Getting started with SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a complex process, but that isn’t an excuse to neglect it. One reason to employ this clever marketing tactic is that it usually costs little more than your time to implement, while giving you sizeable returns. Another is that it’s simple to do – once you know how.

These three simple practices will help you to get started with effective SEO for your business.

1. Relevant keywords

Arguably the most important element of SEO, keywords are the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines.

Include keywords that are relevant to both your business and what searchers are looking for (i.e. their search intent). Having content that incorporates these search terms will increase your website’s chances of being seen by searchers who are looking for the goods or services you offer.

Any good SEO strategy starts with solid keyword research, which will help you to determine which search queries to target. This, in turn, will determine the type and amount of traffic you attract.

Unfortunately, without the right keywords, you won’t be optimising for the right things and even high traffic volumes are unlikely to result in leads or conversions.

Once you’ve found relevant keywords that apply to your business, you can start to create website copy that includes these terms.

This might involve working one or two words into sentences, or including longer phrases made up of several terms (long tail keywords). Whichever you choose to target, be sure to incorporate these keywords into your copy in a natural way.

There are a couple of on-page areas – other than your body copy – where you can include keywords to help search engines figure out what your content is about:

Title tags: This is the title of your web page and is usually the most prominent text for each entry on the SERP (search engine results page).
URL: Also known as a ‘web address’, the URL specifies the location of a page on the internet.
Meta description: Another component of SERP entries, the meta description summarises what a searcher can expect to find on a particular page.
Header tags: Your page content should include various levels of headers (e.g. Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.) to improve the readability of your copy and add SEO value.

2. Evergreen content

As the name suggests, evergreen website content is content that is beneficial all year ′round (until the topic dies). This type of content will retain its value and stay relevant no matter when it’s consumed.

As evergreen doesn’t date, it has the potential to continue bringing traffic to your website for years after it’s published.

Besides reducing the need to continuously create new content, a good piece of evergreen content also has the potential to produce plenty of backlinks long after it goes live. Plus, content that’s relevant in the long term and is good enough for other sites to link to is going to be a hit with search engines.

That said, you will need to keep an eye on your search rankings and refresh your content to ensure it remains competitive. This might include:

Fixing broken links
Updating the year in the title
Replacing or adding images
Adding new information or discoveries

3. Good user experience

When SEO first began to gain importance, ranking on the first page – or even in first place – required strong copy filled with keywords. Now, search engines like Google are becoming increasingly more concerned with the usability of the sites they recommend.

User experience refers to the impression made by a website when a visitor enters. It relates to the overall quality of the experience they have when navigating both pages and content.

Also known as UX, user experience fits into SEO because the practices share a common goal: guiding searchers to the content they need.

As with keywording, there are a few areas and elements where improvements will provide a good return on investment (ROI) in terms of improving search rankings:

Navigation and site structure: A well-organised site with a functional menu makes it easy for both users and search engines to find what they’re looking for.
Headings: Using headings to divide information into digestible chunks and indicate what information is contained in various sections of each page.
Images: High-quality (but small-size) images that are relevant to the copy on a webpage will capture a user’s attention and engage your audience.
User signals: Users interacting with features such as CTAs (calls-to-action), related content and touch points shows that your content is interesting and engaging.
Responsiveness: Mobile-only web browsing is expected to be the norm for three-quarters of internet users by 2025, so it’s essential that the mobile experience on your website is a good one.
Site speed: Users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less and Google takes note of this, which means that your site needs fast load times to rank and retain visitors.

With web design and best practices constantly changing, UX does too. There’s also much more to creating a good user experience than these six points, but they’re a good place to start.

It’s worth exploring other websites and noting what you like about the experience versus what you don’t – it’s likely that those things are appealing to many visitors.

The UX journey doesn’t stop there, though. Once you’ve refined your site, you’ll need to continually monitor how visitors use it and make updates to ensure that your website’s traffic and conversions keep climbing.

There are many more facets to SEO than those presented here – Google’s algorithm uses literally hundreds of parameters to rank web pages – but incorporating relevant keywords into useful evergreen content that appears on a well laid-out site is a good place to start.

What’s important is getting started with a website optimisation strategy and sticking to it to ensure you start ranking.