Top 10 SEO Tips For Beginners

6 June 2024

It can be difficult to know where to start with SEO; what can really make a difference to your website’s ranking in Google, what people are actually searching for when looking for a business like yours, or even what some of the terminology means.

This post from Ian Lockwood gives you ten straightforward things you can do to make a tangible difference to your visibility in organic search results.

1. Keyword Research
   To undertake SEO, you really need to know what you’re optimising for, which means keyword research – the process of finding the keywords your potential customers are typing into Google. There are many keyword research tools around and it has to be said the best of them are all paid services, but you can get a decent amount of keyword ideas using the Keyword Surfer browser plugin, Dashword’s free People Also Search for tool or GetKeywords free plan (registration required).
    

2. Title & Meta Description Tags
   Once you have an idea of what customers are searching for, you can utilise those keywords in your pages (and often, you’ll need to create new pages in which to use those keywords). The single most important element of a web page for SEO is the title tag, which sets the text in the browser tab when viewing the page and is usually the text of the link to the page in search engine results. Google only displays around 60 characters maximum, so it’s best to aim for 50-60 characters in title tags, written as a sentence rather than a list of “Keyword, Keyword, Keyword”.
   
   Each page’s title tag should be optimised for keywords relevant to that page, meaning each one should be different to the rest. The same goes for meta descriptions, which are usually used for the descriptive “snippet” of a page in search results. The limit here is 160 characters and it’s effectively your ad in organic search results, so consider what benefits/USPs you want to get across as well as keywords here.
   
   You can usually edit title tags and meta descriptions when editing the page itself – on some platforms you may need a plugin, such as WordPress where Yoast SEO, RankMath or All In One SEO do the job.
    
3. Headings & Internal Links
   Similar to title tags, the main heading of a page is given weight in terms of a search engines’ understanding of the page’s topic. Importantly, it is the <h1> heading tag that is used for this, so ensure that the main headings in your pages use this.
   
   It's then a question of whether the page heading contains the target keywords for that page. Consider whether broad terms could be made more specific, e.g. “Solar Installation” might be better as “Solar Installation Nottingham” if that’s the area you cover.
   
   Another important element of “on-page” SEO is links between pages. The link text used is like signposts to search engines, meaning that when you link from one page to another, you should use descriptive terms rather than just “click here” or “more info” (it’s fine to combine them, e.g. “click here for our bookkeeping services”). These links also pass value in a search engine’s algorithm, making them appear more important and hence rank higher.
    
4. What To Write About
   On each page of your website, provide as much information as you can – don’t skimp. Describe the product or service in as much detail as makes sense. Consider common questions you can answer, or explaining how things work such as the process for delivering your service.
   
   However, you shouldn’t waffle or pad out content for the sake of having more words on the page, as search engines are good at detecting “quality” of content.
    
5. How To Write
   The way that search engines “understand” content means that simplicity, directness and clarity work best. Keep sentence structures as simple as possible, specify units of measurement or locations you mention (e.g. “Beeston, Nottingham”) and include the entity or questions you’re answering in the sentence, e.g. “vegan cheese is often made of coconut oil” – this makes it clear what you’re talking about and the information relating to it.
    
6. Adding More Content
   There are some subjects where you could write many thousands of words, so just one page isn’t enough. The best way to handle this is to create “hubs” of content – a main page (a service or category page) that has several sub-pages of information about different aspects of the topic. This allows you to demonstrate your expertise on the subject as well as create pages to target a wider range of keywords.
   
   If you need ideas about what extra information you could add, search Google for some of your primary keywords and look at the autosuggest ideas (that drop down when you are typing your search) and the People Also Ask questions (remember more appear when you click on them!) Some of the keyword research tools linked above can help with this too. There’s a great article here about creating content hubs and you can see an example of one in action if you scroll down to the Articles and Information section of this page.
    
7. Improve E-E-A-T
   Experience, Expertise, Authority & Trust are things that Google is looking for signals of from your website (and wider online footprint). This is rather nebulous (Google explains it in this document), but there are some simple things to ensure you have in place:
    
   1. Contact details in plain text (address, phone number, email address), e.g. in the footer of pages.
   2. Link out to your company social media profiles.
   3. Ensure you have a Contact page and help/customer service pages if relevant.
   4. Ensure you have a Privacy Policy page and ideally a Terms & Conditions page.
   5. Display any trust signals you can (accreditations, professional memberships etc.)
   6. Actively request online reviews from customers on a third-party platform such as your Google Business Profile.
   7. Create a detailed About Us page with plenty of information about the background of the business and the people in it.
   8. Ensure the content on your website is accurate and up to date – link out to reliable sources of information when quoting statistics and facts.

It’s also worth reading this very important document from Google about assessing your content quality.
 

8. Verify & Optimise Your Google Business Profile
   If you don’t already have a Google Business Profile, you can set one up here. Once verified, you can edit all the information. It’s very important to select the Primary Category that best matches your business, then add any additional categories that are also relevant.
   
   Remember to populate all the information you can, including a keyword-rich description of the business, Service Areas (locations you serve) and ideally your physical address (you don’t have to display this if you don’t want to, but your listing may not rank as well).
   
   Remember to make use of the Products and Services options where available and add some photos, including selecting your Logo and Cover photos. Google rewards listings that are kept up to date and have plenty of photos.
    
9. Local Citations
   References to your business name, address and phone number (“NAT”) on other websites are known as “local citations” and act like links to your website – they show Google that other people might find your business useful and are likely to want to find it, helping your listing to rank higher.  It therefore makes sense to add your business to major and sector-specific business directories. You can find a list of the top sites to get listed on here and directories by industry here.
    
10. Link Acquisition
    Search engines see links from other sites to yours almost like a vote, showing that other people value your website. They use links between websites to understand and “score” pages, meaning that acquiring links from other websites to your own helps your ranking.
    
    It can be difficult to make this happen, but there are some relatively straightforward avenues. Firstly, you could exchange links with related businesses & websites, but don’t create reciprocal links with just any site – there has to be a reason why they would link to each other, to avoid Google seeing it as “spam”.
    
    You could also offer testimonials to business suppliers for use on their website, requesting a link back to yours to “prove” it’s genuine. You might also consider sponsoring local organisations, charities or sports clubs and get a link from their Supporters page.
    
    Another valuable activity is PR – getting your business mentioned in the press. There are services such as Connectively, Qwoted, Help A B2B Writer and Sourcebottle that send you alerts when journalists & bloggers are looking for input to articles they’re writing. You can also search Twitter (X) for the #journorequest hashtag to find journalists seeking input on all sorts of articles.
    
    You can use Google Search Console to view data about the links you already have pointing to your pages (along with many other useful things).

If you want to learn more about SEO you can see all current workshops delivered by Ian for the Accelerator project here.

Back