11 Simple SEO Tips To Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, can seem like a bit of a dark art to those who don’t practice it. The utopia for many organisations is to find their website at the top of Google, however the method of how to get it there can seem scary and unmanageable. We’ve listed below our top 11 SEO tips to get your website to the top of Google, based on our tried and tested SEO techniques.

SEO Tip #1: Define your keywords

Before you start, you need to understand what it is you want to be found for. Defining your keywords is the most important first stage of SEO, as this is what will shape all the following steps. You need to think about your products and services and your demographics and narrow these down into a list of keywords. You can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner to help you find keywords, but you should also review the search terms on Google Analytics that people currently find your website for and also search terms on Google Search Console that you receive impressions for. Also, just start typing your proposed keywords into Google and see what the recommended autocomplete options are; these will show the most popular search terms. You may wish to use these, or you may wish to avoid them, dependent on how targeted your product and audience is.

SEO Tip #2: Create great content

Your website content should be optimised with your keywords in mind, whilst always remaining relevant and easy to read. Ideally, each page should have a minimum of 300 words, with quality content that is relevant to the product, service or page. The page should be readable for both your users and for Google and should not be overly filled with keywords; they should only be used where needed.

SEO Tip #3: Write effective meta titles and descriptions

Again, your keywords should shape this exercise. What keywords are most relevant to the page and name? Ideally, the page title should already be relevant to the keywords, therefore the meta title is a reflection of the page title and your keywords relevant for that page. You can also include variations in the meta title and any demographic targeting you want to include, so that people know exactly what to expect when they land on the page. The same goes for the meta description, it should be optimised for your keywords but also giving clear and succinct information on the content of the webpage.

SEO Tip #4: Images are important too

The names, description and alt text of your images are all really important too when it comes to SEO. Google crawls all content on your website, which means images as well as text, therefore your images should be used as a tool to help improve your SEO. Don’t just upload images with the name DSC001.jpg, rename them all to be relevant to the page and also the content of the image. The alt text should also reflect the content of the image but with your keywords in mind.

SEO Tip #5: Quality Backlinking

Backlinking is still a very important element of SEO. Google uses backlinks to help score the authority of your domain, by looking at how many other sites (typically with high volumes of traffic) link to your website. This could be via directories, blogs, affiliations or a number of other backlinks. This is a very important part to get right for any SEO strategy. Backlinks again, need to be relevant, built with your audience and demographics in mind.

SEO Tip #6: Blogging

Blogs are a great way to improve your search engine ranking, when done properly. Many companies miss the opportunity to produce blogs in a way that are beneficial to SEO. As we’ve spoken a lot about in this blog so far, it all comes back to your keywords and being relevant. Think about your keywords before you think about your blog, as your keywords will help to shape your blog title and content. If it’s not relevant to your keywords, then it’s not going to help your SEO. Create great blog content relevant to not only your keywords, but to your audience as well and your blog post could be found by thousands of readers. Blogs are also a great way to get backlinks, as if you’ve produced a really useful and insightful blog, you may find that other people will share your blog and link back to your website.

SEO Tip #7: Index your site with Google

For Google to find and list your website, it needs to know that it’s there and you want it to be found. Create a sitemap, which is a great way for Google to quickly review and index your website, then request for Google to crawl your website via Google Search Console. You should do this regularly if you are continuously adding new content to your website.

SEO Tip #8: Ensure your website looks and performs at its best

There’s no point making all the effort above to get to the top of Google if your website doesn’t look good or work very well. If your website is outdated, has a poor user experience and is difficult to navigate, then your SEO efforts will be wasted. If SEO is part of your ongoing strategy, ensure the foundations are right first with a website built to impress. That also means removing anything that may slow the website down and ensuring you have calls to action in place.

SEO Tip #9: Recognise the importance of reviews

We recently posted on our Instagram that new research from Trustpilot shows that reviews can help increase sales by a whopping 315%. Online reviews are only growing in importance and as a key part of a consumers buying journey. Whether you use Google, Facebook, Trustpilot or another platform to gather your reviews, you should ensure you are collecting strong, positive reviews and feedback about your organisation. A good review score can be used in your Google search engine listing, plus research shows the listings with a star rating receive more clicks than those without. 

SEO Tip #10: Optimise Google maps listing

When it comes to Google maps listings it’s important that the location on your website and Google match and are correct. If you have a single business address with multiple service locations, remember to include those in your listings. Alternatively, if you have multiple addresses ensure you have a location set up for each one on Google My Business. Last but not least, keywords, these need to be in your title to help boost your ranking on Google maps listings.

SEO Tip #11: Video views

We all spend hours scrolling through social media and know that videos capture our attention the most, so it’s time to create video content for your company. Before you start we’ve got some tips to follow; landscape video, high quality content, relevant to your brand. Now you’re ready to brainstorm video ideas, press record, edit the clips and publish. When it comes to optimising your Google ranking for video searches, YouTube is the best platform to upload your content on. Ensure you use tags and keywords in your video title and description. Other social media platforms are great for sharing your YouTube videos to get a greater reach and drive traffic to your YouTube video increasing your chances of being found on Google video searches for your relevant keywords.

These are our top 11 tried and tested tips to excel at SEO. We help take companies from the depths of the Google search engine results pages to page one, using these SEO techniques. SEO should be considered an ongoing strategy as once you get to page one of Google, you want to stay there. You can do that by consistently adding new and relevant content and ensuring your follow these rules at all times.

If you need more help understanding SEO, or you want to work with an experienced SEO agency to help with the tips we’ve outlined above, then contact us today. We can get your business found online and we’ll continuously work to improve and maintain your search engine ranking. Call the SEO experts today on 0113 357 0440 or get in touch via our contact form.