What is SEO and 15 steps to implement it and increase website traffic.
What is SEO and how to improve yours?
Search Engine Optimisation - or SEO- is a way of making sure that your customers can find you, and the solution you offer to their problems, online, easily. It makes your website appear in search results when a stranger is looking for a business like yours.
In the past, website owners resorted to tactics like keyword stuffing - adding important search terms to their website, photo captions and even hiding text in the same colour as the background. Google and other search engines have become much more sophisticated and now punish websites that don’t play fair. Google also ranks websites based on the quality of the information and the user experience.
A few years ago Google introduced an EAT score (Expertise, Authority, and Trust), a set of quality guidelines to assess the credibility and value of online content. It emphasises the importance of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of websites and content creators. EAT signals to search engines that a website can be trusted to provide accurate and reliable information, resulting in higher search rankings.
In 2023 Google extended this to EEAT.
EEAT takes EAT a step further by considering not only the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of the content creator but also the extended expertise within the specific topic or industry. It recognizes that subject matter experts can have varying levels of expertise in different niches, allowing for a more nuanced evaluation of content relevance and credibility.
Features and Benefits of EAT and EEAT:
Credibility and Trust: EAT and EEAT help establish credibility and trustworthiness, making your website a reliable source of information in the eyes of search engines and users.
Higher Search Rankings: Adhering to EAT and EEAT guidelines can lead to improved search rankings, as search engines prioritise trustworthy and authoritative content.
User Satisfaction: By providing accurate and high-quality content, you enhance the user experience, fostering trust and loyalty among your audience.
Niche Authority: EEAT enables subject matter experts to showcase their expertise in specific niches, positioning themselves as authorities in their respective fields.
Competitive Advantage: Embracing EAT and EEAT principles gives you a competitive edge by demonstrating your expertise and credibility compared to competitors who may not prioritize these factors.
EAT, EEAT, and SEO:
EAT and EEAT are closely tied to search engine algorithms and play a vital role in SEO strategies. Search engines like Google consider EAT and EEAT signals when determining search rankings. To optimise your website for these factors, consider the following SEO practices:
Quality Content: Create well-researched, informative, and authoritative content that aligns with your niche and expertise.
Backlinks: Earn high-quality backlinks from reputable websites, as they validate your expertise and authority.
Expert Contributors: Collaborate with industry experts and influencers to enhance your website's credibility and expertise.
User Experience: Prioritize user experience by ensuring a user-friendly website design, easy navigation, and fast loading speed.
Social Proof: Leverage social proof, such as testimonials and reviews, to reinforce trust and credibility.
So what else can you do to improve your SEO?
SEO involves a number of actions website owners can take.
1. Sitewide settings:
Structure your content - Structure your pages with headings to keep your text skim-friendly and help search engines navigate your content.
Add alt text to images - In addition to increasing accessibility for visitors who use assistive screen readers, alt text also helps search engines identify the content of a page.
Add social sharing images and SEO descriptions - As you add new pages to your site, give them social sharing logos and SEO descriptions
Give your images readable file names - Image file names may also be used as alt text.
Add tags and categories - Organize your blog posts, products, gallery images, and other content with tags and categories to help visitors navigate your site.
Link to your site's content - Where it's relevant, use content links to connect the pages on your site to each other.
Customize URL slugs - As you add pages and collection items, ensure the page urls reflect the content of the page.
Keep your image sizes small - To ensure your site loads well, keep your images under 500 KB and overall page size under 5 MB.
2. Keyword Research:
Keyword research is when website managers use keywords to find and research actual search terms that people enter into search engines. The knowledge about these actual search terms can help inform content strategy, or marketing strategy overall. You can read more about Keywords on this blog post.
3. For ecommerce sites, enhance product pages with high-quality images and detailed meta descriptions.
For all sites, ensure that your home page and any other important pages containing information about your product and service reference your location in four key places:
Its title tag
Headings
Body copy
Its meta description
4. Create a Google Business profile.
Creating a Google Business profile takes just a few minutes, and is one of the easiest things you can do to improve visibility in local search results.
When you set up your profile, you supply your business address to Google, who will thenverify that its real (this can involve a card containing a PIN code being sent to your address, a text message or even a video call). Note that it’s important that the address you supply to Google has to be a real ‘bricks and mortar’ one that potential customers can actually visit, and a location where you provide services or sell goods in person.
5. Ongoing Site Maintenance
This means fresh content! Sites that feature in-depth, informative articles on topics that people are genuinely interested in tend to perform well in search results. Therefore, the ongoing addition and modification of keywords and website content are necessary to continually improve your search engine rankings.
A blog is your best bet, instead of trying to update the existing content on your main site pages. Of course then you are wondering what to blog about! Think about the value you bring to your users/customers. Why would they visit your site? What information are they looking for that you can provide. This is what you need to blog about. I am blogging here about SEO because I know some of my clients (or potential clients) are wondering what it’s all about and I am hoping this post will help them - you!
If you run a bricks and mortar business and being known in your locality is important, create high-quality content that references your local area.
6. Social Media
You may wonder how your social media can help optimise your site for the search engines. Well, your social media accounts is where you have followers and friends. (It is also where you can be found by search engines - Google yourself and there’s a good chance one of your social media accounts will turn up in the search results, possibly ahead of your website because those accounts have fresher content.) I digress! By promoting your blog posts or website updates on your social media, your followers there are likely to click on the link and read your blog post, if it is relevant and useful to them. This creates traffic on your website, and the search engines like traffic! They think ‘hey, people are going to this site, it must be useful’! You should also encourage your friends and followers to share your blog posts - to create more readers/traffic.
7. Submit your site to high-quality local directories
This is called back linking - getting links back to your website from other websites, in this case online directories. You can read more about this here.
8. Getting backlinks is a key part of increasing the visibility of your site in Google search results.
As mentioned above, this is because Google treats backlinks as as signals that your website is worhty, and rewards websites with larger numbers of links pointing to them with higher positions in search results.
9. Upload your sitemap to Google
When you build your website, your designer should upload the sitemap to Google for you. A site map (or sitemap) is a list of URLs on a site that tells search engines about the structure of its content.
10. Verify your site with Google Search Console
11. Request that Google index your site - This asks Google's bots to review your site and update search results with your new content.
12. Encourage customers to leave Google reviews for your business. The more info you give Google about your business, the better!
13. Verify your site with Bing Webmaster Tools - to manage your site’s presence in Bing and Yahoo search results.
14. Connect your site to Google Analytics to get data on customer and audience behaviour on your site.
15. Enable AMP - If you have a blog, enabling AMP creates a stripped-down version of your site that loads faster on mobile devices. You can do this on your Squarespace site by following these instructions.
Open the Blog preferences panel.
Scroll down to Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Check Use AMP.
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