The Importance of Holistic SEO

In order to keep ranking well on Google, it is essential to develop a holistic SEO approach. Such an approach appreciates the need to focus on every part of your website. This includes technical SEO, website security, user experience and page speed optimisation. Include these in your overall SEO strategy and you will reap the benefits.

Make sure your website is built securely

Best practice SEO starts with the website. We have had many clients who have invested thousands into a website which lacks basic search engine optimisation capabilities, often built on a system which is ineffective and inferior to the likes of WordPress.

As well as the system, security is a big consideration that is surprisingly overlooked by many companies. Not only is it important to prevent hacking and to protect data, but it is valued highly by Google’s algorithm. Therefore, ensuring your website is secure provides immediate value to your SEO strategy.

Setting up a secure site means that you require HTTPS to allow for the transfer of encrypted data over the web. The user will notice the padlock icon within the browser, indicating the site is secure. It is still surprisingly common to see websites, that allow for credit card transactions, to not have an encrypted connection (this is not good). A secure website will ensure sensitive data is encrypted and, importantly for marketing, means your website will be seen in a more positive light by Google.

Don’t forgot to optimise your page speed

Your website speed impacts everything. It directly has an effect on ranking, conversions and your bounce rate.

There is a myriad of ways to influence your site speed. Tools such as Google Page Speed Insights can give you an indication of how your website is performing.

There are many approaches you can take to speed up your site. Compressing and re-sizing images can save many bytes of data. This will allow for the images to load faster and more efficiently for the benefit of the user.

Installing a caching plugin may also be of use. This can be done via your hosting or via tools such as WP Super Cache for WordPress. Using a page cache will significantly decrease your load time, as static files from the website will be saved in the browser.  This means that returning users will not need to load the page from scratch.

However, the most important tip to note would be avoiding clutter on your website. Getting rid of unused images, drafts of content and unused pages will ensure your website can run as smoothly as possible. Optimising your page speed will dramatically improve your website’s performance for the user and advance its capabilities to rank well on search engines.

It is all about great user experience

Optimising websites is a multi-faceted discipline. Not only do you want to get visitors to your website, you want them to have a positive experience of your website. Or even ensure that visitor to trigger a call to action, such as subscribing to a newsletter.

With website UX, everything needs to be considered to help guide the user and encourage them to perform a certain behaviour. For example, your call to action may need to be designed into a button. This button needs to be clear and recognisable, with a certain shape, colour and size to encourage users to click. In terms of design, you want the overall website design to be clean, intuitive and easy to use, leaving the user with a positive experience; a website they would happily visit again.

The way a potential customer behaves on your website can be monitored and analysed via tools such as Google Analytics. This will allow you to develop an understanding to how people move around your website, what the most popular pages are and what aspects you need to improve.

Don’t leave your technical SEO behind

Your website needs to be constantly under review to ensure on page and technical SEO signals are optimised to their full potential. You will be surprised how many websites miss out on basic SEO fundamentals.

Duplicate content is still an issue we see; content must be unique throughout the website to avoid being penalised by Google.

You also need to ensure your website is easy for the search engine to crawl. Making sure your title tags and meta descriptions contain your keyword allows the search engine to understand your webpage much more clearly. Best practice tips such as making sure your meta description is never longer than 160 characters, or making use of internal links in your blogs to lead users to further information on your website – ensuring these basics are complete will only go towards strengthening your website.

Ultimately SEO is more than just content and links. It requires holistic thinking across a whole range of different online techniques. In 2016, without this integrated way of thinking you will be left lagging behind your competition in a digital environment which is only getting more and more competitive.