There are a few different ways to improve your site’s SEO, and the best strategy is to take a broad approach. If you just focus on one aspect of SEO, you may find that your efforts are cancelled out by poor performance in another, so it’s worth understanding the bigger picture.
Here are the key things worth tackling (click on them to jump to the section):
Technical SEO: Configuring the website’s page structure, code and servers.
Metadata: The handy tags which tell search engines what something actually is.
Website Content: Optimising the wording and structure of your entire site.
SEO Articles: Written to make the SEO gods happy (and your customers, too!).
Business SEO: Beyond your site, improve your brand’s profile on the wider web.
The first 3 can be tackled as a one-time task, though you may need to update them every few years. The last one – SEO Articles – that’s an ongoing thing which will need careful planning to make sure you continue to gain steam, rather than dropping off the radar.
Phew.
If you’re exhausted just thinking about the list of tasks ahead of you, then why not get in touch with the SEO experts at Purplex? We’ll handle it for you.
The difference that sitting in the top slot on Google will make to your website traffic might surprise you – this is the share of people clicking on each search result, by position:
40% – Yes – nearly half of people click on the top result (even when ads are shown above it). That’s why the number 1 position is so highly-valued.
19% – Drop to second position and the number of people clicking through falls by more than half!
10% – There’s another big drop by the time you hit third place – just a quarter of those that clicked on the first-ranked search result.
Let’s round out the final positions in the top 10…
By the time you get to page 2, all that’s left are crickets and tumbleweed – even so, there’s a myth that SEO is a cheap or free way to replace advertising. In reality, it’s a cost-effective strategy that is best used alongside PPC campaigns. Good SEO takes time and/or money to get right, and it’s a long term solution, not a quick fix.
Technical SEO boils down to one thing – is your site neat and tidy? We’re generally talking about the code here, rather than the content. But don’t switch off!
It’s really important to get technical SEO right, as it will have a big impact on your search traffic. Here are 3 key things to get right if you want to hit the top of Google:
How long does it take your site to load and what happens while it’s loading? A slow-loading page isn’t just technically bad – it will also cause users to give up and try another site instead. But Google will sometimes mark you on things that those users may not even notice. That includes factors like ‘cumulative layout shift’ – the distance and direction that content wiggles around as it pops into life, and ‘first contentful paint’ – the time it takes before something – anything – appears on the blank page.
If you’ve deleted a page or moved it around, Google needs to know about it. Otherwise, the page may not appear in search results, and the missing content will go down as a red mark in your site’s report card. Search engines don’t like it when pages go missing, as it breaks their results pages – getting redirects set up correctly is important to avoid SEO penalties.
It’s so frustrating to click on a link and land on a 404 – page not found error. This isn’t just an issue when you delete a page without setting up a redirect – it’s also a problem when you’re linking out to other sites and they move or delete content. A good piece of SEO software should give you an idea of where the broken links are on your site. Fixing these is an annoying and tedious job (why not get Purplex to do it?), but a good way to improve your search performance.
Search engines really don’t like seeing the same sentence twice. Search engines really don’t like seeing the same sentence twice. It’s OK on one page, but if they see this happening between pages on the same site, or different sites, they’re like a professor marking an essay – plagiarism is suspected.
The copied content gets marked down severely for copying, and, just like at uni, the original author can also get in trouble. Nowadays, you can easily use ChatGPT to rewrite content and dodge the plagiarism bullet. But if you do that, you’ll often end up with a slightly strange tone.
Of course, sometimes it isn’t possible to avoid duplicating content across multiple pages – what if you run a music venue and have one page for each date? If you run the same event every Wednesday, each date will contain the same information. The same might be true if you have products in different colours or with slightly different specs. In this case, you may benefit from canonical URLs – this lets the search engine know which URL is the definitive version of the page.
Search engines don’t like messy code – it slows down your page, when loading, indexing and during use. Messy or broken code can also lead to a buggy, unresponsive layout, especially when viewing content on devices it wasn’t designed for. So it’s important to get your site designed by a professional who keep your code nice and clean.
Google rarely publishes information about how to improve your SEO. Revealing information about their algorithm would allow people to game the system.
Search engines love metadata. This ‘data about data’ explains what something is, in a way that a robot mind can interpret. Alt text is one example – in theory it’s a label added to an image which helps vision-impaired people understand what the picture is. In reality, it’s used by the search engine when they ‘crawl’ your site, looking for data. They can’t read a picture, but they can read the alt text metadata.
Just like alt text, a lot of metadata is not only useful for bots, but also for humans, too. Here are the key bits of metadata that should be completed when you’re finishing off a website or webpage:
01
Perhaps the most commonly-forgotten item on cheap websites – this makes the difference between your site looking like it was made by an agency or made by your neighbour. A favicon is the little logo that appears next to the page title in your browser when you visit a site. It’s a simple thing, but really makes the site feel professional.
02
Perhaps the most commonly-forgotten item on cheap websites – this makes the difference between your site looking like it was made by an agency or made by your neighbour. A favicon is the little logo that appears next to the page title in your browser when you visit a site. It’s a simple thing, but really makes the site feel professional.
03
Each page on your site should have a meta description. This is often pulled through as the short description shown in search results. It may also be shown as the description in social media posts, depending on your site and page settings. This text should be the right length – too short and it won’t take advantage of this important space on the search engine results page (SERP). Too long, and the text will be clipped off, losing the meaning and/or important keywords.
04
On each page of your website, there should be a single heading which is marked in the code as #H1. This is the main title for your page, and it may be pulled through into search results. The H1 lets search engines understand what your article is about – adding specific words to this title informs the search engine that this page should rank for those keywords. Sometimes a page has multiple H1s – this can create confusion when a search bot crawls the page.
05
There’s a special tag that developers will put on a page which is under construction. It’s called ‘noindex’ and it prevents the page from showing up in search results. The tag is like a post-it note that tells a search engine not to ‘index’ the page. But sometimes this tag is left on by accident when the page goes live, which will prevent it from having any search presence. You can usually check this in your SEO plugin on WordPress.
06
You already know that the URL is the address of your page on the internet. You can think of a slug as the house number – it’s usually the last bit of a URL (if you aren’t using an urchin tracking module or ‘UTM’ – the bit after the ‘?’). Sometimes slugs, and even the address before them can be a bit of a mess – e.g. selling.com/behk88/77gfrdtrtfh88h6g/ – if they look like this, then it’s not great for humans or search engines.
A human is less likely to click on a link if they can’t tell what lives there, and a search engine won’t be able to get any information from the URL. Good practice is to make your links readable and as concise as possible. A better example would be selling.com/hairbrushes/oval-bamboo/
07
By 2024, most sites are sitting on a URL which starts with ‘https’, not just ‘http’ – but there are still a few businesses left behind with an old system. Others have https set up, but SSL is not configured correctly. Most modern browsers will either post a big warning, or prevent users from accessing a site where SSL is broken – that includes websites with a ‘http’ URL. SSL is a secure system that protects the data sent between the site and your computer.
08
Pages on a website can act like folders on a computer, and breadcrumbs make this folder structure visible and interactive. For example, a holiday cottage in Cornwall could have these breadcrumbs: homepage > cottages > england > cornwall > fowey cottage.
A user can easily jump to any point in the breadcrumbs by clicking on the link, and a search engine can understand how the pages relate to each other, while getting more metadata about the page contents. The beauty of this system is that you can keep a shorter URL like beachholidays.co.uk/cottages/fowey-port-isaac/ while showing a more complicated hierarchy in the breadcrumbs. Shorter URLs are easier to type and better for SEO.
09
Webpages are usually very clearly structured – at the top, there is an #H1 heading. Below this, the page is broken down into sections with separate #H2 headings. Below each #H2 may be subsections with #H3 headings. #H4 and #H5 are usually used for styling text and/or low importance headings like those in the footer. Search engines read the keywords in each of your headings and use them to work out what your page is about – what the most and least important topics are, and how much content is written about each one.
Many sites use heading styles randomly, or use too many headings. Try to make sure that there is at least a paragraph of content for each heading, and that the headings are structured correctly. If a page is written to rank for a keyword, this keyword should appear in multiple headings, and the body copy below them, too.
Break up your page with heading styles (H1, H2, H3 etc) – it helps users to navigate your site, and allows search engines to understand the page structure
An SEO article is really just a fancy name for a blog post. You’re reading one right now. The most important thing to remember about SEO articles is that they will be read by an actual human being. If that person doesn’t enjoy reading your article, they’ll click ‘back’ and disappear forever into the internet void.
The best kind of SEO content is the kind that makes someone want to read more. Because that means they’ll stay longer on your page, pushing up one of the most important measures of SEO – ‘Average engagement time’. This metric is shockingly underrated and it’s surprising how many in the industry focus on keywords instead. But just like on Youtube, it’s far more effective to focus on long, engaging content with real value than to produce fluffy, clickbaity snippets.
The longer your article, the more keywords you will include – not because you’re trying to stuff them in, but because you’ll naturally include them as you touch on every aspect of a topic. If you know your industry, then it will be easier to write about it, and if you’re not a natural writer, then you can always get an agency like Purplex to help.
With all this in mind, here’s a good way to approach writing an SEO article – using our Purpose, Plan, Execute system – it’s the basis of our name – Purplex:
Buyers travel down a funnel as they head towards a buying decision – at each stage in the funnel, more and more people are lost until you get a few people converting into real customers. SEO articles are a great way of hacking that funnel – you’re catching potential customers before they’ve even decided to buy a product. Then you can guide their purchasing decision and be a helpful voice which they’ll then trust more when they come to the bottom of the funnel, ready to spend money.
So the kind of content you need to write will depend on what you’re selling – whether it’s windows or wellies, your SEO articles will be written to inform customers high up in that funnel. Think about the kinds of questions potential buyers might ask at this stage in their journey – ‘best wellies to wear in snow’, ‘how to sound insulate a window’. And remember that these people aren’t looking for a hard sell – they’re looking for useful information. SEO articles should be light on marketing and heavy on education – you’re building trust and then upselling your product, not the other way around.
I know – we’ve already said that keywords aren’t *as* important as interesting, useful content. But they *are* still important. In fact, the best way to start planning out your article is to do a bit of keyword research. It will help you understand what questions your customers are asking and what answers will be useful to them. And keywords are still important when crafting good headings, which play an important role in your page’s position in search results.
So how can you do this keyword research? There are a number of sites which let you do a few searches for free – ahrefs.com has a good one. But the best tools are all hidden behind expensive paywalls. Good agencies like Purplex will have access to keyword research tools and will use these before starting work on any SEO article.
Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to get writing. A good SEO article is at least 500 words long. A great one is 4000 words long – these come under the ‘ultimate guide’ category. They usually take a good amount of research to put together, and some time to edit, structure and illustrate.
Guides shouldn’t just be a wall of text – nobody wants to read a wall of text.
But equally, they shouldn’t be so broken up that it’s hard to get into the flow of reading.
Try to make sure that each section is valuable and can be read without context, as some people will only read a small snippet from a huge article. This is particularly important as Google may clip small sections out for their ‘structured snippets’ – these quotes are featured at the top of search results, boosting search traffic to your website.
Once you’ve finished writing, run the content past a second pair of eyes to get it proofread. Typos can reflect poorly on your brand, and it’s always helpful to have someone who can improve the style, too. ChatGPT can do this for you if a real human isn’t available.
The most important pages on your website are the ones which deliver sales. But you can get them to rank higher without a huge amount of effort. Here are 5 ways to do just that:
01
Big image files will slow down your pages, making those crucial page load times creep up. That not only puts customers off, but also destroys your search ranking. So install an image optimisation plugin, to crunch those images down into smaller file sizes. Yes, you might have to shell out a few quid for a license or a subscription, but it’s worth it for the improvements to site speed.
02
The footer is often an afterthought, but it’s one of the most valuable parts of your webpage when it comes to SEO. This bottom margin can be automatically populated with a sitemap, using common (free) plugins like Yoast. That will let you show users your entire site in one view, helping them find relevant content. It also creates more links between your pages – useful for boosting your SEO.
03
The secret to good SEO is actually just keeping users on your site for as long as possible. So, once they’ve read something useful, or found something that’s not quite relevant to them, but in the right ballpark, why not show them a related page? Adding a ‘related pages’ section to articles, topics, products etc will keep people on your site for longer. This could be as easy as dropping a widget on the page – it depends on your site builder.
04
Take a look at your website analytics to find your most popular blog articles. Now go through them and add in more text-based links, button-based ‘call to actions’ etc. These should link to relevant pages elsewhere on your site and/or your contact page. Joining up user journeys across your site will keep people around for longer, which boosts your SEO, while also improving your sales figures!
05
If you’ve got lots of content on a page, or a long article, it can sometimes be a good idea to add a contents box to the top of the page. Even better if it follows you down on desktop (just like ours!). This helps users to find the value they’re looking for on each page, and jump between relevant sections, rather than leaving the site. A contents box which is generated automatically, based on heading tags (H2, H3 etc) is best, as it also lets you see when your headings are mislabelled.
SEO isn’t just about what’s on your website. You can think of your site like a friendly spider at the heart of a web – we also need to focus on all that silk. Some of it is made up by other marketing channels – Digital Ads, Socials etc. But others still fall under SEO, like backlinks, Google Business and reviews. Let’s run through how we can improve those strands.
If another website links to yours, whether or not anyone clicks on the link, that will push your page up in search results. Google and other search engines uses these links to your site – ‘backlinks’ – like a vote for the page they link to. The more votes you get, the more chance you’ll have of your page ‘winning’ that lucrative top spot in search results.
Backlinks are even more powerful than that, though… Because each page contributes to your site’s overall position, a single reputable backlink can have a noticeable impact on the ranking of many unconnected pages. A backlink’s power is determined by the ‘page authority’ and ‘domain authority’ – basically how legitimate the page and website are. ‘backlinksforfree123.me.uk’ would have a low domain authority, while ‘bbc.co.uk’ scores very high. Of course, it’s much easier to get a backlink from the former site than the latter!
If you’re a small or medium-sized business, then chances are that many of your customers find you and/or your competitors through a Google Business profile. This is equally true for plumbers, window installers, hairdressers or car showrooms. The profile is like a mini website, and it also links to your website, so it’s important to get it optimised for search.
A great business description is concise, keyword-rich and location-specific. All negative reviews should be responded to in a timely and constructive manner, your photos updated regularly, and products and/or services added where relevant. In short, this profile should be as complete as possible, but also easy to read and visually engaging.
We’ve already mentioned that it’s important to respond constructively to any reviews on your Google Business profile. This is equally true of reviews across the other major review platforms, from Trustpilot to Glassdoor, Facebook to Checkatrade (where it’s possible to do so). Claiming and monitoring your profiles on these platforms will allow you to keep on top of any negative reviews, which can seriously impact sales.
Asking satisfied customers for positive reviews – whether in person or via email, is a great strategy to boost your rating. And given the importance of this review score when people are comparing you to your competitors on search engines, it’s worth investing some time to get this right.
Confused about keywords? Stymied by SEO? Find definitions to common SEO jargon in our helpful guide.
Search Engine Optimisation – a collection of techniques which improve your site’s ranking in search results. These conclusions usually come from a mix of experimentation, experience and the occasional rare bit of advice from Google. Search engines generally don’t explain how SEO works, as it encourages people to game the system. That’s why it’s worth hiring an expert.
Search Engine Results Pages – the page you land on after searching on Google, Bing etc. The goal with SEO is to get your site to the top of this page.
The word or phrase which someone types into the search box. Articles are often stuffed full of a specific keyword (‘keyword stuffing’), with the intention that the article appears at the top of results when someone searches for it. But that’s not really how SEO works. It’s not just about keywords – it’s also about the value users get from your content, and how relevant your site is to their search.
In the context of webpages, engagement is a way of measuring how much a user interacts with the page. An engaged user will scroll down, clicking on images (conciously or unconsciously), filling in forms and clicking links. Each time they interact with the page, they trigger an ‘event’, which is recorded by your analytics tool (e.g. Google Analytics). Bounce rate is an alternative way of reporting user engagement, but this has largely been replaced by ‘average engagement time’ or ‘engaged sessions’. Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions which ended without any interactions – it’s basically the opposite of total sessions ÷ engaged sessions.
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