Good website SEO, like many things in business follows the Pareto Principle (also known as 80/20 rule).
This means, by finding out the 20% of your website SEO activity that generates 80% of your website traffic and concentrating your focus on the 20% works best, you’ll start to see the results you really want!
On-site SEO involves taking the individual elements of a website and to optimise them for a search engine crawl. The aim of this is to help users on your site quickly understand your page and address their concerns, this will help get you higher organic search traffic, brand awareness and conversions.
What makes up the 20% for most websites and how do you use this in your website SEO strategy?
Firstly, optimising your keywords and headlines will help Google immediately know what’s on your page.
Research conducted by Yoast showed that putting keywords in headlines, especially at the beginning of the headline, had the most beneficial effect. That’s because it is the very first thing both Google and your audience would see. It will also put you in a competitive position for a good page ranking.
Turning the focus to content now, your page’s content is what will ultimately determine its search position. It’s what the visitor comes to see, which makes it very important to a search engine’s crawler. So, creating optimised content should fall into the 20% of your efforts that yield results.
Secondly, using internal and outbound links properly will help boost your reputation and provide a map for Google’s crawler.
By linking to relevant content on your own site, you provide a shortcut for your visitor that lets them find more of what you have to say on a certain topic. It not only helps them be more aware of a topic, but it also increases how much they see you as an expert in your industry.
Outbound links from your site can offer several benefits; it helps Google further determine what your content is about, and it can improve the credibility of your content in your audience’s eyes.
The third thing to focus on is the way you illustrate your content. Powerful imagery will inspire your audience and keep them engaged. By tapping into your audience’s emotions and desire for visual stimulation, you can draw more visitors to your site. This entails ditching the boring stock photos and relying on visuals that engage and educate.
Meanwhile, with appropriated tagged visuals, Google will be able to get greater detail about your how your posts appeal to your audience and amount of time they spend on your site, all important stuff!
Don’t ignore checking your websites load time…
Finally, taking the time to optimise your site’s load time will keep your bounce rates lower and improve the user experience. Site speed has been part of Google’s ranking algorithms since 2010. Google themselves have discovered that even a two-second difference can increase your bounce rate, so finding ways to shorten load time will always help your websites SEO.
You can check your websites speed score using Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
The good thing is, all these elements are relatively easily achieved and don’t require a significant amount of time. They will improve the SEO on your website and let you focus the rest of your time on other parts of your marketing activity.
However, if your time is still tight and if you don’t have the opportunity undertake this for your site, our experts at Spitfire use these same principles to make our clients’ site work harder. If you’d like a hand boosting your website SEO and site traffic, just get in touch and we’d be delighted to help.
