SEO explained: How to improve your website’s ranking in 10 steps

You type “best moisturizer for dry skin” or “Nike runners” into your search bar, and within a second are met with millions of results. But you probably don’t think about how or why you get the results you do.

The average user isn’t going to think about the hours, weeks, months and years of work that go into any given website appearing in the first page of a search engine results page. Yet that’s exactly what it takes to achieve Search Engine Optimisation, known as SEO. 

SEO is a digital marketing process of bettering the quality and quantity of your website traffic, through optimising a website’s functionality, design and content. Largely, the focus is to optimise for Google who, as of June 2021, maintained a market share of 92.47%. 

It is believed that SEO came to fruition when the first known website in the world was launched in 1991, eight years after the internet came to be. Unsurprisingly, It took less than a decade for the virtual world to get a little noisy, and so came the need to get creative — and competitive. 

Think about SEO as Monopoly: the aim of the game is to get as much real estate as you can. The more eyes you can get in front of, the better your chances of moving users through the funnel and turning them into converting customers. 

But how can you go about it? 

The 10 ways to improve your website’s SEO

1. Focus on the brilliant basics

   Create an organisational legacy of excellence via early goal-setting. Focus on the priorities and desired outcomes of your website and Marie Kondo the rest. If you nail the basics early, life will be a lot easier later. Ask yourself: will your chosen website categories still be relevant in five years?

   Ensure your URL structures are clear and concise by limiting unnecessary words such as “and”. Everyone who manages the website should know how to write a compelling page title, meta description and which keywords to include across various landing pages and why.

2. Pretend you’re in a shopping centre when designing the user flow 

   Whether you’re selling tote bags or pottery classes, you need to remember that your website is a virtual shop front. Pretend you’re in a shopping centre: there are 16 sports shops that are vying for your customer’s attention. Often customer’s will decide to enter a shop because they can see what they’re looking for in the window; the shop is well laid out; or they know that they’ll get good value for their money.

   There are numerous factors that play a role in purchasing decisions. A user experience holds great weight in the decision making process, meaning it should not be under-valued. Whether you’re selling a product or service, the ability to do so should not be three clicks away from the homepage.

3. Don’t just focus on keywords, think about intent 

   Traditionally, it is believed that if you put a keyword on a page enough times, the landing page will show up on the search engine results page. This is no longer the case, as search engines are much more intelligent these days.

   Including “Nike runners” or “tote bags” on a landing page 60 times does not ensure that your page will get ranked. Instead, you need to focus on user intent. Leaning into keyword research and answering the most commonly asked queries around a certain topic will help, and — when coupled with a great user experience — your chances of visibility via SEO are greatly improved. 

4. Constantly ask yourself: Are you answering the question? 

   Not to take away from poetic licence and brand tone of voice, but are you answering the question? Really? Are you?

   Flowery long winding paragraphs that speak around a topic as opposed to through it are less likely to end up ranking well with SEO, meaning they won’t land on a search engine results page.

   If you do want your webpages to get more attention, you need the metadata to do exactly what it says on the tin. The language on the page needs to speak to that user’s intent. In sum, understand your audience, answer their questions, and make it easier for them click ‘purchase’. 

5. Keep page load speeds low… or lose 

   There is no time for slow page load speeds today. The greater the page load time, the higher user bounce rate and lower click through rate. Ensure that all of your pages are firing — fast — via Google Search Console.

   Google Search Console is also a great tool if you are new to SEO, because it offers a step-by-step guide on how to fix identified issues.

6. EAT: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness 

   Remember Google’s whopping market share? Well, Google ranks websites and webpages based on three key principles, being expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

   In the simplest of terms, the likelihood of your website or webpage ranking will heavily depend on whether the website and web pages provide credible sources of information that add value to a user’s search intent.

   For example, a heart surgeon would be a perfect candidate to write a piece about cholesterol and heart disease. When it comes to the e-commerce space, including product or experience reviews helps to build out the EAT score.

   In the event where no credible sources can be found, externally linking to validated and respected sources of information is another way to help build up your EAT score and, subsequently, your SEO ranking. 

7. Keep it visual 

   If you are on the fence about how your content is being perceived by search engines, remember that bots/spiders/crawlers (the things that trawl the internet for pages, index them in the relevant library and serve them back to users) are not sentient; i.e. they are not experiencing feelings based on your pages.

   However, this does not mean that you should disregard the use of images and videos on your pages.

   No one likes a wall of text, whether you’re an unfeeling web robot or a person who is learning more about SEO. Keep the content short and snappy. Use bullet pointed lists where it makes sense to do so. Include evocative headings that pose a question and answer it below. Including images and videos that have been originally created in-house are even better. 

   Essentially, the easier the content is to engage with on a page, the more likely it is to end up in a rich snippet on the search engine results page.

   N.B: make sure that all multimedia is optimised with alternative text. This means that screen-readers can be used on the page and ensuring that your pages are created with accessibility in mind is not just an important SEO ranking factor, it’s also the right thing to do. 

8. Link up 

   Links are currency online. This means that every time you include a link, whether it’s to your website or another website, you are offering a sustainable marketing stream. The more traffic a website or webpage gets, the more powerful the link is.

   There are two types of link streams: internal and external. Something that you can easily do is create an internal linking structure across your website.

   Start broadly and insert links to key pages on your homepage. From the category pages, link out to your priority landing pages and, from there, include links to related pages.

   Including internal linking across your website means that you are moving your currency around, and you are also creating better pathways for bots to crawl through the website. This makes the website easier to index, and therefore has a better chance of ranking in the search engine results page.

9. Reduce, reuse, recycle for a low hanging fruit approach 

   The thought of creating, designing and filling new webpages may be daunting. It can seem like too much of a time commitment, but do not fear, because repurposing and republishing evergreen content, regularly updating metadata to match seasonality and fleshing out content into different formats are all less time intensive (and expensive) ways of getting the best bang for your buck.

   Lead with data, understand which landing pages are garnering the most organic traffic month-on-month and focus on improving their rankings on the search engine results page before diving into the medium and low traffic landing pages.

10. Invest in SEO 

    Remember: consistency is key when it comes to SEO, and that is because it truly is important to view SEO as a long term investment.

    Search engine optimisation has only been around for a little over 30 years and it is constantly evolving, which means that investing in a specialist who has their finger on search trends as well as technical and on-page gravitas is key to keep your strategy moving.

    As SEO is not a digital campaign that you can turn on and off, it is important to view SEO as an essential part of your developer and content team — not a short-term project.