SEO stands for search engine optimisation and as the name suggests, involves optimising a page for search engines. It is a crucial marketing activity to make sure your brand is organically visible to your target audience. In order to implement SEO effectively, it is important to meet the criteria of search engine ranking factors.
We have broken down our SEO activity into different categories to share with you, what we think the most important elements are. There is a lot that goes into SEO, but there are some key activities that every online business should be doing if they want to be competitive. This includes keyword research, technical SEO, on page SEO and off page SEO.
Keyword SEO checklist:
- Identify competitors
- Complete keyword research
- Conduct keyword gap analysis
- Target keywords, prioritising search volume and difficulty
- Identify question keywords, answer these in FAQs
Keyword research is crucial in understanding what your target audience is searching for. This way you can identify which words you want to target. If you want to increase your chances of higher rankings, it’s a good idea to identify keyword missed opportunities from your competitors. By targeting these keywords you have less competition and a better chance of ranking better in search results, this is a great way to improve the visibility of your business.
Technical SEO checklist:
- Inspect URL in Google Search Console
- Make sure your website is mobile friendly
- Identify and fix any site crawl errors
- Have a fast load speed
- Fix any broken links
- Add schema markup
Next, we recommend ensuring your website is up to scratch when it comes to technical SEO. Essentially, technical SEO ensures your website is easy to navigate and free from underlying issues that may make it penalised by search engines when it comes to ranking results. Technical SEO is something that you may need to get help with as it is not as easy to understand or do as other elements of SEO.
On page SEO:
- Write high quality content that is relevant and useful to the target audience
- Find and fix and missing title tags or meta descriptions
- Ensure content targets keywords
- Optimise images for SEO
- Update old content to make it more relevant
- Make sure content is readable
- Enhance user experience
On page SEO is crucial in order to achieve well in search results. It involves a combination of activities to get the best results. Firstly, with on page content, it needs to be perceived as useful to the reader by the search engine and the user. This means writing high quality, compelling content that users are searching for but that is also SEO friendly. This is because search engines take user experience into account in their ranking factors.
Off page SEO:
- Build backlinks
- Analyse competitor link profile
- Steal competitors broken links
- Turn unlinked mentions into links
Off Page SEO is more complicated and requires more time and effort than on page SEO. Building backlinks is not an easy task by any means, and building links from good quality sources with a good domain ranking is even harder. It requires a lot of research and the ability to create high quality, shareworthy content.
Next steps…
Your website may cover many of these points already, but if it doesn’t, don’t worry, that’s where we come in. There are many websites with missed opportunities to improve SEO, and we are confident that we will find some best practise areas with room for improvement. With the help of Our Digital marketing agency, your website could become more visible to their target audience in search engine results through SEO.
We also understand that many of these SEO best practises may be completely alien to you. If you don’t know where to start, Our Digital Team can help. We work as an extension of your inhouse team to share our SEO knowledge and skillset to make your business eventually self reliant when it comes to SEO.