Technical SEO
Technical SEO can seem a little daunting, but really, what we are talking about is ensuring that a search engine can read your content and explore your site. Much of this will be taken care of by the content management system you use, and tools like Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl can explore your website and highlight technical problems
The main areas to consider here are:
- Crawl:Can a search engine explore your site?
- Index: Is it clear which pages the search engine should index and return?
- Mobile: Does your site adapt for mobile users?
- Speed: Fast page load times are a crucial factor in keeping your visitors happy.
- Tech: Are you using search engine-friendly tech or CMS for your website?
- Hierarchy: How is your content structured on your website?
If you are a small business using WordPress for your website, technical SEO should be something you can check off your list pretty quickly. If you have a large, bespoke website with millions of pages, then technical SEO becomes much more important.
On-site SEO optimization
Your website should be optimized as a whole and at an individual page level. There is some crossover here from your technical SEO, and you want to start with a well-structured content hierarchy for your site.
Assuming you have a well-structured site, applying sensible optimization is again relatively straightforward. The main areas to focus on here are:
- Keyword Research: Understand the language of your target audience.
- Descriptive URLs: Ensure each URL is simple and descriptive.
- Page Titles: Use keywords naturally within the page title.
- Meta Descriptions: Craft meta descriptions like they were ad copy to drive clicks.
- Content optimization: Sensibly use keywords and variations in your page copy.
- Good user experience (UX): Ensure your site is a joy to use and navigate.
- Strong calls to action: Make it easy for your users to know what to do next.
- Structured data markup: Tap into the latest SERP features to improve click-through rates.
When optimizing your site, take time to consider your customers. If you are a local business, then local SEO is more important, and your address and location become crucial optimization points.
With solid technical SEO in place, layering your on-page optimization is straightforward. Use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl and identify weaknesses and methodically work through your pages.
- Service content: What you do and where you do it.
- Credibility content: Why a prospect should engage with your business.
- Marketing content: Content that helps position you as an expert and puts your business in front of prospects earlier in the buying cycle.
It’s really important to realize that SEO is important for all of these kinds of content, but it is often only really considered for service-type content. SEO is often forgotten when it comes to credibility content like reviews, testimonials and case studies.
As a simple example, I recently renovated a Victorian-era house in the UK, and throughout the process, I was looking for various professionals that could demonstrate relevant experience. In this case, having a well-optimized case study showing renovation work on a similar house in the local area would serve as great long-tail SEO content — it also perfectly demonstrates that the contractor can do the job, which perfectly illustrates their credibility. Win-win.
Content
Content is king. That’s the saying, right? It’s true in a way. Your website is really just a wrapper for your content. Your content tells prospects what you do, where you do it, who you have done it for, and why someone should use your business. And if you’re smart, your content should also go beyond these obvious brochure-type elements and help your prospective customers achieve their goals.
For service businesses, we can loosely break your content down into three categories:
Service content: What you do and where you do it.
Credibility content: Why a prospect should engage with your business.
Marketing content: Content that helps position you as an expert and puts your business in front of prospects earlier in the buying cycle.
It’s really important to realize that SEO is important for all of these kinds of content, but it is often only really considered for service-type content. SEO is often forgotten when it comes to credibility content like reviews, testimonials and case studies.
As a simple example, I recently renovated a Victorian-era house in the UK, and throughout the process, I was looking for various professionals that could demonstrate relevant experience. In this case, having a well-optimized case study showing renovation work on a similar house in the local area would serve as great long-tail SEO content — it also perfectly demonstrates that the contractor can do the job, which perfectly illustrates their credibility. Win-win.
Ensure you optimize all of your marketing content, including case studies, portfolio entries and testimonials — not just the obvious service pages.
A solid content marketing and SEO strategy is also the most scalable way to promote your business to a wide audience. And this generally has the best ROI, as there is no cost per click — so you are scaling your marketing without directly scaling your costs. This kind of SEO strategy is not right for every business, but when it is a good fit, it’s almost unbeatable.
Linking
Internal Links
Linking your content internally helps improve the authority and visibility of your content. It’s probably the most simplest element of SEO.
How you build internal links is by linking one piece of your content to another piece of content that ideally covers a similar topic.
Tips to build good internal links?
- Limit the number of internal links to 3 or 4 maximum per 2000 words article
- Keep the internal links as natural as possible
- Try to include your keyword within your anchor text wherever it feels natural. Do not overdo it.
Backlinks
Backlinks are another key element of SEO. The more Backlinks you’ve, the more it tells Google that “Hey, this website seems awesome. Everybody is linking to it.”
There are several advantages to this. Backlinks can drive a ton of traffic to your blog, they can pass on the link juice if it’s a do-follow link resulting in higher rankings. Backlinks can also help you improve your domain authority.
How do you build good backlinks?
- If you’re guest posting, only guest post at sites similar to your business.
- Check the domain authority, spam score of the website you’re guest posting on. You can use the tool, Keywords Everywhere for doing this.
- Try to get more do-follow links as they’re more beneficial in improving your website’s rankings
- Find websites that are backlinking to your competitor’s website and then send them an email convincing why they should link to yours
- Find out broken or invalid links to replace it with yours
Optimising Keywords
This important element of SEO can either make or break your content strategy. Keywords are essentially common search terms used by the searchers.
Keywords can be short-tail keywords or long-tail keywords. For example, “Book” is a short-tail keyword whereas “Buy inspirational books” is a long-tail keyword idea. Both are important, as ranking for a short-tail keyword can give you traffic while ranking for a long-tail keyword can give you more conversions.
Tips for Keyword Optimization:
- Combine both short and long tail keyword within your blog
- Try to target a maximum of 3 keywords per website page
- Try to include your primary keyword within the first 100 words of your article
- Also include keywords with buyer intent
- Include your primary keyword within your title tag and H1 tag
- Within your blog post, make sure you also include related keywords to your primary keyword
- Make use of Google’s “People also ask” snippet
- Keywords Everywhere and Ubersuggest are cost-effective and great tools for keyword research.
