If you’re new to websites, SEO might seem like a buzzword. It can be thrown around with little explanation and seem to soak up too much money. However, if you’re planning on optimising your site, it’s key to making your website reach its full potential. SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s the process of taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on Google. Basically, it includes using keywords, alt-tags for images, meta descriptions, SEO titles and heading tags. SEO success factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user experience. It’s how Google estimates precisely how well a website can give the searcher what they’re searching for.
It’s tempting to optimise your site and leave it at that. Really, we need to be constantly monitoring the results to see what’s working and what’s not. Before beginning any project, we need to establish what the metrics of success will be. 5 possible metrics to use are:
Some very useful tools here are Google Search Console, Google Analytics and ahrefs.com. We’ll go over these tools later in this article.
A key tool for investigating the speed of your site is Google Page Insights. Pay particular attention to the speed on mobile devices because over 53% of visitors come from their phones. Roughly four decades after the introduction of the first mobile phone, almost every developed country has at least 90 per cent mobile phone penetration. It has become increasingly pervasive and indispensable. These days our devices come with us everywhere, stay in reach almost all the time and do just about everything. They play a central role in our lives so it makes sense put the mobile experience first when developing a website.
The popularity of smartphones has become so clear that mobile internet usage has now surpassed the use of a desktop. This trend continues as smaller devices gain more market share.
To speed up your site, remember a few things:
“Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.” It does exactly that. By setting up an account with Google Search Console you can see where your site is going wrong and how it can perform better. You’ll see what search terms are sending visitors to your site and how you can increase them.
If one of your pages is unfriendly for mobile users, Google will email you to let you know. The benefit of following this advice is that Google will reward you by pushing you higher in their own indexing.
The full list of details as highlighted by Google are:
For more on how to set up Search Console for your site, check out Google’s guide here
We’ll show you how to conduct keyword research and the benefits. It’s the first step in developing content for your site and a cornerstone of SEO.
If you have any questions be sure to contact us or book a consultation.
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