The 11 Most Important Parts of SEO You Need to Get Right

Getting the key elements of SEO right can help you win customers, conversions and sales and achieve your business goals.

Search engine optimisation has seen rapid change over the last few years and what worked in the past doesn’t necessarily work now. However, there are still core SEO principles that remain as relevant as ever and form part of a solid SEO strategy for you and your clients.

Let’s take a look at our top SEO tips.

1. Understanding your audience and competitors

You are there to serve your customer so make sure they are your first consideration in everything you do.

Do they have a problem that they want to solve? What do they need? Do you know what their core desires are? Who do they resonate with? Use this to form your SEO strategy and decide what works for your business.

2. Do your keyword research

By doing effective keyword research, you’ll understand exactly what your customers are looking for when they go online and can tailor your website content to their needs.

Make sure you figure out their ‘user intent’ whilst you do so- why they are searching for these things and what problems they need to solve. This will help you identify more opportunities for your business.

3. Figure out your analytics and reporting

Monitor your search rankings, your keyword performance, your bounce rate and other key metrics to measure and evaluate how your website is performing. This will enable you to identify what is working and what isn’t, and make adjustments to your SEO strategy accordingly.

4. Optimise user experience

• Make sure your website is a pleasure to visit.
• Create a website that looks beautiful and is easy to navigate.
• Optimise your page load speed.
• Add useful content that answers your customers’ questions.
• Break the content down into smaller paragraphs to make it easier to read and digest. 

5. Focus on mobile SEO

Approximately 50% of all web users worldwide use a mobile device to go online and this number looks set to increase. To ensure that you perform well, you need to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. If you’re not sure, run your website through the useful Google Search Console tool.

6. Boost your page speed

Faster loading web pages mean a better online experience for your customers. Get this right and it won’t just be your customers who stick around- Google will reward you with better rankings too. According to a Kissmetrics infographic, more than a quarter of visitors will leave your page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Don’t make this mistake and turn away valuable customers. Run a Google Lighthouse report to see what technical improvements your website needs.

7. Make sure your website is crawl-friendly

Search engines crawl your website to explore what you offer so they can connect you to your ideal customers and rank your website accordingly. To ensure this works effectively, make sure you have a good website structure, effective internal linking and that your website is free from 404 errors and technical problems.

8. Optimise local search

If you want to target a local audience, you need to ensure you are doing all the right things so they can find you. Start by ensuring your business is on Google My Business, update your online contact details such as address and phone number and add location pages to your website.

8. Master your technical SEO

Technical SEO deals with the more complex side of your website such as site speed, coding, JavaScript, Schema markup and canonicalization. One small mistake here can throw off your website rankings and online success.

9. Create awesome content

By creating engaging, high-quality content, you can provide useful information to your readers and boost your website rankings. Make sure your content is clearly written, free from typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Most of all, it should provide value to your customers, be easy to read and most of all, be highly engaging!

10. Link strategically

Links continue to be an important ranking factor. But you should ensure that you only link to high-quality websites that are related to your content. Choose those that add value or context or provide more information. Wherever possible, link to other pages on your website.

11. Put it into action

Understanding SEO and actually doing it are two different things. It’s no good understanding what you need to do, you need to take action. How will you develop an SEO strategy that delivers results for your business? What will you target first?

Develop your SEO strategy by using these SEO tips and put it into action today with our help. 
Contact us to learn more.