Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising a website such that it ranks higher and more frequently for a variety of internet search terms, this increases organic traffic which is used to generate more revenue.
So how do I improve my rankings?
Search engines have one job, to provide the user with the most relevant, helpful content pertaining to their search query. If done successfully this grows the userbase of the search engine, resulting in more clicks on sponsored results i.e. more income for the search engine. Due to the high competition and lucrative nature of search engines, their algorithms are extremely advanced and constantly being updated.
Google has shown immense success as the world’s favourite search engine, driving 93% of global traffic. Due to Google’s dominance, SEO is focused on optimising your site for Google’s algorithm, although the changes will likely increase ranking on all search engines.
The Anatomy of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
When you Google a phrase the algorithm finds the websites it believes will best satisfy your search and ranks them accordingly. However, for certain phrases Google will also include sponsored results.
- Sponsored Results: These are often seen on searches with commercial intent as the users are more likely to make a purchase. Sponsored search results are shown at the top of the page. This isn’t because they are most likely to satisfy your search, but because they have paid Google to be there. Google’s sponsored results work on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, in which advertisers must pay Google for every time someone clicks on their link. You can identify sponsored results by the intentionally nonchalant ‘sponsored’ label just above the link.
- Organic Results: These are the results that aren’t sponsored. Google doesn’t make any money from you clicking these results and thus they are optimized to satisfy you as the user. The aim of SEO is to place your website as high as possible within the organic results, potentially getting you next to sponsored results for a fraction of the cost.
How Does Google Rank Your Site?
Before you can begin learning SEO techniques you first need to understand what happens when you publish your website.
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Discovery: First Google must find your site; this is usually achieved through your sitemap. An XML sitemap is a file included in your website that holds information for your website, importantly it contains all the URLs on your website. These files are specifically designed to notify search engines where to look to find your site. Almost all page builders will generate a sitemap.xml file for you.
WordPress users should install the YoastSEO plugin to optimise their sitemap. Although sitemaps are the most common method, search engines can also find your site through external links, or ‘backlinks’ from already indexed sites linking to your website. - Crawling: Once your website and all URLs have been located. Google will ‘crawl' your site, this involves downloading the content of each page and following any links its finds. This is done to collect all information about your website so it can display it to other users.
- Indexing: After crawling your website, Google analyses the content to understand its purpose and relevance, this includes analysing keywords, headings, content structure and quality. Google then decides if it is worth indexing, taking up space in Googles database but allowing it to appear in search results.
- Ranking: When a user searches through Google it queries the database for relevant pages and uses its complex algorithm to sort them, the algorithm places the sites it thinks will be most helpful to the user at the top of the page.
Categories of SEO:
- Technical SEO: This refers to the exclusively technical aspects of your website that contribute to its ranking. This includes optimisations that are done in the background irrespective of content. Examples of this include website speed, website structure, sitemaps, etc.
- On-Page SEO: Optimising everything your visitors see on your site, these are the changes you make through your website builder to the page itself, including editing content, changing headings, adding images, etc.
- Off-Page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on optimising aspects outside of your website, these behaviours often work to build a reputation for your website in the search engines eyes, the main and most effective strategy of this is generating backlinks.
Where do I Start?
All this information can be overwhelming, there is a lot that goes into SEO, and it only gets more complex as you move onto the more advanced techniques. That’s why we have split the process up into actionable steps to help you get started in the world of SEO.
1. Optimise Technical SEO
Assuming you already have a website, technical SEO is the best place to start for optimising your search rankings, it gives you a solid foundation to push your site as high as possible in the SERP.
- Page Speed: Google’s algorithm analyses how users interact with your page, if it has a poor user experience, Google is going to receive that information through visitor data and won't rank your site. As people grow more impatient it is crucial to your website's success that it isn't slow and sluggish to navigate. The most common reason for this is having high quality images that take a long time to load. Images contribute to the user experience so you can’t simply remove them, instead your images should be optimised, for WordPress users there is a plugin named EWWW Image Optimiser which will automatically optimise all the images on your site. If you are not on WordPress you can simply run your images through and online image optimiser like Optimizilla and reupload them. This decreases the file size and hence load time without having any noticeable change for the user.
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Link Structure: How you structure your website is not only important for site crawlers, but also for users to easily navigate your page. The Ideal link structure is known as the flat site structure, Nielsen Norman Group has a great diagram displaying the difference:
This structure prioritizes having less categories/subpages and quicker access to pages. Although it may look less organized it makes navigating your website far easier as the structure is simple to understand. This does often result in a lot of links being present on one page and we encourage you to utilize drop-down menus where possible to prevent your page from looking cluttered. This simple yet organized structure makes it especially easy for crawlers as they very quickly locate all the links to your pages.
A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to get from any one of your pages to any other in no more than 2 clicks, take this with a grain of salt, especially if you site is large but it is a good goal to aim for.
- Sitemaps: Ensuring you have an optimised sitemap will set you up for SEO success, as mentioned previously WordPress builders can download the Yoast SEO Plugin, this will give your more control over your sitemap, allowing you to exclude certain pages and prioritize others, there are also more advanced features allowing you to notify search engines how often your content is going to change and thus how often they should come back and check for updates. If you are using a template builder such as Wix or Squarespace unfortunately they have limited SEO functionality compared to WordPress, however you can still manage your sitemap by unpublishing outdated/unused content which removes it from your sitemap, making it easier for crawlers.
2. Keyword Research
The next step is to understand what people are looking for on the internet so you can target exactly that. There are many keyword research tools available, we recommend Semrush although it requires a premium subscription, Google’s own keyword planner is a free alternative.
Within your keyword research tool, you are going to want to search for general terms surrounding your brand and niche, for example if you sold yoga mats you would simply search ‘yoga mats’, If you business is local you should include the area within the search, e.g. ‘yoga mats perth’. Pay attention to the ‘related keywords’ portion of the results, this gives you all the similar keywords listed in terms of search volume. Take note of the keywords that are applicable to your brand, preferably in a spreadsheet, as well as their monthly search volume. If your brand extends multiple topics then repeat this until your reach is covered, for example they may also sell yoga clothes so you would repeat this using ‘yoga clothes’ as the search term.
Generally, the more popular a keyword is the harder it is to rank for, however to gauge keyword difficulty effectively you can download a free chrome extension named Mozbar. This extension will display two data points next to all results on the SERP.
- Domain Authority (DA): This is an analysis of the SEO power of the website as a whole, is it scored out of 100 and is based upon the backlink profile of the domain, its size and content volume as well as its traffic.
- Page Authority (PA): This is an analysis of the SEO competitiveness of the induvial page itself, it is also scored out of 100 and is largely based on the on-page SEO optimisation, backlinks to that specific page, and user metrics.
- Domain Authority (DA): This is an analysis of the SEO power of the website as a whole, is it scored out of 100 and is based upon the backlink profile of the domain, its size and content volume as well as its traffic.
- Page Authority (PA): This is an analysis of the SEO competitiveness of the induvial page itself, it is also scored out of 100 and is largely based on the on-page SEO optimisation, backlinks to that specific page, and user metrics.
Once you have a list of at least 20 keywords you can begin searching them on google with the Mozbar extension to analyze their difficulty. As a rule of thumb if there is a site within the first 10 results that has less than 25 DA and PA than with good SEO practice you could rank where that site is. If all results have DA and PA that are 30+ it is going to be extremely difficult to rank for these keywords as these sites are highly optisised with a strong backlink profile. Discard the search terms that are too difficult to rank for, if you find your niche to be very competitive you may need to go retrieve some more keyword ideas.
Once you have all your relevant and plausible keywords you need to categorize them, the idea is that you will dedicate one page to each category instead of trying to fit them all on one page.
3. Heading Trees
Once you have completed keyword research you are ready to start editing your content, beginning with the headings. Within your website it is crucial you use the correct heading elements. Your ‘Heading 1’ or <h1> is considered the page title and should be what the page is about as a whole, it should include at least one keyword, but advanced sites are able to include multiple, or components of different keywords while still sounding natural.
All subheadings should be Heading 2 elements, subheadings of those should be Heading 3 elements, and so forth. Ensure these headings also include keywords. This is important because crawlers use your heading structure to understand your content, so through using the correct elements the search engine understands what your content is about and that it is neatly structured.
4. Editing Content
After you have planned your heading structure you are ready to start editing your content. Remember that user metrics are also a strong factor for SEO so ensure your content is user-friendly and useful, whilst also containing your keywords naturally.
Formatting is integral to keeping visitors on your site, very rarely will people read walls of text as it seems overwhelming, although they will happily read the same amount of text if it is formatted neatly with headings, spacing and images to break up the text. This can be seen in the example below.
Through utilizing these tools Text 2 is a lot more approachable and will be read by more people.
Your heading tree will help you break up your content but there are many other tools you can use to improve the readability of your page. Images are a great tool to break up the text while also engaging the reader and we encourage you to use them generously, this will greatly improve your user experience. Remember to include alt text detailing what is in the image, this is used by the visually impaired and also by site crawlers so they better gauge your content.
Text styling is another great tool used to increase user engagement, consider using bold and italic styles throughout your content to make it seem less bland. This also makes your text easier to skim which also keeps users on your site.
5. Generating Backlinks
Once you have completed your on-page SEO you are ready to move onto off-page SEO, this is where the real competition begins. Backlinks are links from another website linking to your website, these are valuable in the eyes of Google as it is seen as a vow of trust, it follows that the bigger and more trusted the site is by Google, the stronger effect that backlink has on your search rankings.
For example, if The New York Times linked to your website, this would boost your sites authority as it is receiving recognition from a highly reputable site, however if your friend Joe linked to your site, then it would have a much lessor effect on your search rankings. This is because Google isn’t as trusting in Joe as it is in The New York Times. Therefore, the effect on your rankings is a culmination of not only the quantity but also the quality of your backlinks. An ideal backlink source has a Domain Authority above 25 and isn’t linking to an excessive number of websites.
There are many strategies to generate backlinks, but we will share what we have had the most success with.
Guest Posting:
This is writing an article for someone else’s blog and including a link back to your website in the article. This is successful because they are getting something in return for the backlink, very rarely will people hand out high quality backlinks for nothing, especially as they often will understand the value of backlinks. You want to write for a blog that is similar to or within the same industry as your business. Not only will this funnel relevant visitors to your site but will further contribute to Googles understanding of your page.
To find a website that will allow you to write a blog for them simply search for your niche follow by “submit a guest post” into google, for example if you sold yoga mats you would search for, yoga mats “submit a guest post”, the quote marks tell google to only show results that include that exact string of text. If you can’t find any quality backlink sources you can take a step back in terms of your niche to a broader topic, for example to, health and wellbeing “submit a guest post”.
As you browse these sites you will notice a lot will charge to feature your article on their site, if it is reasonably priced this can be seen as an investment into your website that will generate you more income in the future.
Broken Link Building:
This approach involves finding links that no longer work on live pages and contacting the owner to replace the broken link with a link to your content instead. This is easiest to do on resource pages that have large lists of links to resources, you can find these pages relevant to your niche through searching for your niche followed by “helpful resources”.
Once you have found relevant resource pages install the Chrome extension Check My Links. This will automatically check all the links of the page, highlighting broken links in red. When you find a broken link consider whether it is relevant to your brand, if it is then recreate the content that the broken link is meant to link to within your own site. After you have published the content to your own site reach out the owner and notify them one of their links no longer works, inform them you just so happen to have a similar page on your own site and would appreciate if they could change the link to your content instead.
This strategy is successful as you are doing the admin a favour by notifying them of the broken link and the easiest solution for them is just to swap it out with the one you provided. This strategy does come with the risk of producing content for a certain broken link and not having it come to fruition, although more content on your site is never time wasted.
Skyscraper Link Building
This technique involves finding a piece of content that is relevant to your site and has a lot of backlinks, you can check the backlinks of any page with an online backlink checker. The idea is that you will improve upon this content and then reach out to the websites that are providing the backlinks, suggesting they link to your higher quality content instead. This process is especially successful if the content is old and is beginning to become outdated. There are several ways in which you can prove the content:
- Quality: The most obvious solution is to improve the quality of the content itself; this could include adding depth, giving practical examples, improving the language to be more professional and succinct, etc.
- Length: Through adding more content, you are giving more information to the reader, which is seen as more valuable. It is important to avoid increasing the content to the point where it’s too much information to dig through for the user to find what they're looking for; we have found a 10-30% increase in word count is ideal.
- Formatting: As discussed earlier formatting can greatly increase the user experience, through using sophisticated, aesthetic formatting you can make your content much more appealing to users.
Through these techniques you should be able to generate a handful of high-quality backlinks, positioning your site to perform to its maximum potential in the SERP. Remember SEO is not something you do once and is an ongoing process that takes time. If you want a professional to manage your SEO feel free to check out our plans.
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