speed.
Another optimisation task for images is providing relevant Alt tag content. The Alt tag is within the HTML of an image element, this should contain a description of the image using keywords where appropriate.
Now for the main content, simply put make sure you have at least 400 words of unique content. Unique means it’s on that page only, so you can’t copy and paste text from other pages or websites. This is called Duplicate content and its the one thing that can make or break a website. Neil Patel is a well-known SEO who put together a great guide to writing content with both customers and search engines in mind – I highly suggest you give this a read before writing content for your website.
Is that it?!
These 4 SEO tasks can make a massive difference, with task 4 being the most important for most businesses. You should also keep in mind that Google has hundreds of different factors it looks at when deciding if your website should be page one or not.
If you would like to discuss how Teckle Digital SEO Agency can be your SEO company and how exactly we can help get your website to the top of Google then fill in the form below! Our SEO packages start from £200 and provide an excellent return with 90% of our clients being page one on Google for their chosen keywords within 3 to 6 months! Internet marketing, like SEO, does take time so be sure that your business has enough business before investing in an SEO company. The worst thing you can do is stop your internet marketing due to budget constraints.