Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your website to enhance its visibility on search engines. This should, in turn, increase the level of traffic and business driven to the site.
Search engine optimisation can consist of many factors, from the technical health of the site to the keywords it targets and the quality of its backlink profile.
Having an SEO-friendly website and running a comprehensive SEO campaign are two different matters.
An SEO-friendly website is developed with search engine optimisation in mind to ensure that the site performs well on Google. An SEO campaign is a more strategic, ongoing effort to increase the visibility and rankings of a website.
We’ve detailed the key differences between the two below.
Best practices of an SEO-friendly website
Clean code
Ensure you incorporate clean code that is easy for Google’s crawl bots to understand. The easier the code is to read, the easier it is for Google to understand the content and rank the website accordingly. Clean code can speed up the crawling and indexing process, which, with Google’s limited resources, is integral to the performance of a site.
Host the website within the UK
The physical location of the server hosting your website can have a significant impact on its performance. If your website is hosted within the UK, search engines know to serve your site in UK search results.
A comprehensive sitemap listing the pages of the site
A sitemap stored in a handy place is essential to an SEO-friendly site, as this map is submitted to Google to ensure that its crawl bots can find and index the pages listed. If Google can’t find the pages on your website, they can’t show them on the results page.
Original content
Content should be original and not written by AI (artificial intelligence). Content that has been written by AI may have been duplicated elsewhere, which could impact its ability to rank on Google. Google favours content that is original and has been written to be helpful to the user. Duplicate content may be penalised by Google, which could result in not showing in the search results.
A comprehensive SEO campaign can include, but is not limited to:
On-going keyword research
This can help to identify changes in trends and search volume of target keywords. Conducting regular keyword research ensures that the most effective keywords are included within the content, which will help to drive the most relevant traffic to the site.
As part of this keyword research, a full SEO campaign will include analysing the intent behind a search query. This looks at the type of content that the search engine serves to the user in response to a query.
For example, if you search “accommodation in Chester”, the top search results are for Hotels in Chester. This means that other accommodation types, such as cottages, may struggle to rank as highly for this term.
Competitor analysis
Conducting an in-depth analysis of competitor sites is an incredibly valuable part of any SEO campaign. By analysing the websites of your top search engine results page (SERP) competitors, you can identify key similarities or differences.
As part of our competitor analysis process, we run a keyword gap analysis to look at the keywords our competitors are targeting that we’re not. These ‘missing’ keywords may be terms that hadn’t previously been considered as part of the SEO strategy.
Technical health
It is important that the technical health of a website is monitored and fixed wherever relevant, as this may hinder search engine crawl bots indexing the site. If a site is experiencing slow loading pages, for example, this could cause users, and crawl bots, to drop off the site.
If Google’s crawl bots can’t index the site, the site won’t appear in search results. Similarly, if a user lands on a page with a broken link, meaning they can’t find the content they were looking for, they may visit a competitor site to complete their conversion.
SEO-friendly websites and SEO campaigns both have their advantages, depending on your business goals, resources and budget.
Need help building an SEO friendly website or launching a full SEO campaign? Contact the friendly and knowledgeable team at Engage Web today, or book onto our next workshop.
Have an existing site and want to look at the effectiveness of your on-page SEO? Use our free website SEO analysis tool!
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