Search Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) determines how your website ranks in search results. Some companies make several times more money from ranking highly, in search results, than they do from working with paid advertisements.
Today we’re going to teach you the basics and you’ll leave with an understanding of how to:
The checklist that search engines use to rank your website.
We’re going to focus on a few key principles that you don’t have to be an expert to implement. We would recommend creating a google search console account for your website before you proceed to get maximum value.
The search console can highlight errors in your website that may cause web crawlers to rank your site lower or miss it completely. We’ll take a quick look at the main sections, on the left-hand-side, starting with overview.
View your websites performance, coverage and enhancements.
That is, how often your website is clicked, whether your pages are all valid, and can be indexed, and your websites usability respectively (Figure 1).
You can use “open report” to see how your website performs in each of these areas. Google gives you suggestions on how to fix pages with errors in them, many can be done without requiring a professional developer.
URL inspection lets you see which pages are indexed and it gives you the option to request for google to re-crawl your website. This is important when you add or delete pages.
Manage the web pages you have on google.
It starts off by showing your coverage, i.e. the availability of your pages, and again, it lets you know if your website has any errors (Figure 2).
The sitemap section lets you submit your sitemap URL. A sitemap is like a roadmap of your website which tells search engines that it’s ready to be crawled. You can create a free sitemap using the XML Sitemaps website.
The removals section lets you submit URLs to be removed. This is important if you’ve got outdated content and/or duplicate content, both of which can negatively impact your rankings.
See how your websites performing.
Enhancements specifically looks at load time, interactivity, visual stability and mobile friendliness. Let’s break these down further.
Load time, also termed Largest Contentful Plaint (LCP), is how fast your website loads. Nearly 50% of users expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds and 40% abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load[1]. I don’t think we need to explain the importance of load time further!
Interactivity, or First Input Delay (FID), is the time it takes for a user to be able to see and interact with the webpage. Again, this is important to lower bounce rates since the majority of people are inpatient consumers.
Visual Stability, or Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), is the user experience your website provides. Do all features respond instantly, does the website contain bugs, basically, does it function as intended. You’ll be given a score, and should aim for < 0.01.
You can select “try PageSpeed insights” to see how your website performs (Figure 3). This feature is one of our favourites, since it gives you suggestions on how to make your website more user friendly. It also lets you assess the quality of your developer, and/ or designers, work and make actionable suggestions for improvements. Please note that results for website and mobile are different, but we would suggest prioritising mobile. This is because google has recently changed their search engines to rank websites based solely on mobile performance.
Simple steps that make a huge difference
Firstly, COMPRESS YOUR IMAGES. This is free, it can be done in bulk and its very important for LCP and FID. We use https://imagecompressor.com/ since it can compress all the necessary file formats we use. Try to keep graphical files to below 300kB and image quality to at least 70% of the original. You can also convert the file type to a format that allows lossless compression, like webp, if your server can serve those file types.
Whilst on the topic of compression, minify your code! This removes unnecessary white space and in some cases it can reduce your file size by up to 60%[2]. You can minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript for free with just a simple google search.
Name your files descriptively and make sure you add alt attributes for every image. Not only does this help visually impaired customers using screen readers, it also helps search engines understand the content that's on the website. Additionally, it provides alternative content for those who experience loading errors or disable certain web features.
These are super important when you have large files on a website. It helps avoid negative FID because it gives the illusion that somethings happening. Customers would be a lot more complaint to wait more than 3 seconds if they’re served with a beautiful page loader. This recommendation does require coding experience, however, it’s a suggestion that you can easily make to your developer.
Ensure your website is mobile friendly. We’ve touched on how google only looks at mobile websites when crawling sites now. Make sure mobile websites have limited graphical content and stripped back features. This avoids poor load times or features not working as intended. To put that technically, a poorly designed mobile website would affect all 3 enhancements metrics, LCP, FID and CLS.
Safe browsing and HTTPS are other factors. HTTPS is a protocol that lets you transfer webpages over the internet, where the S stands for secure. Safe browsing assesses whether your website has any existing vulnerabilities e.g. malware, hacked content, basically anything that can effect safe browsing. When you buy your domain you can incorporate SSL encryption or some platforms, like Webflow, provide SSL if you’re hosting your website on their platform.
These are servers that keep a copy of your website and deliver them to customers within the servers geographical area. Less distance = faster load speeds. Some CDNs can actually be configured with compression[3] and they greatly increase LCP and FID. You will have to speak to your developer to get this set up.
We hope you’ve learned something valuable today. Even just being able to navigate the basics of Google Search Console puts you miles above the average website owner. If you want to learn more about what we’ve discussed have a read of the references or contact us directly if you think we can be of service
Google Search Console
- https://search.google.com/search-console/about
XML Sitemap Generator
- https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Larget Contentful Plaint
First Input Delay
Cumulative Layout Shift
Image Compressor
- https://imagecompressor.com/
GoDaddy SSL Certificate
- https://uk.godaddy.com/web-security/ssl-certificate
[1] - Akamai.com
[2][3] - Imperva.com
