You wish to gain more traffic for your website, be better positioned than your competitors, obtain more prospects or simply increase your sales? Then you’re in the right place!
You know Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is necessary for achieving these goals. But first off…
What is SEO again?
Well it basically consists of improving how well your website pages show up and rank on search engines.
It involves implementing, evaluating, and then making decisions on your website that ultimately will affect your e-reputation and online success.
And why should we aim to be first on Google?
Let’s provide you with some examples.
Get more qualified traffic, clients and sales
As you can see below, the chart from Sistrix shows the usual CTR (or click-through-rate) for organic rankings vs average CTR for the same keywords.
Being first means getting 30 to 35% click through rates on search requests, that’s huge and game changing for your business!
Indeed, if you’re among the firsts organic positions in search engines, it’s more budget that you won’t be spending in advertising to get to the same result.
And much more traffic acquired in a qualitative way, if Google sees your content as the best adapted to answer your potential clients search requests!
So the more you know how to optimise for better rankings, the higher the clicks, the higher the traffic, and the higher the leads and revenues.
Increase revenues
Another example with Alkries shows evidence in their case study that they increased a service-based business’ organic traffic and their revenue by a whopping amount.
Using a detailed SEO strategy, they successfully almost doubled their clients traffic and increased their revenue by 49%!
Update the content to boost traffic
Below is a snippet from Ahrefs organic traffic for a particular page. As you can see back in 2018, the traffic dropped down by 54% in just over a month.
Pages don’t rank well forever, a large part of SEO is also about keeping your pages up to date and staying current. This is exactly what they did to achieve that massive boost afterwards. They simply edited and republished the post. Ranking well again caused an immense increase in traffic, which means more conversion goals being achieved!
Wishing for similar results for your business? Let’s dive right into our ultimate checklist then!
Follow this and you’re guaranteed to improve your rankings. If the list seems exhaustive, no pressure to do them all. Just do your best and see the results for yourself in terms of organic acquisition and search performance!
A first tip: through SEO, you rank pages, not websites. Remember that and it’ll make it all simpler.
Let’s get into it then!
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The necessities: the basic SEO setup
Setup Google Search Console
Connecting your website to Google Search Console will help you monitor your search performance and find trends and opportunities to rank for.
Steps to set it up:
- First off, sign-in to your Google account – or create one
- Click on “Add a Property”
- Chose “Domain” and enter your website’s domain name, like coteries.com
- Click on “Continue” and verify your domain by adding a DNS entry with your domain name provider.
And you should be all set! If you have troubles validating your domain you can select the URL option and select your preferred validation method.
NOTE: Even if you haven’t verified you are the site owner yet, Google will start tracking data associated with your website (property). Make sure to verify you’re the owner, as only then will you actually have access to your site’s search information.
Setup Google Analytics
Part two of the necessary tools you’ll need! Google Analytics will help you monitor your traffic acquisition and gather a lot of other information about your site.
Head over to google.com/analytics and you can start for free.
Google also provides you with clear instructions to set up your analytics account in case you get lost. Note that this is to set up a Google Analytics 4 Property (also known as GA4), the new version of GA that was made available in October 2020.
You can compare GA4 to Universal Analytics if you wish to, and you can also opt to use Google Universal Analytics if you prefer or if you’re more used to it. However, note it will disappear on July 1st, 2023.
TIP: you can also import your Search Console reports in Google Analytics. It will help you to get more accurate search data on your traffic acquisition. To do so, you will need to enable data sharing in the Google Analytics’s property settings.
Note that you can also use a different traffic analysis tool as an alternative to GA, but it works great especially when connecting it to other tools.
Setup Yoast (if you use WordPress)
In case you have a WordPress website, using the Yoast SEO plugin is a must.
It provides many tools that help optimise posts, pages, and influence the SEO of your entire website.
Helping with quite a few points that are yet to be mentioned, Yoast checks if your keywords are in your article, if you have the right length of text for the amount of times your keyword appeared and so much more. So make sure you add this to your website!
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Understand where you can rank better: do keyword research
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Find opportunities to rank for in your niche or industry. It will help you know on which content you can rank and get traffic.
Below are some tools you can use to do keyword research.
Google Suggest
First one is fast and easy.
Wondering what are the most popular suggestions when people search terms related to what your business sells?
Put yourself in the mind of your customer, search and see what comes up. It’s great for finding keywords with low search volume and low competition levels but that have a high conversion value (called “long tail”).
Google Trends
Useful for seeing if a keyword is trending and to pick the right time for posting on certain topics.
Note that it might not really be accurate in Switzerland, as there is not enough data, but it can still help you out!
Google Keyword Planner
A Google Ads tool.
If you don’t have a Google Ads account yet, you can sign in into Google Ads with your Google account, and skip the beginner campaign setup part to just use the Keyword Planner.
It will give insights on the search volume and competition for a specific keyword. Providing suggested bid estimates, you can also determine your advertising budget.
Again, the data in Switzerland might not be really accurate given the low search volumes. So you can always try another market (France if you target French-speaking regions).
Keyword surfer
A great tool for getting quick (and free) insights, and a Google chrome extension that gives you extra information for each link appearing in the search results page.
Adding on to Google Suggest, you receive the estimated search volume, cost per click, immediately. Pretty cool right?
KWFinder
Another option, with the basic plan costing $29.90 a month.
What you gain are keyword suggestions, insights to what your competitors rank for, and even how easy it is to rank for a keyword.
Research among online communities
More of a method than a tool: checking on social media platforms and groups can help give you trending topics that just searching on Google give.
People discussing a subject that you have the perfect answer to? Create an article about it, answer their questions and have them explore your website!
You may also Search for keywords among online “forums” like Reddit, Quora or anything relevant for your industry to do so.
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Create great content
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Publish amazing content that is helpful to your potential clients. And always aim for quality, not quantity! It will help you rank better, be found, and linkable.
Plan and structure
Having done your keyword research and strategized what content will be engaging, you should now have a good idea of what content you want to create.
You might find this obvious but keeping a structure in mind is essential for creating great content. Once you get deep into the creation part, it’s easy to lose track of the structure, so make sure you do it at the beginning.
Write long content
Make your content longer and more detailed than other contents ranking for the same keywords. It’ll give you a better chance at ranking higher than your competitors.
Optimised contents for SEO usually contain 1’000 to 2’000 words.
Go in depth. Google ranks content that goes into detail about a topic higher than content that doesn’t.
Use synonyms and linked topic keywords to create a semantic cluster, this will raise your chances of ranking well for your target keywords.
Publish easily readable content
Reduce bounce rate and increase your potential ranking with easily readable texts:
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- Include loads of small paragraphs with short sentences
- Use active voice instead of passive
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Propose unique content
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- Do not just regurgitate information. Use your own primary research, surveys, studies or examples.
- Include your experts in the content creation process.
- And create evergreen content!
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Use multimedia
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- Include multimedia into your content: not just images but videos, graphs, infographics or charts.
- Insert images with both an accurate document file name and a descriptive alt text. You will also be found in Google Images.
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Make it up-to-date
Keep your content up-to-date and update old content. This helps A LOT to rank!
Present clean, captivating design
Humans are visual creatures, those first few seconds won’t be about reading your website, but taking in all the visuals presented.
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Optimise your pages: On-page SEO
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On-page SEO means optimising your webpages for both search engines and visitors.
Common on-page SEO practices include optimising title tags, content, internal links and URLs.
Optimise your content
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- Use your keyword once in the first 100 words and insert your keyword once or twice every 100 words.
- Add “helper” words to make your title actual and more specific. It will help to appear for more long-tail searches and therefore get more traffic. You can use “helper” words like the current year, “best”, “review”, “guide”, “checklist” etc.
- Rank different pages on different keywords, don’t repeat the exact same keyword or keywords that are too similar – Google is smart enough to notice (and sometimes penalise)!
- Use synonyms and semantic fields.
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Structure your page and its headings
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- Put your keyword as early as possible in your page heading (H1 tag)
- Structure your html H tags and input your keyword if you can
- H1 for the title
- H2 for the subheading
- H3 for further categorisations
- P tags for paragraphs
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Define your meta tags
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- Define the Page Title and Meta Description with call to actions and keyword-based
- Put your keyword as early as possible in your page title tag
- Add words to make your title tags actual and more specific – appear for more long-tail searches and therefore more traffic (“current year”, “best”, “review”, “guide”, “checklist”…)
- Improve CTR of how you appear in the search results by:
- Adding numbers to your title and description tag
- Taking the best out of ads for a targeted keyword – if there are some – as they’re usually designed to maximise clicks (if they are well designed!)
- Define “og: tags” with image, title and description at least. These tags are meant for social media, like when you share a content in a feed. If you use WordPress, the og:image tag should be already included with the Featured image for example.
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Build better URLs
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- Use short URLs
- Insert your keywords in your pages URLs
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Insert external and internal links/b>
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- Insert links to at least 5 authority or leading websites in your industry
- Insert links to 2 to 5 pages of your own website with text anchors (the text where the link is on)
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Use Schema Markup
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- Use Schema Markup to get search snippets, these little things in search results you can interact with. It also helps search engines to better understand your content, and visitors to find solutions to their requests.
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- Use validators to check that your site is well-structured from Schema.org validator or Google rich results tester.
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Technical SEO: review technical aspects
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Improve your website’s crawlability and accessibility for better rankings!
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- Make sure your page is ranking on Google with Google Search Console (GSC) and Google search.
- Check your page coverage in GSC
- Check your domain coverage in Google by searching for site:https://yourwebsite.com
- Check if a page is ranking on Google by searching for its URL in Google in quotation marks
- Make sure your site is HTTPS, a key ranking signal for Google
- Check crawl errors on your website (with GSC coverage or another tool like Moz, SEMrush or ahrefs) and repair them.
- Make sure your website is mobile friendly (shouldn’t have to be stated in 2022, it goes without saying that unless you’re in a specific niche your traffic should be predominantly mobile)
- Fix broken links with Dr Link Check
- They also identify the top url hosts and provide all outbound links from the site
- The free plan is limited to 1500 links. We did however delete the “project” and run another website, so you’re not actually limited to that amount if you want to look at how other sites are doing.
- Check your site speed and how to improve it (and a bunch of other stuff) with PageSpeed Insights
- PageSpeed Insights Provides performance insights for your website including 6 metrics and recommendations. We could go on about them and give details but right now knowing every aspect is not so important, if you do want to know more though you can read about it here.
- Make sure your page is ranking on Google with Google Search Console (GSC) and Google search.
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Off-page SEO: develop your online reputation
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Off-page SEO is about developing your domain reputation, particularly with the acquisition of quality backlinks.
Note it’s a key ranking factor, together with content and Google rankbrain algorithm (their program part that helps ranking content for any search).
We measure domain reputation with metrics, such as domain authority by Moz or domain score by SEMrush. Usually going from 1 (new website) to 100 (Google), these metrics reflect domain reputations and allow you to identify backlink opportunities or spams.
Seeking to have a high domain score therefore means acquiring a lot of quality backlinks!
ANY link pointing to your content from a quality website in your industry (as long as it is an influential website, a good directory, a blog, a social network etc.) is good to take.
Backlinking is like business development: it takes time and it’s not as easy as it seems.
In the end, understand that the more inbound links you have from quality sites, the better you will be ranking on your top queries.
Here are a few things you can tackle:
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- Guest-write for websites that have a domain authority around the same as your site or better. Write for sites with an audience you’d want to gain traffic from.
- Check your competitors backlinks
- ahrefs is a great tool to check backlinks of your competitors – the first 100 backlinks for any competitor can be visible with a free account
- Reach out to site owners that have already included external links with similar content like yours
- With a tool like SEMrush, export all of your competitor’s backlinks, filter out the ones that aren’t relevant for your strategy
- Take a clean list of solid prospects, email them with a personalised email and ask for a link to a quality piece of content (which is why content is key!)
- Mention influential bloggers, let them know that you mentioned them and ask for a re-share/like/message or a link.
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Questions? Doubts? Need help with your SEO?
Contact our SEO and digital marketing specialists, expand your search visibility and get more clients and sales!
Sources: ahrefs.com, backlinko.com, google.com, neilpattel.com, semrush.com
