On-Page Optimisation

With Google making around 500-600 changes to its algorithm every year, it’s crucial for businesses to stay on top of these changes to ensure that their websites are optimised for this search engine. Despite most of these being very small changes that don’t greatly impact SERPs, there are some updates that Google makes to its algorithm that can have a significant impact (like the E-A-T update). Therefore, it is important to make sure you take all of Google’s updates and best practices into consideration when making changes to your website and adding content.

To help improve your website’s ranking and optimise your website for Google and other search engines, we have highlighted eight important on-page optimisation tips to help boost your position in SERPs.

Backlinking

A backlink is generated when a website links to another, these are also called inbound links. They play a vital role in generating a high domain score for your website. Google will recognise if your website is being referred to from a trusted domain and therefore boost your SERP rankings. Backlinking can also provide many other benefits to your online presence, such as;

• Additional referral traffic
• Building authority and improving rankings
• Building relationships with other businesses and websites
• Raising brand awareness via promotion of your business through external sources

Providing Relevant Content

When you are writing content, you need to always have the end-user in mind and make it as relevant and engaging as possible. Through increasing your user intent and creating content that is relevant for your audience, you will rank a lot better on Google as opposed to pages that are just pushing to sell.

Technical

There are many changes that you can make to improve your website from a technical point of view. Here are three main key technical aspects that give good long-term results.

1. Optimise your page speed – This means making these small percentage changes to your website by decreasing the size of all images and files throughout the whole website, these may only be very small changes but it can ultimately have a big impact on your sites speed.

2. Cutting out error 404 pages – Error 404 pages are not desirable for any website, they can provide a bad user experience on your site and can contribute negatively to your Google ranking. Therefore, make sure to remove any error pages from your site and rectify the issues as soon as possible.

3. Internal links - These are a great way of keeping your users/customers on your website as you are redirecting them to find information, while still being able to keep them on your site which means they are a lot more likely to convert. Internal links can be placed in the coding of specific words that users may wish to learn more about which can prompt a CTA through ‘Click here’ or highlighted words that include an internal link.

Physical On-Page Changes

Your physical on-page optimisation is all about making your website and mobile app experience as user friendly as possible. This may include making sure basic aspects of your website are functioning properly such as your CTA’s. One way in which you can monitor this is through using an analysis tool such as Hotjar.

Hotjar will show you heatmaps based on where users are clicking on your website, therefore if you have an important section of your website that is not receiving many clicks at all, such as a CTA (call to action), you may want to consider moving its position on the website and then monitoring how well it performs in its new position. 

Optimise your Titles and Meta Descriptions

When creating meta titles and descriptions it is important to do your keyword research beforehand. You should choose them based on the keywords your target audience are searching, for example if your business is selling items around Christmas time you may want to use the term ‘presents’ rather than ‘gifts’ because it has a higher search volume. Your meta description should be very clear, concise and describe what you are going to cover on that page.

Keyword Research

Staying up to date with your keyword research will play a massive factor in how well you rank on Google. Through being able to adapt the whole of your website and its features such as blog posts to fit in with what people are currently searching for will improve your credibility massively in the eyes of Google. However, once you have your keywords that you want to target, it is important not to keyword 'stuff'. This is when you use relevant keywords too much and in an unnatural manner, subsequently Google will recognise this and you can be penalised which will have a negative impact on your SERP's. 

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

While it is great to have a functioning website with loads of traffic, your online presence will take a massive hit if you do not convert this into the same user experience for those using a mobile or tablet device. You will need to make sure that users are getting the same experience on a mobile device otherwise you may see negative factors start to increase, such as bounce rates and a lower rate of conversions.

Create a Secure Website (HTTPS)

Having a secure website for any online business is vital, however it is a lot more important to those who have e-commerce transactions going through it due to the sensitive data that is put through the website. Having a HTTPS website will not only add an additional layer of security to it but it will be recognised as a trusted website which will help contribute to your success in Google’s ranking.

With so many different factors indicating how well you rank in Google it can seem like quite a big task to initially overcome. The best way to ensure you stay on top is by always pushing out relevant content and not taking any shortcuts when loading files and images onto your website as this can impact the speed and usability. If you would still like some support and development with your website why not contact one of our experts today.