Optimising your website for search engines

What is SEO?

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimisation, helps your website rank on search engines. It is a process in which you build and optimise your website to increase its visibility on the likes of Google and Bing. The better your visibility, the more traffic comes through to your site.

Say your business in Liverpool is a mental health organisation specialising in EMDR therapy. When people google “emdr therapy liverpool”, you would like your website to show up in the search engine, right? That’s what a good and strong SEO strategy will help you achieve. Remember that a number of websites will be competing to rank for most keywords, so unless your business is niche, you will need to spend some time to get it right. This involves considering the three pillars of SEO: tech SEO, on-site SEO and off-site SEO.

By the way, do not mistake SEO with the sponsored ads you see at the top and bottom in the results: these are paid placements and SEO is not part of their strategy. With an SEO optimised website, you are essentially targeting unpaid rather than direct or paid traffic.

Tech SEO – Technical optimisation

Without boring you with technical jargon, you want your website to actually be visible to search engines: it needs to be crawled* and indexed**. To make this process easy for the search engine, consider for example:

• a strong URL structure (keyword optimised and relevant)
• clear and concise navigation
• internal linking
• page speed (Core Web Vitals are a set of factors that Google has listed as important in a website’s user experience)
• a mobile-friendly website
• security such as a HTTPS connection

On-site SEO – Content optimisation

Your goal should always be to produce high-quality content, and in SEO, this can be achieved by writing for both your customers (what your audience sees) and search engines (code such as title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text and header tags).

For your audience, you should cover topics that are relevant to your brand, write content that is original and up-to-date, has a structured layout with visuals to break up lengthy paragraphs, and include keywords (search terms) to help your audience find it in the first place.

Off-site SEO Optimisation

Off-site optimisation strategies involve link building and can be achieved through various efforts, including: Guest blogging and other content marketing, PR, social media marketing, listing management, and ratings and reviews.

Does Search Engine Optimisation work? Is it worth it?

When done right, implementing SEO into your website will be worth it.

The true value of SEO lies in that your traffic is organic. Once your site is technically sound and the content is out there, your traffic will come without the need for paid placements (unlike paid ads). Still, you should prioritise keeping your content up-to-date. Teaming up with an SEO agency might help you, as they can also notify you of changes in the way search engines scan and rate websites.

Is search engine optimisation free?

SEO itself is free. The strategy you use to get there might not be. I recommend partnering with a professional SEO agency for this strategy. At Healthy Pixels, I currently only offer basic tech SEO advice, but can point you in the direction of good companies if you are interested.

What is Healthy Pixels’ SEO strategy?

While I currently do not offer a thorough SEO strategy at Healthy Pixels, your website will be SEO-ready in many areas at launch focused mostly on the technical side, including:

1. Meta titles and descriptions on all pages
2. Optimised images for best page speed
3. Alt text for all images that are not simply graphics
4. No broken links on launch; but we’ll create a 404 page anyway
5. A h1 on every page, and a tree hierarchy for following headlines

I also have a certificate in SEO, and have been part of improving the on-site SEO strategy for multiple websites, including content creation and overall site structure, and would be happy to help you find the best strategy for your website as well.

Conclusion

In short, you should consider SEO for your website. It might take some time initially, but you will find value in the organic traffic it will generate for you. To begin, why not contact me to discuss your website’s objectives and together come up with a plan? Although I will not run a full SEO audit, I can help you well along the way, and recommend other SEO partners where I fall short.