5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website SEO

One of the biggest questions we get from our clients is understanding where to start when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). The words “search engine optimization” sound technical, and frankly, a little scary! You might feel like you have to spend hours invested in understanding this strategy in order to capture any leads from Google. Well, we are here to share five easy ways to improve your website SEO. Regardless of whether you’ve thought about SEO for your website or not, these tips are the perfect starting point.

Don’t wait any longer to start making updates. If you dedicate 10 minutes a day, a week or even a month to make tiny tweaks to improve your website SEO, we promise that you will see results in the months to come. 

Let’s walk through five easy ways to improve your website SEO:

1. Page Headers

Let’s start with the copy on your website. Check out your headlines for each page. Do you see any business-relevant keywords used throughout your copy? If you are a photographer, the words photography should probably be used. Along with long tail keywords that further describe your business, for example “Minnesota wedding and branding photography”. If you are a graphic designer, ecommerce site or selling a service, make sure those keywords that clearly define your business are being used throughout your website copy and headlines. These keywords are the only way that Google knows what your website is all about. This is extremely important for SEO. The next time someone is searching for a local graphic designer, you might just pop up!

Once you’ve identified some keywords that speak to your business, you need to begin to infuse them throughout your website. It’s also important to make sure you have only one H1 header for each page of your website. These headers and the most important headers for SEO purposes. They should contain your most relevant keywords. Your website provider will help you identify which headlines are considered H1. 

Key Takeaway: update your H1 header on each page to use long-tail keywords that clearly define your business or brand.

Need a refresher on what SEO keywords are? Check out this blog post.

2. Page Speed

Visit Google PageSpeed Insights and see what ranking you have for both mobile and desktop. Did you know that 53% of mobile users leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, according to Google? Improving your page speed can be an easy way to improve your website SEO. Oftentimes, the biggest issue Google PageSpeed identifies is image size. Simply follow the prompts and read through Google’s suggestions to help increase your websites page speed. 

Key Takeaway: visit Google PageSpeed Insights and try to get your mobile and desktop website in the green with a score of 90+. 

3. Alt Text

Did you know that Google’s algorithm cannot view images as efficiently as it can text? When Google crawls your website, it depends on something called alt text to help understand what the image is. For example, say you are selling baked goods, a cookie might look similar to a pancake, donut or pizza. Without this alt text, Google can’t determine with certainty what that image is. 

If you are in a very visual industry like photography or apparel, alt text is going to be extremely important to help improve your SEO. Here are some simple tips when determining the alt text for your images:

• Make sure the keywords are relevant to the image. Don’t name an image something it’s not just to rank for that keyword.⁣
• Don’t keyword stuff. If your keyword is “donuts” don’t name your file “donuts_donut holes_filled donuts_box of donuts.jpg” Google doesn’t like this! Keep it simple.⁣
• In addition to your alt text, make sure to also name your file with these keywords. Believe it or not, Google can read those deep layers of these images.⁣
• Don’t force your keyword into the alt text if it isn’t working. For example, your blog post may have a ton of supporting images, not all of them should use your chosen keyword. ⁣

Key Takeaway: update your images on each page to include relevant keywords in your alt text. If you have dozens or hundreds of blog posts, update the highest performing posts vs. trying to update every single blog. Save your sanity! Google Analytics can help you identify what your highest performing posts are. 

Not sure how to find these keywords? Here are 4 SEO keyword research tools that can help!

4. URL Structure

Click around on your website and take a look at how your URLs are structured. When you click on a blog post does your URL look like this: www.example.com/blog/12-31-2019/dr432fr? If so, this is another simple way to improve your website SEO. Take a look at this blog post for example, you can see that the URL ends with blog/improve-website-seo. We chose this URL on purpose. We want to first identify the page [our blog] then we wanted to use our keyword to describe the post [improve website SEO]. 

Most of the time you can change these structures to be automatic through your website provider or through a WordPress plugin called Yoast. That way you simply need to add in your keyword, but the structure, or layers of your URL, will be consistent.

Here is a quick breakdown of what your URL structure should look like:

Domain – Subcategory – File Name (this is typically where your keyword lives)

Key Takeaway: Go to your website provider and find out what your URL structure is saved as. Make sure it is simple and follows the breakdown shown above. 

5. Content Strategy

Updating your website consistently tells Google that you are an active business or service. Because of that, Google makes sure to crawl your website more frequently. This can be difficult to do if your website only consists of one page and doesn’t allow for easy updates. That is why identifying a digital content strategy is another way to improve your website SEO. This ensures that Google will crawl your content and display your website on search engine pages for those relevant keywords.

A successful content strategy can consist of a blog, posting new testimonials, updating a digital portfolio with new client work, or consistently updating your services or offerings. Don’t forget to infuse those keywords into your website copy and headers! 

Key Takeaway: Identify what your content strategy will be in order to update your website consistently. Make sure to set goals for yourself to ensure you stay on track. 

There you have it, five simple ways to improve your website SEO in order to start ranking for those relevant keywords. We will continue to share more ways to make simple updates here and there. SEO doesn’t have to be a full time job. Simply dedicate a few minutes a week to one of these steps. Plus, with consistency, these tips will become habits whenever you’re making future changes to your website.

Stop delaying and add one of these steps to your list this week. Comment below and tell us which one you are working on so we can cheer you on! 

If you are looking to take things to the next level, then we have just the course for you! It’s called SEO On Tap.