What should your first steps be when your website is a complete SEO disaster?
Now, we know what you might be thinking from our choice of headline: “isn’t that putting it quite strongly?” And it’s true that your website doesn’t have to be an utter catastrophe in the search engine optimisation (SEO) stakes, to still merit a top-to-bottom review of what it does well, and what it does badly – and how the latter may be fixed.
For this piece, however, we won’t dwell too much on that. Instead, we’ll simply focus on the three most important steps to take when you have a (relatively) blank slate to work with.
This is a linear process, so make sure you perform the first step before moving onto the second, and then the third.
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Help search engine bots to do their job
We won’t dwell too much here on precisely why you might consider your site to be an SEO disaster; nonetheless, if you’re really struggling to get your pages appearing in the search rankings, it’s worth considering whether your site could be presenting difficult obstacles to search bots.
By “search bots”, we’re referring to the bots that search engines send around the web, their job being to ‘crawl’ the web and find new sites and pages to ‘index’ in the search results.
Things like accidental noindex tags, uncrawlable links and robots.txt malfunctions could all be compromising these bots’ ability to crawl and index your site for inclusion on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
If this sounds like something that could be an issue for your site, why not get in touch with the Piranha Designs team now to request a technical review?
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Communicate your site’s relevance to search engines
How do you do this? Well, you don’t write Google a letter… instead, it’s about sending what are known as ‘relevance signals’ to the search bots, indicating that your site’s content is relevant to the needs of particular searchers.
There’s no stronger organic relevance signal than content relevance. Sure enough, search engine bots try to understand the purpose and meaning of the pages they discover online, so that they can then present those pages in the rankings for relevant search queries.
Using the most relevant keywords, then, remains crucial for online business owners trying to attract the right people to their site by ranking for the right queries. By “keywords”, we’re talking about those words and phrases that actual human beings search for, whether it’s “letting agents in Manchester” or “restaurants in Gibraltar”.
Such is the importance of keyword research to getting a site’s SEO right, that it is a fundamental part of all four of our SEO marketing packages here at Piranha Designs. So, don’t be afraid to ask us about any of them.
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Amplify your site’s authority and relevance
If you’ve thoroughly completed the previous two steps – with or without the assistance of Piranha Designs’ search marketing experts – you should have put in place strong foundations for your site’s long-lasting SEO success.
However, it’s one thing to send out relevance signals, which serve as that initial ‘radio signal’… and quite another thing to ‘amplify’ that signal. We’re talking about making the signal louder.
In the past, the accumulation of backlinks – links from other sites to your own site – would have been your very top priority when it came to ‘amplifying’ your site’s relevance and authority.
Link building is still important, but it’s also true that content relevance has overtaken it as a ranking signal in the past few years. And such factors as your site’s navigation system and internal links will also greatly shape its effectiveness at amplifying its signal.
There are ‘good ways’ and ‘bad ways’ to do both link building and content marketing. So, it’s important to avoid falling into the traps that could cause you to actually harm your site’s SEO performance, instead of helping it.
That’s another strong reason to consider getting in touch with professionals, such as our own. Reach out to us in Gibraltar, London, Edinburgh or Spain today, and we will be pleased to advise and assist you, so that you make all of your right moves for your site’s online marketing and SEO.
