The search giant has become the primary source of information for most internet users and is, therefore, a critical platform for businesses to win awareness and drive revenue. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can help you gain that all-important awareness, but what do you need to do it right?

How to analyse your SEO

The quickest way to understand the strength of your SEO is to look at three core factors: Search volume, organic traffic and conversions.

What is Search Volume?

Search volume is the number of searches that have been made for a particular keyword. This is typically presented alongside a figure for competition or difficulty, which lets you know how hard it will be to rank for that term. A term with a high level of competition may be difficult to rank for. A term with high search volume is one that a lot of people are looking for.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to the number of visits your website is generating from the organic results in search engines. By understanding your organic traffic, you are getting a clear view of how effective your search engine optimisation is.

What are Conversions?

A conversion is when a user completes a goal, be that signing up to a service or buying a product. A visit is nice, but a conversion is better and if you aren’t generating enough conversions, you need to look through your whole user journey, beginning with the SEO.

How to improve your SEO

Understanding your site performance can help you identify pain points within your site. Where exactly those pain points exist varies, but you can use an SEO auditor to gather that insight and identify places to improve. Some of the most common issues are listed below…

Use keywords correctly

The art of the keyword is about much more than simply doing your research right; it’s also about correctly placing them through your site. If you’re not using them enough, you won’t rank, if you’re using them too often, you’re keyword stuffing and risk being penalised by search engines. The right balance is the key to success.

Improve your Header Tags

Header tags are the headers and subheaders used in a piece of content. ‘How to improve your SEO’ and ‘Improve your Header Tags’ are examples in this post. Search engines place high significance on the copy in these headers, so ensuring your using relevant, keyword-rich headers will help you rank.

Add a Robots.txt file

A Robots.txt file essentially tells search engine bots not to access or crawl pages which are specified in the Robots.txt file. Examples of pages that could be included in a Robots.txt file include: log-in pages, account pages and pages where users have to submit confidential information, such as their credit card details. By including these pages in your Robots.txt file, you’re making steps to prevent search engines from accessing these pages, and listing them in search results. Robots.txt files can be bypassed, so to be extra sure that specific pages won’t become visible in search engine results, ‘no-index’ tag can be included too. This prevents search engines from indexing a particular webpage.

Create a sitemap

Performing a similar function to a robots.txt file, a sitemap is a file that outlines the structure and organisation of your website. By setting up a sitemap and organising it in a logical way, you make it easier for search engine bots to understand your site and index it correctly. You can also tell them how often your site should be crawled, so if you update it regularly (for example, if you regularly publish news), you can instruct the search engine to crawl more regularly and feed the latest information into the SERPs.

Remove or replace broken links

Broken links are links to pages that are no longer active. This creates a bad experience for the user, who will click the link expecting to be taken through to the relevant page. Search engines penalise bad user experience, so it’s important to keep on top of broken links and make sure they’re replaced.

In a nutshell

Analysing your SEO performance and identifying the places where it can be improved can be made much easier through the use of an audit tool. Try our SEO Audit for FREE and find out where your strengths are and where you need to improve.

Find out how Neon can help you develop or enhance your SEO strategy – get in touch today!