Learning how to optimise your website can be overwhelming at first because there is just so much information out there which makes it hard to decide which tactic to focus on first.
However, with a little bit of organisation, focus, and patience you can learn the basics of how to rank in search engines and get your business on the way to competing with your top contenders.
Define clear objectives
One of the main challenges with search engine optimisation (SEO) is that it’s difficult to know what constitutes a successful campaign. There are so many variables, and results can take months or even years to materialise.
That’s why it’s important to start by setting some realistic goals for your SEO campaign. These could be anything from increasing website traffic to improving your website’s ranking in search engines.
Simplicity is key when it comes to goal setting – if the goal is too complex, it becomes difficult to know if the goal has been achieved or not. To keep things clear and concise, break down your SEO goals into smaller ones that can easily be measured.
There are many benefits to setting goals in search engine optimisation including:
Measuring progress
SEO goals help you measure the progress of your efforts by comparing them to where you want to be. This way you can track if you’re gaining momentum and make necessary changes along the way. Without goals, it would be difficult to tell whether SEO strategies are getting results or not.
Your goal might be something like increasing organic traffic by 50%. Once you hit that goal, you can then set a new one before you continue tracking your progress. This helps steer you in the right direction and also allows you to scale your efforts based on your recent success. You’ll also want to ensure you follow the correct ways to measure SEO results so you have a clear picture of your performance.
Direction
Goals provide a road map for your search engine optimisation strategy. They help you identify what actions you need to take.
A road map is important for SEO because it allows you to stay focused on your long-term goals rather than getting caught up in the latest trend. By having a defined set of goals and a plan for achieving them, you’ll be able to effectively optimise your website more and improve your ranking in the search engines.
Decisiveness
When you know that a certain choice won’t bring you the results you want then you’ll avoid spending any time going through with it which makes the decision-making process come naturally to you.
One great example of how knowing your goals helps you become more decisive is in the world of SEO. Without specific goals, it can be very difficult to make decisions about what not to do with your website.
For instance, if you’re not sure whether you should add a new blog post, or update an old one, setting specific goals for your website can help make that decision much easier.
In this case, if your goal is to increase traffic from organic search engines, then adding a new post would be a bad decision because it would likely take away from the time and energy you could be spending on optimising your existing pages for better search engine rankings.
Better communication and teamwork
Goals can help improve communication between team members. By outlining specific goals, everyone involved in executing your SEO strategy will be on the same page and working towards the same goal.
That way, each team member’s action can be seen as complementary and uniform – as all part of the larger effort.
This allows everyone to know what they need to do to help achieve the goal and there is less room for blame should something go wrong. Additionally, sharing the goal with all members of the team allows for greater transparency.
Accountability
One of the most important things about goal setting is that it helps you measure your progress and hold yourself accountable when you fall short. If you’re not hitting your goals, it tells you that either your goal was set too high or your SEO strategy isn’t working.
Either way, this is the time to take a step back and analyze what’s going wrong. This could mean adjusting your goals, tweaking your strategy, or simply changing up your execution.
That’s why it’s so important to feel accountable for your SEO efforts–so that you can learn from your mistakes and continue moving forward.
Clarity
When you set an SEO goal, you usually aim to achieve something specific, such as increasing your website traffic or getting more leads. However, by the time you’re doing the necessary steps to make your goals come true you start to understand what you truly want and how you want it, which starts to uncover your underlying desires.
For example, suppose you set a goal to rank high on Google for the phrase “Dentist Lismore” because you see your main competitor is on page two of SERPs. Then as you start optimising your blogs to include that phrase you realise that what you truly want is more engagement from your target audience—more clicks, views, and shares. So instead of targeting keywords, you now begin to create content like “The Top 5 Foods To Avoid If You Have Sensitive Teeth” which attracts more visitors to your website.
Managing your strategies
You can’t manage what you can’t track. SEO is no exception. Tracking your SEO results allows you to see which strategies are working and which ones need improvement. It also helps you focus on the strategies that are bringing in the best results so you can continue to refine and improve them.
Without tracking your progress, it would be difficult – if not impossible – to know whether your SEO efforts are having any impact at all.
A few of the metrics you need to monitor are:
Rankings
Most people want to get ahead, especially business owners. But when it comes to SEO it’s simply more than just staying at the top.
If you’re running a business, it’s important to improve your search engine ranking so that people can easily find you online. For a detailed view of the factors affecting this, you’ll need to use software like KW finder, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. These tools will show you how well your website is performing as well as give you tips on how to improve your overall strategy.
Traffic
Websites are often ranked by traffic or the number of people who visit your site. This is a common metric because it’s easy to track and understand.
However, website performance should also be measured by other factors such as how many people stay on it, how long they stay, and whether they return. After all, a good business doesn’t just create new customers but keeps them coming back too.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you measure site traffic. By monitoring the number of visitors to your website, you can see which pages are most popular and identify any areas where your traffic is increasing or decreasing.
You can also use Google Analytics to track how long visitors stay on your website and which keywords they use to find you. This tells you how engaging your content is and if you need to make it more interesting to keep people around.
Google Search Console is another great way to measure your site traffic. It’s a free, user-friendly tool that provides you with information about how your site appears in Google search results so you can make improvements to it.
One major difference between Google Search Console and Google Analytics is that Search Console provides information about your average positions on SERPs based on Google searches, whereas Google Analytics provides information about all of the traffic going to your website, including users who came from platforms outside Google.
Leads
This is the lifeblood of your business because leads are the people interested in what you have to offer. Without them, your business won’t last long.
If your website isn’t helping you get more attention from people who need your product or service, then it becomes an added expense instead of an investment. That’s why one of the most important SEO tips for beginners is to always track the number of leads you have so you know if your efforts are paying off.
Lead tracking also helps you with this because you can understand what people want to see based on information about the product they are interested in.
The challenging part is that the more your lead pool grows the harder it is to track so you need a way to manage all that incoming data in one place. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) systems come in.
A CRM is a tool used by businesses to store customer data and interactions. This information can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns, identify customer needs and discover their preferences to improve their experience with your brand.
It gathers details such as contact information, purchase history, email exchanges with customer service representatives, and demographic information.
CRMs also provide feedback loops that allow businesses to track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. This feedback can help your business improve its strategies for acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones.
Call Rail and Avanser are good examples of this.
Sales
Of course, every business wants to make a profit and that’s only possible when your prospects are buying from you. Just like leads, your sales connect the dots between your SEO strategy and your business goals so it is essential to always be aware of these numbers.
Aside from showing how much money you’re making, sales numbers show if your content is converting visitors to customers. Say you have a website for a bakery and decide to make a blog post listing popular cakes that you can make for every occasion with trivia about famous people who like them.
A month later and you see that there are lots of visits to your post but no one places an order. This can mean that the celebrity trivia on your post attracts people looking for gossip instead of cake bakers.
You can then use this data to edit your blog post to remove any mention of famous personalities and just focus on the price, taste, quality, and preparation times of your cakes so that the right type of visitors will be drawn to them.
Google Analytics has several features that you can use for knowing how well your sales are doing. The first is by counting the number of clicks on your buy button. The second is by recording the number of visits to your thank-you page which appears after a purchase. And third is through e-commerce tracking, which tags specific purchase data like product IDs, revenue, and tax that come from your website.
Understand the 4 types of search intent
Knowing what your audience is looking for is among the vital SEO tips that you need to learn because it helps you target the right people using the right content. This allows you to attract more visitors who are already interested in those types of content making them more likely to stick around and explore your site further.
Another benefit of knowing your audience’s search intent is that it lets you create buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, and by creating them, you can get a better understanding of what their needs and wants are.
This insight can then be used to create marketing campaigns that will resonate with your target audience and convert them into customers. The types of search intent that your visitors have are:
Informational
Normally, when you have a question but there’s no one around to ask, you turn to google. From academic research to celebrity gossip, search engines comb the internet to find the answers you’re looking for.
When you use words like what, how, where, who, or why then your intent falls under this category.
People with informational intent are often the easiest to convert into customers because once you give them the answers that they need, they’re more likely to be interested in buying whatever it is that you’re selling. That’s why it’s important to optimise your website and content for SEO so that you can attract these people and provide them with the information they’re trying to find.
Navigational intent
If you’re looking for a specific company’s website, but you don’t know its exact website address, typing keywords in Google related to that company will usually bring up their website as one of the top results.
For example, if you want to find the online order page for your local Nike store, you could type “Nike shoes online” or “buy Nike shoes” in the Google search box. Companies with an ongoing SEO strategy often optimise their websites to include these search phrases in their web pages for higher chances of appearing in peoples’ SERPs.
Transactional intent
When someone is looking to purchase a product or service their intent is transactional. They can be searching for a specific item, or just browsing around to see what options are available.
Transactional intent is important for online businesses because it means the person is close to making a purchase. So if you can target your ads and content towards people with transactional intent, the better chances you’ll have of them buying from you.
Commercial investigation.
This intent can be seen in a few scenarios. First is when people look for the Top 10 lists of products in a given category so that they can quickly find the best option.
The second is when business owners search for suppliers from whom they can get their raw materials, and the third is when a college student is looking for an apartment that’s close to the Uni.
What these situations have in common is that their purpose is not entirely transactional since the searcher may not end up purchasing anything but it’s not 100% informational either since there is a buying intent behind the search
That’s what commercial intent is – something in the middle.
Choose core (and related) keywords for every page
Among the SEO tips for beginners, this one needs a lot of research because it’s important to choose different core keywords for every page on your site.
For instance, if you have a baking blog that has multiple pages featuring a brownie recipe from Martha Stewart, Gordon Ramsay, and Curtis Stone, Google can get confused about which of those pages is the most relevant for the keyword “brownie.”
This confusion can cause Google to show searchers a page that you may not necessarily want to rank for. What’s worse, if Google finds it hard to differentiate your pages more and more, this can lead to your site getting penalised or pushed farther from the top SERP in favour of a more organised one.
Other downsides to using the same core keywords on multiple pages are:
Repetitiveness – if you have multiple pages with the same keyword, it can feel identical and give your audience a bad experience. Additionally, overuse of keywords can make your website seem like spam to search engines.
Scattered external links – using the same keyword on multiple pages can confuse other websites when they try to link to yours as they can get confused about which page has the most relevance for that keyword.
Limited anchor text and internal links – It can be difficult to set anchor texts and decide which page to feature for a specific keyword if that keyword appears on multiple pages on your website.
Diluted site traffic – Having the same keyword on multiple pages can hurt your traffic because one page may get more traffic than the other, and it can be tough to forecast how well a particular keyword will convert.
To avoid these situations, you should make sure that each page on your website has a unique title tag and meta description. Tools like Screaming Frog can help you scan your website for duplicate title tags and determine how many times a particular keyword is used on a page.
You also need to use a keyword research tool to look for search phrases that you can apply across multiple pages having the same topic. This will help you optimise your content for more than just one keyword, and will also help your audience differentiate your pages.
For example, let’s say you’re targeting the keyword “running shoes.” You could have a page about “running shoes for women”, a page about “running shoes for men”, a page about “running shoes for kids”, and so on. You would then want to make sure that each page has a different anchor text pointing to it.
The type of search phrases that you need to be familiar with are:
Short-tail
These are typically three words or less and are generally very specific to what the searcher is looking for.
For example, if you are selling iPhones, you might want to use the keyword “iPhone 6 sale” in your advertising instead of a general keyword like “smartphones.”
Because they’re very broad, short tail keywords receive a high volume of monthly search traffic. They’re generally easier to rank for but they also have a higher level of competition. That’s because many businesses are vying for the top spots in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for these high-traffic terms.
Also, because they are less specific, the type of audience you attract may be wider. This can be a challenge if you’re targeting a specific group of people in your promotion or marketing campaign.
Long-tail
A long-tail keyword is a search phrase that’s made of three words or more. These phrases are more specific and targeted to a specific audience compared to shorter, more general search terms.
Examples of this are phrases like “Vegan desserts for Diabetics.” Another example is when you’re gathering ideas or don’t know exactly what you’re looking for like “Good topics for a thesis.”
This makes long-tail keywords a great tool for SEO because you can attract more qualified people by targeting these specific phrases. And since fewer site owners are using these phrases on their pages, there’s less competition to rank higher for them.
A potential downside to using long-tail keywords is that they are more difficult and time-consuming to research. You need to understand what phrases your ideal audience will type in Google before including them on your page. This can make blog writing and on-page SEO more challenging for you.
They may also not generate as much traffic compared to short-tail keywords. The upside is that the more long-tail keywords you use on your website, the better quality audience you’ll attract.
Some good tools you can consider for long-tail keyword research are:
1. Google AdWords Keyword Planner – This is a great tool for estimating traffic levels and seeing how different keywords compete with each other.
2. Moz’s Keyword Explorer – This tool offers more detailed data, such as search volume trends and keyword difficulty scores.
3. UberSuggest – This is a free tool that generates keyword suggestions based on Google search data. It’s a great starting point for brainstorming new ideas.
Establish a site structure
Site architecture is important because it can make or break your website’s usability, and for your SEO strategy to succeed, your website needs to be user-friendly.
If a user has to constantly click on links to find what they’re looking for, they can get frustrated because of the time it’s taking them to search.
If buttons are too small, difficult to see, or are placed just on one end of a page, it can be hard for people to go back to the previous page or move on to the next.
Similarly, if links are too close together or if they’re difficult to identify because of poor colour contrast, users may click on the wrong one and accidentally open a page they don’t want to view.
All of these factors can make a website hard to navigate, which can be frustrating for your users and cause them to leave.
The more people leave your website, the lower the conversion rate, and ultimately, can mean a loss of business for you.
On the other hand, a good user experience means easy-to-use menus, clear titles, readable fonts, a dedicated page for main topics, supporting pages for related ones, and buttons that are set in the right places.
Users who have a pleasant browsing experience are more likely to view your other pages and the longer people stay on your website, the better chances you’ll have of ranking higher in SERPs.
In addition, having a good site structure is one of the SEO tips for beginners that can help you beat your competition since it often gets overlooked by other business owners.
There are a few great tools that can help you improve your site structure. Visio and Creately are both great options, as they allow you to create diagrams of your website. They can help you see how everything is connected, and quickly identify any potential problems with your site’s layout.
Both tools are easy to use and allow you to quickly create diagrams and prototypes that can be shared with others.
For free options, check out Google Search Console and Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Both of these tools are great for identifying errors on your website that are decreasing your traffic.
Create a Sitemap
A sitemap shows search engines the structure of your pages and the relationships between them. They are important for SEO because they help Google understand your website’s overall design.
It does this by making it easier for you to submit your pages to search engines for indexing. Some popular sitemap formats are:
eXtensible Markup Language – An XML helps Google and other search engines better index your website by listing all the URLs inside it, along with additional information like meta description, last modified date, and relevance. This type of sitemap can only be seen by crawlers.
XML can be useful if you have a big site with a lot of pages since it assists search engines to map out what is on your site.
Hypertext Markup Language – A HTML sitemap helps your users find the information they’re looking for. It’s a list of all the pages on your website, which become accessible to them from any device. The HTML sitemap is typically organised in hierarchical order, with the main pages listed first, followed by the pages that are one level below, and so on.
Having an HTML sitemap also improves your internal links. It does this by giving your users a way to access a page that has a topic unrelated to the ones on your map. Establishing this unique connection ensures that none of your pages is “orphaned.”
Claim (and complete) your Google Business Profile
Local intent is a major factor in internet searches. The reason for this is that many people are looking for information about places within their immediate area – restaurants, home repairs, coffee shops, etc.
This is why having a Google business profile is important for letting people in your suburb know about your business. It’s a free listing that allows you to control how your business appears on Google Search and Google Maps so people in your local area can easily find you.
It lets you manage your online reviews, add photos, and videos, and updates your business hours and contact information. It can also help you connect with customers who have had a good experience with your business.
The main benefit of having a Google business profile is that it helps your business appear higher in search results. This is because when your business listing shows up in the “knowledge panel” on the right-hand side of the SERPs, you can attract more traffic and potential customers to your website.
Assess your competitors
If you’ve ever been in a contest you probably know the feeling of sizing up your contenders to see if you have an advantage over them. It’s the same in business and is even a common practice when it comes to giving tips for SEO beginners.
When you’re starting in SEO, it’s important to know who your competition is. By understanding their tactics and strategies, you can learn what works for them to apply in your own business and what doesn’t so you can avoid it.
A content gap analysis for SEO is a good strategy for this. Put simply, it is a process of detecting flaws in your current material by looking at your competitor’s content.
When you have a competing business that’s ranking higher than you in SERPs, you can simply visit their website and research what they’re doing that’s bringing in more traffic and leads.
What kind of valuable stuff do they give away in exchange for peoples’ emails?
Do their blog posts entertain visitors? Or do they come up with educational ones that emphasise the importance of their services?
What topics do they cover in their content?
The information you gain from this research will show you missed opportunities in your content strategy which can allow you to create something better.
Optimise your title tags — and make them spicy
Do you notice the text appearing in your browser tab when you visit a page? That’s the title tag in action.
In its raw form title tags are part of your website’s HTML code that is used to display the title of your site or page. They are also the title that appears on social media when someone share’s your post.
In other words, the title tag tells your audience and search engines what your page is about. This is why it’s included in this list of SEO tips for beginners because you can never understate the value of a compelling title. After all, the title is the first thing people see on Google and what they use to decide whether your content is worth reading or not.
That’s why your title tag should be keyword-rich to remain in line with your SEO goals but also descriptive and enticing so that users will want to click on it. It’s also important to make sure that all of your pages have unique title tags so readers can differentiate them and so that each one can rank independently in SERPs.
Breadcrumbs
Similar to what Hansel and Gretel used to get back to their home, breadcrumbs is a small text path or link trail near the top of your page that helps your visitors know where they are and allow them to return to your homepage quickly.
Clicking on any of the listed links will take them back to the corresponding page in the trail, which is less confusing compared to using the Back button. Aside from giving your visitors a good user experience by preventing them from being lost, breadcrumbs also help engines like Google index your website easier.
Content is King
Organic traffic cannot be possible without content because blogs, videos, and graphics are what people consume after they arrive on your page. The chances of people landing on your site go higher the more content you produce with targeted keywords. That’s why creating plenty of optimised content is one of the most important SEO tips for beginners you need to learn.
Develop long-form content
When you read a blog post about Taylor Swift’s latest breakup, don’t you feel let down when the post doesn’t mention what caused the separation? Of course, you want the juicy details and so do search engines.
This is why Google favours long-form content because it allows your visitors to go into more depth about a topic and get more detailed information.
Long-form content is often seen as being more authoritative because longer blog posts usually take more time to write due to the amount of research that goes into making them. As a result, people are more likely to trust them especially when you include data with proper references.
And the more people trust your content, the more likely they are to share it and link to it, increasing the credibility of your website.
Write for humans first, then search engines
A sale is only possible when people become interested in your product and the best way to do that is by creating quality content that solves their problems or gives them answers to their questions.
When you’re writing for your readers, you’re creating content that gives them value. This, in turn, will help to build a connection and keep them coming back to you for more answers – both of which are important factors when it comes to SEO.
When you write for search engines, on the other hand, you’re often focused on keyword density and other technical aspects that can be difficult to understand (and downright annoying) for your average reader. Not only will this frustrate them, but it can also hurt your website’s ranking with Google for giving people a bad experience after landing on your page.
So instead of favouring search engine algorithms, focus on writing content that aims to help your readers. They’ll thank you for it – and so will the search engines.
Mobile-Friendly/Responsive
So you’re browsing through local house listings on your phone when you come across one that catches your eye.
The picture is small, but from what you could see, it looks like the perfect place for you and your family. You click on it to get more information but nothing happens. You use your fingers to enlarge the page but the image just goes fuzzier.
Nothing changes even after you refresh the page so you start to think your data might be slow. Then further scrolling down shows comments from people having difficulty viewing the images in high resolution.
This is when you begin to think that the listing might be a scam so you give up and move on to the next one.
A lot of businesses lose visitors like this because site owners think that having a good functioning website is enough.
Did you know that around half of all online traffic is generated by mobile devices? Smartphones account for 54.4 percent of worldwide website traffic in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone. And that doesn’t even include tablets.
That’s why Google continuously changes its algorithm to favour mobile-friendliness among websites and it’s no surprise because it takes less effort to browse the internet using a smartphone compared to a laptop where you need to use a trackpad and keyboard.
So it’s safe to say that optimising your website for smart devices is a major factor for search engines.
There is no cheating The System
As a beginner in any field, you’ll come across different opinions on the best ways to do certain things.
SEO is no different.
Since it’s considered an art of bending the rules how do you know if you’re crossing a line? Here are two concepts that can help you make a judgement:
White Hat
White hat SEO is a set of ethical techniques and practices used to improve search engine rankings.
There are a few reasons why white hat SEO is considered ethical:
- White hat SEO relies on organic, sustainable methods that improve the user experience and increase the visibility of websites through merit alone.
- Its strategies are based on user experience which means its optimisation process always asks the question “How helpful will this be will be for humans?”
- White hat SEO practitioners always play by the rules set by Google and other search engines. This also means they have up-to-date knowledge of SEO trends.
- It’s more time-consuming because of constantly keeping up with changes from Google algorithms and creating quality content for audiences.
Some examples of white hat SEO techniques include creating a blog post that serves as a helpful guide or gives a detailed answer, optimising website structure and design for easy navigation, developing link-building strategies that allow users to find answers faster, and using social media to build online relationships with key influencers.
Black Hat
The main reason black hat SEO is considered unethical is that it goes against the stated guidelines of most search engines, like Google.
Black hat techniques can be used to artificially inflate a website’s ranking in search results, and this can give the site an unfair advantage over other websites.
Additionally, black hat SEO can lead to poor user experience, since some of its techniques make a website difficult to read and use.
In other words, Black Hat SEO aims to satisfy Google algorithms more than the needs of the users.
Common Black Hat SEO practices include:
- Overstuffing blog posts with keywords that make them confusing and hard to read.
- Adding invisible keywords or hidden links to your web pages.
- Putting links on your page going to other websites, particularly those with high PageRank values, even if they’re unnecessary or don’t add any value.
- Providing content that’s completely different from what’s displayed in search engine results.
- Creating multiple pages with similar content.
Off-Page SEO
When you’re doing activities outside of your website to help improve its search engine ranking, then you’re doing Off-Page SEO. So anything that you do to build up your online presence and get people talking about your site falls under this category.
Most SEO tips for beginners will focus on On-Page SEO first but some put more emphasis on Off-Page after the initial set-up of their website.
External links
Online presence involves other websites mentioning your product or service as well as linking their content to yours.
These external links play an important role in SEO because they help search engines understand the popularity and relevancy of your website.
When your website has many high-quality external links pointing to it, that’s a strong signal that it is worth ranking highly in search results. On the other hand, if a website doesn’t have many external links, it may be less relevant and not worthy of as high of a ranking.
So, while external links are just one part of the SEO puzzle, it’s an important part nonetheless. So make sure to include them as part of your overall SEO strategy.
Citations
If you aim to use your website to target customers in your immediate area then you need to make sure your SEO tactics will also improve your citations from local business listings.
A citation is a mention of your business, usually in the form of a short sentence or paragraph, on either an online directory or an article about your local area.
There are several different citation websites out there, but the best one to use depends on your specific needs:
- Easybib can help your businesses get citations and backlinks easier. Doing so will help your website rank higher on search engine results pages. This increased visibility leads to more website traffic and, ultimately, more customers.
It also makes it easy for you to create customised bibliographies and works cited pages. This can be a valuable asset if your business wants to showcase any scholarly work and academic achievements.
Easybib even has a citation tracking feature that helps businesses keep track of where their citations are coming from and measure the impact of their marketing efforts.
- Google My Business optimises your business listing to show up in Google Maps and Google search results.
When customers search for a business on Google, they are more likely to find the business if it has a GMB listing. This is because websites listed in GMB show up in the search results before those that are not. In addition, it allows customers to leave reviews and ratings about your business.
- Yelp builds a large database of local businesses, which helps users find the businesses they’re looking for. Additionally, Yelp can help improve your business’s online presence by increasing your citations (references to your business from other websites).
Additionally, Yelp provides you with tools to improve those citations and helps you track customer reviews. This allows your businesses to see what customers are saying and respond accordingly.
Improve Page speed
A site’s loading time is a key factor in determining whether a visitor will stay on your page or leave. When people are forced to wait for your page to load, they get impatient. And since users hate waiting, they’ll likely never visit your website again which will ultimately hurt your traffic.
Needless to say, slow websites frustrate everyone. But more importantly, it affects your site’s search engine ranking because Google takes your site’s loading time into account when deciding whether to show it to more people or not. In other words, fast-loading websites tend to rank higher in search engine results pages than slow-loading ones.
Some of the most common factors that can slow down your website include:
- – Excessive use of scripts that lead to longer loading times
- – Use of large images or videos, which consume a lot of bandwidth
- – Having too many external links on one page, especially if they are not hosted on the same domain as your website
- – Not using caching plugins to store static pages and images which causes lags
- – Using a shared hosting account instead of a VPS or dedicated server.
So if you’re a start-up looking to improve your website’s visibility and attract more visitors, improving site speed is one of the most important SEO tips for beginners that you need to consider at every step. In our experience, using a good website host will ensure a marked improvement in speed and reliability.
Use SEO Tools to help you
The amount of data that’s available on the internet is staggering, and it’s only increasing every day. It would take you forever to manually analyze all that data to try and figure out what’s working and what’s not.
That’s where SEO tools come in. They automate the process of sorting through all that data and helping you to identify which strategies are working for you and which ones aren’t.
That way, you can focus your time and energy on the strategies that are getting results instead of wasting your time on tasks that do not improve your online presence.
Some of the most popular SEO tools out there are:
KWfinder
This is an online keyword research tool that helps you find long-tail keywords with high search volume and low competition.
It’s really easy to use – all you have to do is type in a keyword and KWFinder will show you a list of related keywords, as well as their search volume and competition level. You can also add filters to narrow down the results, including the language and location of your target audience.
KWFinder is subscription-based, but there’s a free trial so you can test it out before you buy.
SurferSEO
If you’re a business owner who wants to focus on optimising your content then SurferSEO is a good tool to have because it gives you a comprehensive look at your pages and compares them to what currently ranks in SERPs.
This tool gives you a data-driven analysis of exactly what your page and content need to rank higher instead of spending time figuring out what the Google algorithms may be asking for.
Their platform is easy to use, with drag-and-drop tools and preset templates that make high-quality SEO campaign creation simple. And they provide all the support you need to succeed, including 24/7 customer service, weekly training webinars, and free resources like their SEO blog and e-books.
SurferSEO is a fairly low-cost option, with monthly plans starting at just $19/month. They also offer a 7-day trial so you can test it out before you commit.
Screaming frog
This one is a desktop program that you can use to crawl your website and identify errors, problems, and opportunities for optimisation.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to quickly assess areas of your website that may need improvements – such as broken links or missing titles – and provides recommendations for fixing them. As it runs through your website content it also collects data about each page and how it is being found online (including search engine keyword rankings). This information can be used to help improve your organic search results and track the success of your SEO campaigns.
Overall, Screaming Frog is an effective SEO tool that can help you improve your website’s ranking and visibility. You can use this in conjunction with other tools to get the most benefit out of it.
Get more SEO tips from an experienced SEO consultant
In general, the more complex your website and online presence are, the more time you’ll need to spend optimising your website. The good news is even as a beginner, once you have a good understanding of the basics, you can start seeing results pretty quickly.
And, as with anything else related to running a business, the more effort you put in, the more successful you’ll be. So if you’re willing to put some time into learning SEO, the rewards will surely be worth your effort.
That said it can be helpful to hire a consultant to help you improve your website’s search engine ranking because in most cases, it will take your time away from managing your business.
If you don’t have the time or patience to learn SEO, or if you want to be sure that your website is getting the best possible treatment, then investing in an SEO agency is a wise decision. Not all of them are created equal though so it’s important to do your research and choose one with proven marketing results like Paramark.
We have been helping businesses grow online for over 10 years by using techniques for knowing different target audiences like financial services marketing which other agencies have difficulty doing.
Not only will we help improve your website’s search engine ranking, but we will also show you how to create content that engages customers and drives conversions.
So contact us today for a consultation session and let us show you what we can do for your business.
