SEO made simple: step-by-step guide to success
Do you want to improve your website's search engine ranking? Do you want to know what are essential steps to take for your website’s SEO? Is SEO just using keywords? Can you do SEO yourself? Does it all sound a bit daunting to you?
I get it, it can be a bit much and there’s soooo much info out there. But don't let SEO intimidate you any longer - let me demystify what SEO is all about and how you should be thinking about it. Unlock the power of SEO with this step-by-step guide for empowered business owners.
SEO is a major topic of discussion everywhere you look but you don’t have to be an SEO expert to make considerable strides towards increasing your website’s SEO ranking. In this blogpost I want to give you a clear guide to help you understand how to approach this beast we call SEO. By understanding the building blocks and the general approach to SEO you can make better and more informed decisions if you decide to give it a try yourself or if you hire someone to help you.
How you should be thinking
Before we dive into the details, the main point I want to make is that search engines are on a mission to provide the most valuable and relevant content and the best experience to their users. If you remember this simple fact, then search engine optimization (SEO) becomes less of a daunting task that you don’t understand but rather yet another reason why your website should be designed strategically and professionally. You’ll see that most of the below ideas will not only improve your SEO but also your overall website user experience.
I know there’s a lot of info out there about SEO and there’s pressure to get it right. What ends up happening is, business owners tend to focus too much on nitty bitty SEO tasks or focusing only on keywords, but that’s the wrong approach. You need to remember that your website should always be designed to appeal to and provide value for your target audience, not Google. After all, your target audience are the end users of your website while Google is simply an intermediary, trying to connect your audience with your content.
How? Google is trying to understand if your website is valuable and relevant for their users through their highly complex algorithms and SEO ranking factors. The trick is to create a professionally designed and strategic website with your ideal target audience in mind, creating content and offerings that are valuable to them and then make little but powerful tweaks that cater to the specifics of SEO. And have some fun with it, SEO is a process, not an end goal!
Alright, let’s dive into the details for your SEO efforts to unlock your SEO success with confidence!
Website structure and contents
First things first, your website needs to have a clear and easily understandable structure and contents. That means that both your users and also Google need to find your website easy to understand and valuable enough to spend time on. Google is on a mission to understand your website structure and contents so that they can deliver the best and most relevant results for their users. The better Google understands your website, the better your SEO ranking will get. It’s only one of the many SEO ranking factors, but it’s an important one.
How? To help your SEO efforts, make sure your website content creation and website design processes follow a clear and structured plan. Make sure that all the work that goes into your website follows a structured approach - organize content by pages, sections, headings, paragraphs, categories, goals, ideas etc. Do everything you can to create a crystal clear structure and organize your contents in a neat and structured way.
Use on-page headings and paragraphs according to their hierarchy (heading 1, heading 2, heading 3 etc). Correctly utilizing headings and paragraphs signals the structure of your page to Google. This applies to your whole site - all pages, blog posts, any collection or summary element blocks and galleries. Make page titles concise, descriptive, relevant and enticing.
URL Structure. In terms of your URL structure, aim to keep it simple, clear and descriptive. Keyword usage matters and you should always use relevant keywords for your URL slugs. Don’t use cryptic descriptions, a combination of words that are hard to remember or words that are difficult to spell. Definitely do not use a random combination of letter and numbers or special characters that means nothing at all and takes ages to even read. Aim to create URLs that are super easy to remember and type in. This will hands down create a better experience for yourself and your website visitors. Trust me, simple and easy-to-remember URLs are a life-saver for when you need to use them yourself, there’s no downside to this.
One thing to keep in mind when moving your website from one platform to another - aim to keep to the same site structure and URLs as much as possible. And remember to submit the new sitemap to the search engine to ensure that Google indexes your new site. That way you will lessen the negative SEO effects of moving your site to a new platform and you’ll see results in Google quicker. Same applies if you are making any large changes on your website site, resubmit it for indexing.
Content. The quality of your website content matters a lot too. You need to make sure that your website content and copy is aligned with your brand (think about the messaging and tone as well as visual elements), that your contents promote your strategic goals (intentional and deliberate), that your website copy is engaging, valuable and interesting. You should aim to strike the right balance of information to ensure you are not including too much or too little information. Periodically review and update your contents or take up blogging to ensure that you provide relevant and valuable information on your website.
Bear in mind that search engines use highly complex algorithms to crawl and index websites and while there’s no pass-fail grading for your website structure and contents, ensuring that you do everything in your power to keep it neat, clean and relevant will always work to your advantage.
Mobile Optimization
You want to do everything in your power to ensure that your website gives an amazing impression and has the best chance to rank higher in search engines. That includes ensuring that your website is responsive or mobile-friendly.
Responsive design is an SEO ranking because mobile device users make up more than half of Internet traffic. That’s right, I’m talking about the WHOLE internet traffic. Mobile-friendly website design is an SEO ranking factor because search engines are constantly looking for ways to provide the best experience and best results for their users. So yep, all your pages should be mobile-friendly or you’ll get punished by ranking lower in search results if you don’t have it. That, in turn, will make it much harder for your audience to find you. Google tracks whether or not your page has a responsive design and whether the contents of your website are mobile-user friendly. By this I mean the design of your pages adjusting to different device sizes and about how readable and legible the contents of your site are. These elements are tracked on an individual-page level and Google assigns a pass or fail scoring for each of your pages. In case of notable mobile responsiveness or usability issues Google will assign your page a failing status that will significantly hamper your SEO efforts.
I keep saying this and I’ll keep repeating it, it’s a non-negotiable, your website NEEDS to be responsive and optimized for mobile devices. It’s a major red flag to Google AND your audience if your website is not optimized for mobile devices as it has the potential to completely derail all your other marketing and sales efforts. Just think about it from your own perspective - if you ever happen to land on a website that appears glitchy or not properly set up for your mobile device, it speaks very negatively about the business.
So quick recap - a mobile-friendly, clearly organized website with valuable contents is essential for businesses. By designing your website to be responsive to all devices (desktop, tablet, mobile) and strategically shaping a great (mobile) user experience you will increase your chances of ranking higher in Google and also converting your audience into paying clients.
User experience
Your website’s user experience is critical for your website’s success and SEO ranking. Shaping an amazing user experience needs to be incorporated into virtually every aspect of your website design. From an SEO perspective, website user experience is largely tracked by search engines as your website loading speed, engagement metrics and similar. Why? Because search engines prioritize ways to provide fast, efficient and useful information and a better user experience to their users.
FREE RESOURCE
WEBSITE DESIGN & BRANDING CHECKLIST
If you’re wondering… What are key elements of a strategic website design & branding? How to ensure your website & brand identity tick all the boxes? Does your current website & branding (still) suit your needs?
At its worst, slow loading times frustrate your visitors to the point that they leave the website before it even fully loads, which is too early for them to engage with your content or take the desired action. Annoying and frustrating your visitors is never a good idea but it’s also a red flag for search engines. Slow loading times can cause a high bounce rate and low engagement metrics which in turn has a negative impact on the website's reputation and SEO ranking. If your website speed is sub-optimal it will harm your search engine ranking and the traffic you see on your site.
Website loading speed is an important SEO ranking factor and it’s important to pay attention to and optimize your website’s loading time and overall performance. We all have ever-decreasing attention spans and a very low patience. If a website takes even a little longer to load than you’d like it to then it will instantly impact your experience and Google knows it.
Important to note that poor loading times can hamper mobile users' experience more than for desktop users. If your website loading time is poor on a desktop where you usually have a more stable internet connection, then imagine what it looks like to someone who’s on a mobile device and may have a slightly worse internet connection? Slow load times can be particularly problematic to someone who’s on the go, has a slower internet connection and has even less attention or patience. So putting this together, by ensuring that your website is mobile friendly, loads quickly and provides a great experience you are increasing your chances of ranking higher in search engines.
Meta Tags
The most common meta tags are the title and description of a website as a whole as well as for its individual pages. They provide information about your site and its individual pages to search engines, social media platforms and web browsers that again enables them to show the most relevant search results for their users.
This is the exact information that shows up in search results. We’re so used to a set standard of how information is presented in Google that we don’t even notice it. It’s a combination of the URL, meta title and description so it’s very important to make these attention grabbing, informative and use relevant keywords. Squarespace calls them SEO Titles and Descriptions and even provides you an illustration on how your inputs will show up in the search results.
Let’s talk about some best practices. Your SEO title should be concise and informative. A good rule of thumb is to keep it below 100 characters and remember that this is not a place for keyword dumping. Instead, create clear, captivating and valuable titles for your website pages that invite people to click on your site. Your SEO description should be complementary to your SEO title, provide interesting and relevant information and capture your audience's attention. Think of it as a brief summary of your page - talk about what value are you providing, what solutions are you providing, what goals are you promoting with it. Keep it short and to the point, the max is 400 characters but you'll get cut off as only the first 150ish characters are directly visible so aim to keep it around 150-200 characters. And remember - what you write in the meta tags needs to be aligned with the actual contents of the page. If there’s a mismatch, visitors will feel let down and leave directly which isn’t creating any SEO benefits.
Keywords
Now to the most talked about SEO element - keywords. While relevant keywords are important, it’s not everything so it’s not the main topic of this blog post. But it definitely deserves a mention. The key thing you should remember is this - ensure that the keywords you use accurately represent the content on the page and are relevant to you because keywords signal to Google what type of content your site contains.
To make the most of using keywords you need to invest some time into keyword research. The aim is to identify the keywords that are the most relevant and high-performing specifically for your business taking into account your industry, services, market demand and similar factors. Once you have a list of keywords then incorporate them strategically in your meta tags and throughout your site.
And a few mistakes I often see is focusing too much on only keywords (vs contents of your website), using too many keywords all at once, or using all keywords all the time. If you are too focused on keywords and you fill your site with content that’s there only for keyword purposes then I’m here to tell you to take it down a notch. Your user experience matters more than keywords. Remember that your website is for people, not for Google. Focus on providing value for your audience and strike the right balance for keyword usage.
Alright, I hope you found this useful and that this blog post has helped you understand SEO a little better. It’s not only about using keywords all the time, but rather another reason to take your website design more seriously. I may be biased but I do hope that you see the value in investing in professional website design that places your strategic goals at the center of attention while impressing your audience with an amazing user experience and also aiding your search engine ranking.
Now go put these tips into action, you got this!
You might also be interested in:
Website user experience mistakes to avoid - Discover some of the most common website user experience mistakes and how to avoid them. Dive into more details about strategically and purposefully shaping a great user experience on your website as part of website design.
What elements should website design include? - Discover the key elements that a strategically and professionally designed website design includes besides creating stunning visuals. Plus, find steps to enable you to have a hands-on approach for your own website.
Website strategy: What is it and how do you create one? - Discover what a website strategy is, why you need one and when you should start thinking about it. Read about website strategy development and find the exact questions you should be clear on. Plus, find examples of good & poor website goals.
You absolutely can and should…
Reclaim ease of mind - Save your precious time and energy, enjoy the process without any stress or overwhelm and have fun while ticking all the boxes for your design needs. Our signature process is stress-free and offers you all-in-one support.
Own your story - Beat the overwhelm and gain confidence in writing your own storyline. We introduce structure and clarity into the process, place your strategic goals at the center of attention and impress your audience with stunning visuals.
Realize your vision - Leave behind struggling, searching the internet for hours on end or winging it when it comes to your design needs. We help bring your vision to life through fully customized, strategic and unique designs that fit your needs best.
You can also reach out to ask any questions about your online presence, I’d be more than happy to help! Or if you're ready to jump in and turn your vision into a reality then you can have a look at our offering now!
Get useful content delivered straight to your inbox
If you want more helpful tips and useful information about website design and branding delivered directly to your inbox then make sure to join our Mailing list now! As a mailing list subscriber you can expect to be the first to hear about our new content and gain exclusive access to mailing-list only offers.ent and get exclusive access to mailing-list only offers.
P.S. Scrolled to the end of the blog post? Grab your free copy of the Website Design & Branding Checklist to finally get some clarity on whether your online presence ticks all the boxes!
Reclaim ease of mind | Own your story | Realize your vision