As COVID-19 takes hold of the nation, many businesses small and large have been moving to a remote working from home model to help with social distancing. But working from home shouldn’t mean that your website rankings and SEO efforts suffer. If you are one of the many newly-remote workers keen on optimising your business online, here is a list of basic SEO checks and improvements you can do from the comfort of your own home.
What is SEO?
For those starting from the very beginning in their SEO journey, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your website and content for search engines. Doing this means that your content and therefore your website may rank higher in Google’s search results page.
SEO involves several different areas. From on-page SEO checks to technical SEO. Our basic SEO checklist will cover off some of the more simple SEO checks you can conduct on your website to make use of those extra hours at home.
1. Conduct Keyword research
The first step of our SEO checklist involves the use of keywords. What are SEO keywords? SEO keywords are words or phrases that define what your website content is about and help visitors to find your site. Keywords are added to content to help boost search engine rankings for the things your audience will be searching for.
What are some keywords that you would like your website to rank for? Conduct a basic on-page SEO check to see if you have used these words within your content. Do you have an SEO keyword strategy in place? If not, it will be worth spending some time researching keywords used in your industry. What keywords are your competitors using? What are the themes of your website content that you would like to rank for? Building a simple keyword strategy based on research is one of the first steps towards good SEO and a basic SEO check you can do from home.
2. Optimise Your Website for Those Keywords
Once you have conducted your keyword research, the next step in your SEO checklist involves auditing your site’s content to ensure it follows the strategy you have laid out in step one of the website SEO checklist. Some simple keyword checks you can action involve analysing which words or phrases come up the most in each page of your website, do these match with your chosen keywords from your research? If not, optimise your content using these keywords used naturally throughout. Does your keyword feature within the first 150 words of a page? If not, refresh your content to make sure that it does.
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3. Run a Website Speed Test
How fast does your website load? A basic SEO check you can do from anywhere is a website speed test. This will check how reactive your website is for users and how long it takes for everything on the page to load. If you have a quick load speed, your customers will be more likely to revisit your site and stay on your website for longer. If your site speed is slow, your visitors may leave your site in search of one of your quicker-loading competitors.
Fast websites are also easier to crawl by Google’s bots so they will crawl your site quicker and more frequently. As a ranking factor for mobile searches, quicker site speeds can enhance your website’s SEO and improve your chances of ranking in search engine results pages. To get started with improving your website loading speed, run your URL through Google’s page speed test here.
4. Are Your Images Optimised?
Optimised images are an extremely simple SEO optimisation method but still somehow often get overlooked. Image sizes can significantly affect your site’s load speed so a quick check of your site’s image sizes can help improve your SEO quickly and easily. Some basic image SEO checks can include things such as checking you have used images on pages that have a lot of text, checking the images are relevant to the page’s content and checking your images are in the right format for use.
Behind the scenes, some simple image SEO checks include formatting the image title correctly and using alt text on your images. Image titles should reflect the content of the image itself rather than a nonsense title such as 123hdvsj.jpg. Your image file name should contain a keyphrase so that Google will be able to know what the content of the image is without looking at it.
An image alt-text of alt-tag is information added to an image when you insert it into your website’s content. Alt-text should be included for every image on your website as it is a way to identify what the image is if it does not load on your page. This could be because there is an issue or because a visitor has images turned off in their browser. Alt-text also helps identify image content for those using a screen reader due to a visual impairment ensuring that no functionality of your website is lost.
5. Check Your Links
Google crawls websites through links. If your site has no links or is not linked to or from another website, your content will not be found. A quick review of which links are included in your website is a basic SEO check you can do from anywhere.
A good linking structure will ensure your website makes sense to visitors and website crawlers as well as making sure that all content you want to be accessed can be found. This is one of the most important points on your website SEO checklist so shouldn’t be taken lightly. A good linking structure can help improve your SEO dramatically.
If your website has a blog, a good SEO check to conduct is the quality and quantity of your links. Are the links within your articles or content relevant? Do they link to credible sources that relate to the topic? Have you included a mixture of internal and external links within your content? If not, make a note on your SEO checklist to add some.
6. Conduct a Full SEO Audit for Free
Whilst there are many simple fixes, sometimes SEO requires us to really dig under the surface of how your website is performing. If you would like a quick and easy way to see exactly how your website is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool and get the results sent straight to your inbox. You’ll receive a free full breakdown of how your content is performing with some useful suggestions on how you can combat any issues highlighted.
Why not try our website audit tool for free now?
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