We Search Engine Optimise every website we build with our SEO Boost service , however SEO is all about the ongoing, regular website & external changes a website owner makes to their site, not what is done during a website's build.
Understanding how SEO works in modern Search Engines & AI Applications is key to getting a website as high as possible in the results pages.
We submit all our websites into Google & Bing, but once your website is live with us, the SEO is over to you. For a comparison, our hosting & support charges start from £35 a month, whereas good SEO companies will start from £300+ a month, with costs rising depending on how much optimisation and ongoing management is required.
Here we will give you the basics of how SEO works and what you can do to manage your own Search Engine Optimisation.
Let’s start by simply explaining what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is! SEO is the process of improving a website's ranking in Google, Bing & AI search results pages when people search for relevant services or products. It helps drive relevant traffic from the search engines to a website for potential sales and enquiries by making a site easier for search engines and users to find and understand.
SEO is an ongoing process that requires website owners to update, change and improve a websites content, links and information on a regular basis, as explained on our Regular Updates page.
SEO isn’t a “dark art”, it’s a combination of consistent improvements, good structure, and useful content that your customers want to read. The key is providing good quality updates that are relevant to your business & local community.
SEO is not something you “finish”, it’s something you maintain and improve continuously or your website will fall down the Google rankings. To give yourself the best chance of climbing the Google rankings, we recommend having elements on your website that can be easily updated, such as:
Set your website up so it can be easily updated and take advantage of our free website changes policy so we can make the changes for you whenever you're ready!
FREE WEBSITE CHANGES
What you put on your website will always be the most important part of your SEO performance. You must first consider what your audience is searching for, then make a list of keywords that they would search for which relate to your services, product, business, industry and locations.
Once you have this it’s time to update your website across all of the following areas:
Keep on top of your Google Analytics service that we set up when your site went live. Use it to keep track of your site's performance, what pages are working, what could be improved, where your clients are located etc.
Write some copy that includes some keywords that you'd like your desired search engine to crawl your site for, make it sound natural and fluid. Keywords are locations, services, products that are relevant to you.
Have your page descriptions include that Keyword copy and be under 250 characters. Describe who you are, what you do and where you're based so Google can promote you on any result.
Website SEO crawlers love to see Social Media added to your site, adding a Facebook or X widget or links via buttons or icons can be a great way to point people to your Social Media pages and improve your SEO.
Make sure your page aliases are suitable as Google loves to read them as a way of understanding what your page is about. For example, domain.co.uk/websites could be improved by being domain.co.uk/website-design-chichester.
View your XML sitemap through your Webmaster tools to see how your site is laid out and prioritised.
Make sure each image has an alt tag that is relevant to the image and describes in in 3 words or less. Alt tags describe the image so Google and any visually impaired visitors can read it.
Adding your location across the site will help Google understand where you're located and improve your rankings in those areas.
Make sure all links on your website via buttons and clickable text inserts are up to date and work. Otherwise, Google may think you don't pay attention to your site and potentially harm your rankings in Google.
Make sure the headings of your pages are relevant to the content within them. Titling a page, with the use of sub titles is great for the user, but Google also uses them to understand what your page is trying to say.
Blogs are great, but keep it current. Posts should stay live for 1-2 years, before being unpublished and replaced with current content. Rule to go by; only keep blog posts that are still relevant to your business today.
Adding inter-page links onto your site to make it easy to navigate and coherent can help improve your SEO, for example, a "Contact Us" button on each page. Google loves to follow text links to relevant pages inside your site.
Reciprocal linking is when two different sites agree to link to each other, this can boost the SEO of both sites. Be careful though, this only works if the site linking to/from you is reputable and legitimate.
Make sure your Website Title is your business name or extremely relevant. This is what Google promotes on the first line in any Google result.
Keep an eye on your key searches, such as 'Web Designer Chichester', and then see if a month later you are moving up or down the search results.
Make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors on your site. Simple errors are automatically picked up when your site is indexed by Google, so attention to detail is key.
Websites need to be updated, so include dynamic pages such as 'latest news', 'recent projects' or 'testimonials' to make futures updates easy.
Our Websites are made with our Webkit engine, making sure you're on the latest Webkit engine will mean that your site is fast and responsive, which is key for SEO. Read more on the latest Webkit version: Webkit
SEO Guide
It’s important to track your websites hits so you know how well your SEO is doing, which is why we set up all our clients with Google Analytics on publication of their websites.
Use Google Analytics to:
SEO success comes from measuring, learning, and refining your strategy, tinkering with your content, page titles, website links and general SEO is completely normal.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
There's a lot more to SEO than most people have an understanding of and if you want your SEO to be the best it can be, it's worth getting an SEO professional to do this for you. We've learned the hard way that you get what you pay for within the SEO & marketing industry.
SEO PROFESSIONAL
