3 Ways To Help Website SEO
Most businesses rely on their internet presence to drive traffic and growth. Local SEO gets more challenging every day and your competitors are after the same thing. Keeping up with all the changes and strategies can be a challenge when you’re trying to run your core business. Here are 3 ways to help website SEO:
1) Check Your Website Performance
Google made a significant change to their search algorithm in the summer of 2021 and started using site performance as a factor. Things that impact performance can include image size and format, how many elements have to be loaded to render a page, web server performance and more. To help website owners get a sense of how well their pages and websites perform, Google provides a Page Speed Insights tool for free. It’s easy to use, just enter one of your page URLs and click “Analyze”.
After a few seconds, the tool returns some data for both mobile and desktop setting an provides a grade between 0 and 100 indicating the performance score. In addition, the tool returns some ideas and suggestions on how to improve your score. Some may be easy but some may require a website developer’s help. If your scores are under 50, it’s worth making some changes to get the scores up.
2) Check Your Website’s Mobile Friendliness
Google recently started crawling websites “mobile first”. What that means is that your site is evaluated and considered for mobile users first. You can use the PageSpeed Insights tool described above to get a sense of what Google thinks and you can just pull up your site on a smartphone. If the site is hard to use, hard to read or takes a long time to load, you’ll want to make some changes. Sites that aren’t mobile friendly are at a significant disadvantage compared to mobile friendly competitors. In general, more than half of all internet users are on a mobile device so this should be a priority.
3) Check Your Website Content Structure
Good content structure makes it easier for Google to crawl and understand what your website is about. It also provides opportunities to highlight specific keywords that you would like to target for that page.
What do we mean by good content structure? First and foremost it would relate to heading tags. Like an MS Word document, HTML allows the use of heading tags that are enumerated like H1, H2, H3 and so on. An H1 heading would be the highest level heading and might contain several H2 Headings, which might in turn contain several H3 Headings and so on. A single web page should contain only one H1 heading but could contain many “sub” headings. These heading tags provide a way to organize a page’s content into sections and sub-sections which helps Google interpret the content.
Most website pages developed by a professional should be organized this way, but we have seen instances where the tags are used for formatting more than content organization. For example, we’ve helped several of our garage door SEO clients restructure their content to emphasize critical keywords.
SEO isn’t easy, taking time and patience to be successful. Shortcuts are an illusion and never work out in the end. Play the long game with your SEO and keep at it!
