SEO is something that every website owner should be thinking about but the barrier to entry may seem scary. It’s important to know that whilst you can spend hundreds on SEO campaigns, you can do some basic things that will have a significant impact on your ranking.
Utilise SEO Plugins
Yoast is an excellent free WordPress plugin that analysis your content and suggests how you can improve your content based around a focus keyphrase that you define. Using this alone will help you write better content for your website that will help increase your chance of being found as well as providing a better experience for users.
Social Images
There are also other settings you should check out like the default social image. This will mean even if your post/page doesn’t have an image that Facebook/Twitter can detect you’ll always have one when sharing a post/page. Making you look better on social media, but we did a separate post specifically about how you manage that easier.
Going Premium
We use Yoast on every site we build and more often than not utilise the Premium version which offers some nice additional features like internal linking suggestions, a redirect manager, their support team and much more.
Post regularly and research your topics
Google loves to see your site updated regularly, it helps them know your business is active. So it’s a good idea to post updates regularly. To help with that you can make the use of Google Trends, which may not directly impact your SEO but it can be used in your ongoing SEO strategy. The tool allows you to enter search terms and see how much they’re being searched for.
So if you plan on writing a blog post, have a look at what’s currently being searched for and see if you can make it relevant. For example, you see lots of businesses talking about working from home at the moment. This is because they know people are looking up these articles. It’s fine to do posts like this as long as you’re putting your own spin on them. We recently did one and discussed how we’ve been making working from home easier.
No more dead ends
If there is one thing Google hates its dead ends. What we mean by this is a post/page that doesn’t link to another post/page within its content. However, it is important that you don’t just put in random links. Make sure you link to relevant content to make the user journey make sense.
Having a good balance of internal and external links is also something you should think about. If you have too many externals links your sending people away from your website. So by having a good balance you let people understand you’re referencing other businesses but you’re also keeping people looking at other content on your website.
Optimise your images for SEO
You may not think your images have an impact on SEO but they do and it can be one of the easiest things you can do to help improve your score.
The first thing you want to do with your images is to upload them at an appropriate size for what you’re using them for. If it’s just going to be a small logo, you don’t have to use a 1200px x 450px version. Perhaps consider scaling it down. Then you want to optimise it so the file size isn’t too large, we’ve written a whole article just on optimisation that you can find here. Finally when you upload it make sure you give your image alt text. This can easily be done in the WordPress media library.
WP Smush
Smush is a free plugin created by WPMU Dev. There is a premium version available but if you run a small site you’ll likely be fine with the free version.
The plugin compresses any images already on your site, 50 images at a time (bulk compression is a premium feature) reducing the file size meaning less loading for your customers. You can also set it to smush images as they’re uploaded going forward.
It’s now become a standard part of any of our WordPress builds so we highly suggest you check it out.
Make the most of free advice
Finally, make the most out of the free resources available. There are plenty of completely free tools you can use to scan your site to help you make improvements.
Neil Patel has an excellent SEO Analyzer and also posts SEO tips on his blog constantly.
GT Metrix isn’t directly SEO advice, but following their advice on what improvements to make to your website will have an effect on your SEO.
Sem Rush can scan your site and provide some fantastic and extremely helpful feedback.
There are much more but these are a few of the websites we recommend you take advantage of. Just because you don’t have the budget for an SEO agency doesn’t mean your site shouldn’t be found. You just have to do a few basic things to help increase your SEO rating. If you do need a hand though, we’re always about for a social distanced Zoom chat.