SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can be an intimidating subject for anyone who is unfamiliar with it. Not only that, but it also often comes with a large price tag! Whilst there is definitely a benefit in outsourcing your SEO to a freelancer or agency (like us!) it can be hard to justify the expense for a start-up or small business.
Happily, there are a lot of things you can do for free and with limited technical knowledge to help get your website further up the search engine rankings.
To help you get the most from your website, we have compiled a list of 10 ways you can improve your SEO for free:
1. Make sure you claim your ‘Google Business Profile’
We jump straight in to one of the easiest ways to improve your search presence with claiming a Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business). Setting up your profile is simple and gives you a great opportunity to appear in the Google “3-pack” (the 3 Google Business listings that appear at the top of a search). It will also list your business on Google Maps. This is an incredibly quick and easy way to try and boost your organic search traffic. Just make sure you take the time to fully complete your profile and keep it up to date to give your business the best chance of appearing.
2. Get Customer Reviews
Tying in nicely to our first point, you can use your new Google Business Profile to start collecting customer reviews. This not only provides potential customers with the reassurance that you are a trustworthy business, but it also shows search engines that you are worth listing in their search results as you are a legitimate business with plenty of happy customers. Your Google Business Profile isn’t the only way to collect reviews, either. Using a site like Trustpilot or Yell to collect reviews is also a great way to help boost your SEO. Search engines use positive experiences from customers across numerous review platforms to determine if your website is worth ranking in their results.
3. Add proper Title and Heading tags to your pages
Title and Heading tags play an important part in your SEO and luckily they are pretty simple to manage!
A Title tag is used by search engines in their search results so your potential customers will see it. A great title tag should be attractive so that it entices users to click on the link, but it also serves a purpose for search engines to know what your page is about. When writing your title tags, be sure to make them relevant to the content of the page and use the keywords you want to rank for but also make it exciting enough to draw people into your site.
Heading tags work in a similar way but don’t appear on search results pages. Headings are a great way to structure your pages and break down content into easily readable sections. The other benefit is that search engines will use your heading structure to determine the hierarchy of the content on your page.
You should use one “H1” (Header 1) tag on each page to highlight your most important heading and then use “H2” (Header 2) through to “H6” (Header 6) tags to highlight the rest of the hierarchy on your page. Search engines will give more weight to Heading tags than just plain paragraph text, so it’s a great way to tell search engines what the main content of your page is and give a boost to your most relevant keywords.
4. Build some backlinks
Building backlinks to your website can help your website in a couple of ways.
Firstly, you have ‘nofollow’ links. These are links from other websites back to your site that do not pass any direct SEO benefit to you. This means they won’t push you further up the search results page, however that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. A ‘nofollow’ link on a business directory may not pass SEO benefit directly to you, but it does still get your name out there in a place where potential customers are looking for businesses.
The second type of link is a “dofollow” link. These links DO pass SEO benefits to your site directly. Search engines count links from other sources as a signal that this site has content that people want to see and share. The higher the ‘Domain Authority’ of the site linking to you, the more benefit that link will give you. This also works the other way too – if a website is seen as untrustworthy and likely to be used as a “black hat” way of building links, then search engines are likely to punish your site and even remove it from search results completely! Not good.
Our advice for people who want to start building some links themselves is to focus on registering with business directories. They are simple to set up, most of them are free – and while they are mostly going to be ‘nofollow’ links, they will help to get your business in front of potential customers.
If you are unsure where to start, there is a great list of over 100 free Business Directories on UK Business Blog. They have even listed the domain authority for each directory so that you can pick the most authoritative links relevant to your business.
Building business directory listings is a simple task but can be time consuming and if we are honest, a bit boring – so, put the telly on, make a cup of tea and spend a few hours working through your list of business directories!
Remember that regardless of whether link is “nofollow” or “dofollow”, search engines will consider the consistency of details across the internet as a small factor in SEO so make sure your “NAP” (Name, Address, Phone Number) details are consistent across all listings and save your login details should you need to update information in the future.
5. Setup Google Search Console and Google Analytics
Google provide some excellent free-to-use tools to help keep track of your website performance and user behaviour. While these are completely free to use, you may need some help setting them up to work with your website depending on your technical expertise. If you need a hand with the setup then feel free to contact us.
The first of these tools is Google Search Console. This tool gives you data on how you are performing in search results and provides invaluable data on what pages, keywords, locations, featured snippets (the list goes on) are working, or not working for your site.
The second of the tools is Google Analytics. While this is not necessarily an SEO specific tool, it is invaluable for tracking user behaviour on your site and seeing where your potential customers are coming from. Think of it this way – Search Console tracks how people find your site and Analytics tracks what the users do once they reach your site.
A great example for how Google Analytics Can help your SEO is checking the “Bounce Rate” of your pages. You may have a page that is ranking well on Google, but if people are leaving that page immediately after landing on it then you know there is an issue with that page – it could be technical or content related, but now you have the knowledge to be able to investigate.
A major note for using Google Analytics on your website! Tracking users without their consent is illegal in the UK (and most other parts of the world) so you must give users the option to opt out of tracking when they first land on your site (i.e. a cookie banner) and you must include information on how their data is stored and used in your Privacy Policy.
6. Setup an XML Sitemap
Setting up a sitemap goes hand in hand with Google Search Console. While search engines are great at crawling sites themselves, it is best practice to submit a sitemap in Google Search Console so that Google has quick and easy access to all of your pages and you can keep an eye on how often it is crawled as well as if there are any errors or warnings. This will ensure that all the content you want to appear online is known to Google. It also eliminates the chance that important pages are missed.
All major website platforms will have a way for you to create a sitemap easily. If you are using WordPress for instance, you can use the Rankmath or Yoast plugins to automatically generate and update your sitemap (Yoast also now works with Shopify too).
7. Use internal linking to highlight your most important content
Getting people to link to your content and boost your SEO from other websites is a tricky job, particularly when you are a new, small website. All is not lost however, as can do a certain amount of linking yourself.
By adding links within your own website, you can effectively tell search engines which pages contain your most important content and what that content is about. Adding in menus and links within your content too will give context and priority to your own pages. As a simple example, on our website when we mention Website Design in our content we link it to our Web Design Services page (see what we did there!). This provides context to google when they crawl that link. Essentially Google knows that the page is about Website Design and by linking to it multiple times, search engines know it is an important page on our site.
It’s worth us mentioning that overusing this tactic won’t help. You need to be strategic with what content you choose to link to and avoid overloading your content with huge amounts of links. Depending on your technical expertise you may need some help with this, so feel free to contact us if you think you would be better off not tackling this yourself.
8. Start blogging
This can sound like a daunting task, but the benefits far outweigh the initial hurdles. In an odd sort of way, search engines and customers are looking for the same thing – information. If you were to think back over your recent Google searches, the chances are a large portion of the results were blog posts/articles.
For potential customers, blog posts give them information that will help them to make a buying decision. It also helps establish your business as a trustworthy source of reliable knowledge and shows that you are an active business.
For Search Engines, it provides a source of information where they can really dig in to the content and use your words to determine what your business is all about and rank you in their results accordingly. Using ourselves as an example again, this post about Search Engine Optimisation tips will show search engines that we are a business that has an active interest in ranking for SEO related searches and that we provide SEO services to our customers.
Start by thinking up a few ideas for posts (“listicles” like this one are a great starting point) and then set aside some time to write about what you know and love – your business.
9. Do your keyword research
This is probably the most critical item on this list. Keywords are the core of how search engines will rank your pages. So, what are Keywords? Keywords are words or phrases that you use throughout your content that relate to searches you want your page to appear for.
For instance, we are a Web Design and Marketing agency that is based in Yorkshire so search terms like “Web Design in Yorkshire” or “Design and Marketing agency” are important keywords for us, which is why we include those phrases organically throughout the content on our website. Search engines will pick up that we have used these terms throughout our site and will know that our website is relevant to anyone who may search for those phrases.
It sounds simple, but there is a catch. With so many websites battling for the top spot on search results it can be almost impossible to compete with larger, more established sites. The solution to this is to find niche keywords or ‘long tail keywords’. These words and phrases can be tricky to find, but the idea is to find something that is being searched for that very few other sites are targeting.
Let’s use our website as an example yet again. It would be impossible for us to compete on the search term “Marketing Agency” on a global scale but “Small Marketing Agency in Yorkshire” is much more niche and has a lot less competition, making it much easier to hit the top spots on Google. To help find these illusive keywords you can use the free Google Keyword Planner tool. It is primarily designed for researching keywords for use with Google ads, but it is just as useful for finding target words and phrases for your website content.
10. Format your content for Featured snippets
Finally – depending on how your website is set up – adding Featured Snippets may be an advanced task but it is definitely worth mentioning in this list.
Featured Snippets are short chunks of text that directly answer a user’s search query. Once this has been set up correctly using ‘Schema Markup’, if you have text that directly answers a query there is a chance your page will get bumped directly to the top of the search results page in the form of a question and answer.
In the crowded and competitive world of search engines, getting pushed directly to the top of the results page for answering a question directly is a huge win. Get started by trying to answer in roughly 40-50 words some of the questions you have found from your keyword research, and hopefully you will get a chance to appear directly at the top of the search results!
