Learn how to optimise your content so people find your website using search engines such as Google.
Keyword research
Keywords are search terms that people enter into search engines. They’re important for how high up your site appears in search engine results.
As a site manager, you’ll want your website to be relevant for the things that your users are searching for, so they can easily find your website content.
The goal is to create content that will rank well with search engines, attract people to click on your website and generate visits to your website. This is known as organic search traffic.
The more relevant your site pages are for certain keywords, the higher up in the search listings your pages will appear. This is important because generally the further down the results your site appears, the fewer click-throughs you’ll get.
Evaluate popular terms
You can evaluate popular search terms using a range of tools, such as:
- Google Trends lets you enter up to 6 keywords to get an indication of the most popular terms. You can filter your comparison to the UK
- Answer the Public can give you an idea about the different variations of search terms and questions people ask when using search engines
- UberSuggest or SerpStat can give you an indication of traffic volumes and the estimated difficulty to rank high in the search listings
- Moz lets you enter competitor website pages and see what terms they are using to appear in the search listings
The most popular term does not always mean the best as they can make it more competitive to appear higher up the search rankings. Try and find a niche – a searched term where you can be competitive in the search rankings.
Once you know the most popular keywords you can prioritise them in the:
- URL
- title
- introductory sentence or page summary
- headings
- chapter headings
- metadata descriptions
Use descriptive URLs and titles
Two of the most important areas to include your target keywords are in the URL and main page title – the H1 heading. Ideally, both the URL and title should include any identified keyword.
As a general guideline, URLs should be short and user-friendly. Choose hyphens instead of underscores to separate words.
You should be careful about changing URL structure if it’s just a tweak rather than an opportunity to completely overhaul your SEO strategy. Changing a URL can cause broken links.
Remember to check for broken links and put in place redirects to the former URLs.
Page content
Find opportunities to include keywords in your page such as page headings (H2, H3). You’re not trying to cheat the search engines so it’s a good idea not to overuse them.
You should create page content that meets user needs and reads clearly. Look out for small tweaks where adding or removing a word might add your keyword to the page.
Internal and external links
Including relevant links to other pages in your site (internal) and to other websites (outbound) will help search engine optimisation (SEO). Adding a meaningful link description is good for accessibility and good for SEO too.
Meta page titles and meta page descriptions
Meta titles and descriptions are the title and summary shown when your page is found in search listings. It’s a good idea to include the target keywords in these fields, where possible, and clearly tell users about your page so they know if it’s relevant to their search.
Some Website Builder sites use SEO plug-ins (such as Yoast) to help with this. Speak to us if this is something you need.
Improve backlinks
Increasing the number of websites that send users to your site will help SEO.
You could ask other website owners to include links to your site. Think about including a link on your social media channels, or on information that might get circulated and shared further, such as a newsletter, news story or press release.
The more authoritative and trusted the website, the better it is for your SEO. For example, a link from GOV.UK is likely to help your website to rank higher on Google.
Editorial strategy
Think about how to keep the content on your website relevant, fresh and updated.
You can do this through:
- regular news articles
- articles on current popular topics
- articles focusing on target keywords, perhaps answering questions entered into search engines
You can also promote your articles on social media, providing useful content for your social media feeds and driving more traffic to your site.