By following this guide, you’ll rank first on all Google searches.

Just kidding, it’s unfortunately not that simple. In fact there’s no quick fix to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). It’s much more like a marathon rather than a sprint, which is important to remember if you’re getting disappointed with a lack of results.

SEO is the process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website on search engines like Google. It is the process of making a website more attractive to search engines and improving its organic ranking on search engine results pages (known as SERPs).

We’ve put together the ultimate SEO checklist of 15 things you need to be doing in 2023 to help improve your website’s SEO.

Help Google index your website

This is about improving the aspects of a website that you might not think of in the first place to help search engines crawl and index your site.

• Make sure the robots.txt file is in order and is correctly telling the search engine bots how to crawl the website’s pages
• Is your site canonicalised? Duplicate content is likely to harm your ranking as search engines crawl your site and don’t know which URL is the one it should be showing
• Do you have the correct redirect codes in place, such as a 301 or a 302, so users aren’t viewing a URL page that is different to the one they originally requested? 

Using tools like Google Search Console is great in order to find crawl errors and fix them. Go to the ‘Crawl’ section and then find ‘Crawl Errors’ to see a list of pages on your website that are producing crawl errors. Identify the errors and redirect them to the relevant pages on your site. 

Relevant content

Keeping your content up-to-date and relevant for users is crucial. If Google (for example) doesn’t think your content is informative and of a good quality, you can say goodbye to improving your SEO.

Not only will it help your website rank better, it will also engage users and keep them coming back to your site for more.

Keyword optimisation

If you’ve mastered the step before – great! But what good is great content if people aren’t searching to find it? Make sure you’re targeting the right keywords and you are using them in the right way. Find out what people are searching for, what’s missing? What does your website give that others don’t? Even if other people are ranking highly for a specific keyword in your industry, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it better. 

• Identify your competitors
• Conduct a keyword gap analysis
• Find question keywords
• Analyse the intent of pages that do rank
• Prioritise your keywords by search volume and difficulty to rank

User experience

This is our specialty 😏 Having a website that is easy to navigate, clear and uncluttered designs and a fast loading time, all add up to a better ranking.  

Accessibility

Making your website more accessible is important because the last thing you want to do is block off any of your users from being unable to consume your content, or purchase your products. The more users who can access your site, the more traffic you’ll receive.

We have some great tips on how to improve your accessibility.

Mobile-friendliness

Did you know that 59.02% of website traffic comes from mobile devices? 

With more and more people using their phones to access the internet and browse online, it’s important that websites are optimised for mobile devices. This includes:

• Keeping the navigation consistent
• Enhancing your website’s performance by optimising images and videos
• Having clear signposting to indicate what page the user is on
• Caring about your mobile design as much as your desktop – don’t take any shortcuts. 

Backlinks

Meet your new best friend. Backlinks from high-quality and relevant websites are a strong signal to search engines that your website is valuable and trustworthy. Imagine if Beyonce told you that someone was a good singer – you’re more likely to believe her than some random person who isn’t … you know, Beyonce.

Make sure you are including backlinks in your content and try to reach out to other websites to request backlinks. 

Target your competitor’s broken backlinks

Not only should you reach out to other websites, but you should be keeping your ‘enemies’ close too. By using a tool such as Ahrefs, you can identify competitors’ dead links that are no longer working. You can then offer to replace this broken link with a link to your website instead. 

If your content is valuable to the linking website’s audience, they will hopefully agree. This will help to substantiate your authority and improve your website’s visibility.

Identify and fix broken links

Having dead links on your website will mean Google sees your website as less relevant and valuable. Broken links can also be frustrating for users, leading to a negative experience from using your website and an increase in bounce rate. 

Similarly, you don’t want your competitors targeting any broken backlinks (they’ve probably already been checking…)

Improve title tags

You need to be adding and optimising your title tags to improve your SEO. Title tags are one of the first things a user will see before they click into your website. You want to convince users to click into your site, so make sure it speaks to them and their needs.

• Describe the contents of your site, so there’s no room for error or confusion.
• Include primary keywords
• Always use hyphens between words
• Keep them short and simple
• The URL has to be readable so look to strike a balance between making them concise but descriptive. 
• Oh and don’t overstuff your URL with keywords, just use relevant ones!

Improve meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are a short summary of what a page is about. They:

• Increase the clickthrough rates and visits from organic searches
• Give users the right information at the right time
• Increase the number of visits from social media

Meta descriptions entice people to click one link over another link so make sure your content is compelling, that you’re including 1 or 2 keywords in there, you’re avoiding the use of non alpha-numeric characters, and remember to always aim for between 155 and 160 characters.

Optimise images for SEO

Compress and resize your images to make sure you have a nice balance between an image size and its quality. 

We have some further guidance on how to make your website run faster by making your images next-gen.

Update any outdated content

There’s no bigger turn off than going onto a website and seeing their latest update was from 2018. Are they still running as a company? Where have they gone? Are they okay?

Your website will ultimately look outdated, untrustworthy and like you don’t care (which is definitely not what we want). Keep your content up-to-date and share your latest news with your potential customers. You want to make a good first impression. Plus, if you’re not producing content – how are you going to rank in the first place? 

Improve your website copy

Gone are the days where SEO was about churning as much information out as possible onto a page. Ensuring your copy is relevant and readable is important for SEO.

You want to show the purpose of your website to search engines as plainly as possible. Don’t make them work for it (because they won’t). Having interesting copy will keep your user’s engaged, instead of being put off by paragraphs of uninviting text. This will decrease your bounce rate which – you guessed it – will help with your SEO.

Topic clusters

This strategy focuses more on topics as opposed to keywords. If you tried to rank for every keyword and phrase possible, your website will end up feeling disorganised and confusing (which we know is bad for SEO).

Aim to have one larger piece of content that defines the topic. This is your pillar. Your sub-content can then focus on specific long-tail keywords, connecting to the pillar. That way, if any of the pages do well – they all do well.

If you’re looking at this list and feeling a bit daunted, we can help. We can help improve your SEO to help your organic ranking on Google and other popular search engines. Get in touch with us today by emailing [email protected]

Sources

https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet