SEO is major and should be a big player in your business’ lead generation strategy. But a lot of people aren’t. Which is why I’m sharing these 6 simple SEO tips to immedately improve SEO so that you’re confident in your strategy and can see some real changes.
My 6 Simple SEO Tips to Immediately Improve SEO
SEO is a long game. Typically you can wait up to 6 months to see results from SEO which is what puts a lot of people off investing time, effort or money into their website’s SEO. However these simple SEO tips can provide you with some quick wins whilst you wait for the rest of your optimisation efforts to catch up.
So let’s see what we can do to boost your search engine ranking quickly and efficiently!
1. Create a sitemap
Your sitemap is used by Google and other search engines to understand what pages you have on your site, their level of importance and how to crawl your site to display in search results. You absolutely must have one for your website.
Without a sitemap, you’re basically telling search engines to figure your site out for themselves and you’re less likely to rank on their listings as a result. It’s a help me to help you type scenario.
This is my favourite of these simple SEO tips because it takes minutes to do but can make a big impact.
You can create your own sitemap or use a tool such as XML Sitemaps, then head over to Google Search Console to submit your sitemap. If you’ve not signed up to Google Search Console already then you’ll also find some other useful tools there to make sure your website is properly feeding through to Google’s search results.
2. Check your site’s loading speed
Did you know that Google ranks you based on your site loading speed as well as its content? Well it does. This tip is a big one for Google so you need to get it right. Out of these simple SEO tips, it’s the one to invest the most time and money in if you need to.
You’re best off checking your website loading speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights because it gives you the score Google has for your website speed and it shows you areas for improvement. Ideally you want to be in the green, like below:
If you’re not confident with actioning these steps yourself, get in touch and let’s chat about what we can do.
For more information on improving your website’s loading speed, check out this post: 5 Ways To Speed Up Your Website’s Loading Time.
3. Use a thorough SEO checklist for your pages
I have an SEO checklist that I work through on each of my posts and pages and it’s the same list I share with my SEO clients to ensure they keep their content on the right track. It consists of simple actionable tasks that need to be ticked off on each of your website pages (new and old!) to ensure they’re as optimised as they can possibly be to increase your website traffic.
Think of it as simple SEO tips in a condensed checklist format!
Do you want a copy of my free SEO checklist? I’ve turned my checklist with my top SEO tips into a digital download so you can save it, share it, and have it to hand no matter what! Grab it here!
4. Install Yoast SEO for Wordpress
This tip is assuming that you’re website is built on Wordpress which I absolutely recommend if you want to prove your website’s SEO chances. If you are looking to make the switch from another platform to Wordpress, I can help with that.
Yoast SEO is an amazing plugin for Wordpress that takes a lot of the complicated work out of optimising your website for search engines and does it all for you. It generates your sitemap to submit to Google, verifies your website for sharing across social media platforms and my favourite bit… it helps you optimise your posts and pages for SEO. Alongside my checklist mentioned above you’ll be on to a winner with these two tips!
5. Name your images
Let’s say you’re writing a blog post on a Christmas Gift Guide for 2020 and including images of each gift as you write about them – that’s great! Keep doing that! But make sure you’re naming your images things like “Toddler Tricycle for Christmas Gift 2020.jpg” rather than “IMG73636.jpg” because Google also crawls through your images to look for connections to relevant content. Think of it as the right way to do keyword stuffing on your page.
6. Consider your audience
For my last point we’re moving away from technical stuff and talking about your content. By now you should feel confident to start writing with your on-page SEO checklist to hand before you hit publish, but before you begin writing you should consider your audience. Who are you writing this content for? What would they search on Google to find this content?
Whilst keyword research is so important for your SEO strategy, you can also use your common sense on what sort of content you need to be putting on your website to attract your ideal audience. So get your thinking cap on and make sure you’re writing with them in mind!
How did you find these simple SEO tips? Have you already put some into practice before finishing this post? I know I would!
