How to Improve Your Website’s SEO

Want to know how to improve your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO)? Then read on to get the six key things you should be doing to improve your page rankings.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation, more commonly known as SEO, is the practice of improving the ranking of your website on search engines. Google is often the priority. The higher your website ranks, the more likely people will find it when searching for something on the internet. 

Fundamentally, SEO optimises your visibility online. This means that the more times your website appears in search, the more people will visit it. The more visitors you have, the better your chance of providing your product or service to a greater number of people.

Search engine optimisation isn’t only a task for internet gurus, web wizards, and digital experts. While having an in-depth knowledge of Google algorithm trends will give you an advantage. Most marketers will be capable of making simple changes to optimise their websites.  

What do you need to focus on to improve your SEO?

At its core, SEO comes down to research, structure, quality content, consistency, and value to the community. There are also several tried and tested methods you can use to improve your website’s overall SEO. 

You can transform your content’s SEO performance by doing the following:

• Keyword research
• Optimising your title tags and meta descriptions
• Using alt text for images
• Making sure your website is mobile-friendly
• Publishing high-quality content regularly
• Understanding ALL the search engines…

By focusing on these areas, you can improve your search engine ranking to attract more visitors and customers from search engines.

1. Do your keyword research.

Keyword research is the foundation of good SEO. You need to find out what keywords and phrases people are using to search for businesses in your industry and then make sure those keywords are incorporated into your website content in a natural and effective way. For example, are people more likely to search for “marketing agency Dubai” “B2B marketing agency in Dubai”, or “Best marketing agency in Dubai”?

You can use several different tools to do keyword research; some of the most popular include free tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, and paid tools including Moz Keyword Explorer, and SEMrush.

One simple way to identify an area of focus is to download your search queries from Google Console, select the queries ranked under 40, and focus on building content around those words. 

2. Optimise your title tags and meta descriptions.

Your title tags and meta descriptions are two important elements of your website when it comes to SEO. These are the short text descriptions that appear under your website’s URL in the search results. You can find and edit these in the backend of your website. 

It’s important to make sure the meta descriptions and title tags are well-written, consistent, and accurately describe what website visitors will find on your site. In addition, you want to ensure you include these relevant keywords and phrases in the meta descriptions to improve your chances of showing up in the search results.

For example, if your keyword is ‘marketing agency Dubai’, you will want to make sure that’s in the copy and the meta description.

Tools such as SEOyoast will help to identify any inconsistencies. Their red,  amber, green (RAG) traffic light system will highlight any issues and areas for improvement. 

3. Improve your website speed.

A slow website will harm your SEO progress in a number of ways. Firstly, website visitors, aka human beings, don’t like slow websites. Frustrating website experiences will cause people to click away from your site without fully exploring what you have to offer or even before the page has had a chance to load. Think about the last time you visited a site that didn’t appear to load quickly. How many seconds before you closed the page and clicked on a different result? 

Second, it will lower your “time on site” metric, which is a key ranking factor for Google. Time on site literally means the average amount of time each person who visits a web page stays on it. This helps search engines like Google understand the quality of the page. 

For example, if someone visits a page and then leaves within a few seconds (referred to as a bounce), it could be because the user experience was poor or the content didn’t match expectations. Google can interpret this as a sign that the web page was not relevant to the search keywords used or was not user-friendly, which could lower your site’s page ranking. However, if they stayed on that page and then clicked on other pages across the website, that suggests the web page met the visitor’s expectations. Google will interpret this website as a high-quality website for the search keywords that were used and rank you based on this.

There are lots of free tools that can help you with this. A quick search for “website page speed check” will give you helpful tools, including free and paid tools such as SEMRush, and Google Developers. 

As you can see, it would appear Bright Company needs some work. 

4. Create high-quality content

For your website to rank highly in the search results, you need to have high-quality content relevant to what people are searching for. Don’t underestimate the power of words in copywriting. 

At a recent forum, when a Google representative was asked ‘what’s the best way to improve my website SEO’, the Google rep simply said, ‘improve your content’. This is about taking content that is showing success and putting all your energy behind it, ignoring the content that isn’t doing well. (Although you would probably want to assess your content strategy). On the Digital Marketing Podcast (available on Spotify etc.), they put it another way “don’t polish turds” 💩💩💩

So, what is high-quality content?

High-quality content is fundamentally content that people want to read or engage with. This can include blog posts, articles, how-to guides, ebooks, reports, whitepapers, surveys, tips, guides, infographics, and other types of content. The content should be focused on and contain keywords and phrases that you accurately want to target which are relevant to your business. Creative sprints, or content sprints, can be a great way to generate a huge amount of content ideas for your target audience. 

Relevancy is critical. It might be appealing to want to jump onto certain trends by developing clickbait-style content. However, this won’t get you the results you are ultimately looking for from your SEO. Which is for Google to rank you and consider your website to be an authority on a certain subject matter and rank you higher as a result. 

Lastly, you want to make sure all of your copy is well-written and easy to read and understand. You should also ensure your supporting assets, such as videos, infographics, images etc., are engaging. There has been a huge increase in organisations hiring writers for this very reason. However, whether you are a professional writer or not, tools such as Grammarly will help eradicate typos, grammar issues, or complex sentence structures.

5. Build links from high-quality websites.

Link building, also known as back-linking, is perhaps one of the most labour-intensive SEO tasks. Building website links involves finding websites in your industry that have high domain authority, preferably above 50 (SEO tools will help you identify the score), and reaching out to them about guest blogging opportunities or other ways to collaborate. The goal is to get them to post a link from their website to yours. Not only will this help improve your SEO, but it will also help you build relationships with other thought leaders in your industry. There are lots of backlinking or referral tools out there. The trick is deciding on which tools to invest in. 

6. Don’t forget Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo!

Believe it or not, 8% of the world’s population doesn’t use Google. 3% of people still use Bing, Yandex is used by 1.5% of people, and Yahoo! Has a 1.3% market share. Don’t let the small percentages put you off, Bing gets more than 1 billion visits every single month. Not too shabby. This percentage changes depending on the market(s) you are focused on. For example, depending on whether you are in London, Dubai, or Singapore. But it’s worth considering. Keep on top of key search engine best practices to stay ahead of the competition. 

These are just a few of the things you can do to improve your website’s SEO in 2023 to climb Google (Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo!). If you want your website to rank well in SERPs, it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends and best practices. By following these tips, you can help ensure that your website ranks highly in SERPs next year.

Bright Company is a Dubai-based agency that specialises in content creation, website design, and search engine optimisation and marketing. As experts in marketing and communications, we have developed content, marketing, and digital solutions in Arabic and English for businesses, governments, charities, NGOs, healthcare organisations, SaaS solutions, events, the energy industry, FMCG, and many other types of organisations. We are experts in research-based whitepapers, articles, website copy, blogs, strategic messaging, message houses, narratives, press releases, social media copy, ghost-writing, key messages, mission vision values, search-optimised copy (SEO), ebooks, reports, trend analysis, ad copy, and just about any other type of copy. Bright Company can also help you with your landing pages, videos, TikToks, website build, and on-page content.

If you are looking for support with your content or SEO, then let us know, and we’d be happy to chat further.