Having a beautiful, well-written, conversion-optimised website is incredibly important to running a successful business. But if you can’t bring traffic to your website, you’ve got no one to convert. So I wanted to take a step back from talking about website copywriting today and share some of my favourite tips to improve your SEO and website performance.
Before we get started, let’s cover how to monitor your SEO performance so you actually know how to check whether it’s working.
Tools to help you monitor search performance
Let’s start with the basics:
- Google Search Console (GSC) – to help with indexing issues, tracking backlinks, and a simple overview of search performance
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – the most popular analytics program to track traffic levels, sources, fluctuations, and get much more in-depth insight into how users act on your website
- Matomo – a great cookieless GA4 alternative
- Plausible Analytics – an open-source cookieless alternative to GA4
Bonus tools (to extend your understanding and add other insights)
- SEOStack – a fairly new tool that helps you to understand comparative GSC data over 6-12 months, great visualisations of keyword and rankings data
- SE Ranking – my go-to all in one SEO tool that covers keyword and competitor research, backlink tracking, analytics overviews, technical SEO audits, reports, and all that good stuff (as a much more reasonable price than the bigger alternatives like Semrush etc.)
Now we know how to check if what we’re doing is working, it’s time to get into the tips. And they’re simpler than you may think.
5 simple ways to improve SEO and increase traffic to your website
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- Publish a new blog every 1-2 weeks
- Revisit and optimise old blog content
- Keep all of your social media bios up to date
- Use alt text and titles on your images
- Reduce keyword spamming
1. Publish a new blog every 1-2 weeks
When it comes to blogs, as long as what you’re writing is cohesive, thorough, and easy to read, the more the merrier. If you have the team and/or capacity to publish multiple blogs per week, crack on my friend. The key is to be consistent. You will see a drop in traffic if you go from publishing multiple blogs per week to 1-2 per month, or even take a few months off altogether.
So find a schedule that you/your team will be able to consistently stick to in the long term.
For solo business owners, I recommend one blog every 2 weeks as it’s more manageable around client work. For SMBs, I recommend a minimum of one per week. If it’s available to you, outsourcing this work can be a really helpful way to keep on top of things. But if your goal is to improve SEO, it’s important to make sure the person writing your content is familiar with SEO best practices.
Even better, focus on a longer term strategy and begin to build SEO content clusters.
2. Revisit and optimise old blog content
Every 6 months, set aside a week to assess the traffic of your old blog posts. Are they ranking for specific keywords but not driving much traffic? Have they seen a big drop in traffic in the last 6 months? It could be time to update and re-optimise them. A very quick overview of how simple it can be to optimise old content:
- Update old research to more recent sources
- Include links to a relevant service/product pages
- Add external links to the blog if none are currently in there
- Add internal links to relevant, more recent blog posts
- Update the H1 and meta title
- Add/change your H2s
- Add a note at the top of the blog saying “originally published in [month, year]. Updated in [month, year] for accuracy” (or something similar)
- Recrawl the page on GSC
That’s a whistle stop overview, but if you want a deeper dive, take a look through my guide to reoptimising old SEO content.
3. Keep your social media bios up to date
The broader approach here would be to tell you to monitor and grow your backlinks. However, especially for small businesses, social media bios are directly in your control and can be amended very quickly.
See, when it comes to SEO, Google (and the other search engines) are focused on the internet presence as a whole of any given brand or person. So by connecting all of your social media profiles to your website (and using a unified name across all of them), enables you to build brand awareness and rank more effectively for brand terms.
This was part of the thought behind naming my business Alice Rowan Content Marketing. People will often search “alice rowan seo”, “alice rowan writer”, or “alice rowan marketing” to find me because they know my name and what I do.
So back to the social media bios. This is a little bit about backlinks and referral traffic, but it’s also ensuring your overall brand is connected consistently online. Especially when you’re a small (or one person) business without larger brand name recognition.
4. Use alt text and titles on your images
Before we go any further, I need to clarify something. Alt text is for accessibility, not for keywords. Please do not cram keywords into your alt text.
This comes with multiple benefits. Folks who use screen readers (or with poor internet connection) gain access to additional layers of your content. And Google loves good accessibility practices. So by actually focusing on accessibility, usability, and inclusion on your website, you will reap the SEO benefits. It’s a win win.
Now when it comes to naming your files, this is where keywords can come into play. Include your brand name, include relevant keywords, and increase your chances of your blog being pulled through into a featured snippet or into Google’s image search.
5. Reduce keyword spamming
When you’re writing to rank on the search engines, it can be very tempting to cram in every possible unnatural variation of every keyword you’re targeting in every fucking sentence. Don’t.
I understand the want to do this but it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how SEO works in the year of our Google overlords, 2024. Reducing the keyword density in your content may actually be the key to search engine success.
Especially as Google continue to roll out Core Updates focusing on smaller publishers and penalising a lot of the shitty money making quick-win SEO tactics of many larger sites, now is the time to show off your expertise.
Earlier this year, I wrote a handy guide to help you avoid keyword stuffing and nail your keyword density. Give it a read if you’re after more detailed guidance on how to strike the right balance.
As always, if you need a hand with your SEO content, optimising old content, or just need a chat with someone who knows their shit about all this stuff, get in touch so we can get you the rankings you deserve.
