Ready to update your website for better SEO?
A few small changes go a long way to improving your ranking on search engines. Your goal is most likely to show up higher and more often in search results. Keep in mind that the goal of SEO is to help Google and other search engines understand the purpose of your website.
The goal is to let search engines know that you are an expert on a particular subject. Having a well-structured and updated website is important for ranking better.
SEO Tip 1: Pay attention to your header tags (h1, h2, h3)
Let’s start with the basics, header tags (or h-tags) are used in HTML for organization.
Header tags are a way to organize the information you are presenting. You should start with an h1 tag and cascade down through the rest – h1, h2, h3, h4, etc.
The h1 tag lets bots that crawl websites or accessibility readers what the content of the page is about. Using subsequent tags helps divide and organize the rest of your content.
Importantly, each page should only ever have ONE h1 tag. The h1 tag reflects the contents of the entire page and is a great place for keywords that you are trying to rank for.
Misuse of header tags is the most common SEO mistake we see on websites!
SEO Tip 2: Website speed is important
A website should load in under 2 seconds and by 3 seconds, there’s over 50% chance that the user has left. Additionally, most of the world’s internet traffic goes through mobile, so having a slow loading website can ruin not only the user experience but also your SEO ranking.
Search engines, like Google, want to deliver searchers relevant information for their queries. If your website is taking too long to load so users consistently leave, Google is not going to keep sending traffic there.
Want to know how fast your website is? There are lots of free tools. We like Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
SEO Tip 3: Don’t sleep on alt text
Alt text has 3 main purposes.
- It makes websites more accessible which always makes the internet better. Someone who is visually impaired using a screen reader will know what the image.
- If the image does not load, the alt text will be displayed instead.
- Search engine crawlers are able to index an image properly.
Depending on your company size you may need to provide alt text for accessibility. Whether it is a requirement or not, you should add alt text for accessibility and for SEO.
Check out this article about how to write and insert alt text.
SEO Tip 4: Website structure
Website structure is really important not only for real-life humans but also the website crawling robots search engines use. Website structure, when implemented well, helps guide people and robots throughout your site with ease.
Think of website structure like a nicely organized file folder. Poorly structured websites are more like scatters of paper all over a table. Which one do you think will be easier to go through when looking for a specific topic?
This concept works the same way on websites: setting up your menu, the pages and the content within them is imperative to good SEO performance. Even the way you link off any page is important: where does it go, how does that link support the topic of that page? Considerations like this make ok websites turn great in the eyes of Google.
SEO Tip 5: Mobile first
Did you know Google looks at your website from a ‘mobile first’ strategy? They want to know that in today’s ever-increasing smartphone world that your website plays nicely with mobile devices of all shapes and sizes. If you have not had your website developed in the last 5 years, it is likely it is not optimized for a mobile-first approach.
It’s easy to check – just trying using your website on your phone. Does it scale properly?
Why is ‘Mobile First’ so important? Well, if you’re a professional service and you have a client who does all their cursory research on local companies to contact on their phone, and lands on your site that is not friendly, they may just immediately search for a new company. And that’s before robots step in (see tip #4) to ensure your site does not have any information hanging off the end of the mobile page or inappropriate breaks when loading for mobile layouts.
Want to see how your website holds up to these criteria?
We offer free SEO audits! Ready to take your website to the next level? Let’s go!
