Quick SEO Wins
SEO is a tricky art that requires a consistent effort and a finger on the pulse in to master. Getting results can often mean working through a long-term strategy. The good news is, there are a number of tasks you can do relatively quickly to give your accounting website a leg-up.
Many of these SEO practices can be put in place yourself, if you have a reasonable handle on your website. You could also ask your developer or call on the help of an agency with deep SEO skills.
So, here are 5 SEO tasks you carry out to give you an instant boost:
-
Content culling
Whilst having a site with lots of content is good, if it’s not relevant, it’s worth culling it as it could be doing more damage to your SEO performance. Sometimes unwieldy content comes from having an old website that has accumulated content over the years and where your brand has perhaps changed direction. Using a free tool such as Screaming Frog or Xenu gives you a rundown of all your sites pages. If you can identify your page content by the URL formation, you can quickly find the pages that are not so relevant. Otherwise, you could just work through each one by clicking the link and seeing what the page is about. If it’s of no value, remove it.
Another way to check for poor pages is to look at your Google Analytics stats, to see which pages have the lowest traffic or the highest bounce rates. Be careful here though because there could be other reasons for these stats.
-
Header tags
No-one likes to have to read through large chunks of text and this also applies to search engines. If you through block text at the eyes of a user or a Google bot, you will make it harder for them to get the information they need. And why bother when other webpages on the net make this so much simpler?
Adding header tags to your HTML code highlights the headers and sub headers in an organised hierarchy. On the front end, seen by users, this looks easier on the eye and enables people to quickly scan for the content they require. To bots, it looks at the hierarchy of content to understand what’s most important. Header tags are coded as <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc and should be wrapped around your headers and sub headers. Make sure your headers and sub headers contain your keywords.
-
Internal linking
Linking your pages internally across your website is how search engines know which of your pages are relevant. Google for example considers pages with more links directing to them as more valuable.
You can use a free tool called SEO Review Tools to check your internal link network on your site and then tweak this as necessary. You should aim to link from landing pages to your most important pages to improve their relevance on your website. These might be product pages, service pages or category pages.
-
NAP protocol
NAP stands for name, address and phone number and relates to anywhere on the internet where your businesses details are listed. This might include your own website, a local business listing and other citations, such as Google My Business, Yell.com etc. The more places you are legitimately listed as a business, the more credible you look to Google, which is a big rank signal. The common identifier though is he NAP, so this needs to be correct across all listings to be consistent. This means if you abbreviate road to rd on one listing, you must do it for all.
-
Inbound link clean-up
Link building is an essential part of SEO and a link back to your site from a really good, trusted source can help to propel that page up the SERPs. However, low quality sites linking back to you could actually be damaging your site’s performance. Remember, quality over quantity. The quality of backlink is directly proportional to the authority of website.
Building a network of high quality links is a long-term strategy, but for now, you can analyse the links you have and seek to remove those that may be harmful. To do this, you can use a tool like Moz (free trial offered) to research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and discover potentially damaging links. You can remove the damaging links by contacting the website and asking for removal or asking Google to disavow these links. This means you’d prefer these links not to be taken in account when assessing your site. You can do this via Google Search Console.
An SEO audit is a great way to highlight the weak areas in your website’s performance online. This gives you a good steer on where you should be focusing your attention. This is useful for businesses who haven’t done any SEO work, but also for those who have an SEO strategy in place and want to hone this, to get the advantage over their competitors. Whitefish Marketing has a FREE SEO audit tool and can advise thereafter on the findings in your website report.
Need help with your SEO strategy? Whitefish Marketing agency in Kent work with businesses in the south east to improve their online visibility. Call us on 01303 720 288.
