Transcription

Now I’m not technical so this is going to be more about what to do as opposed to how to do it but I just want to run through some of the essential elements of your SEO plan from a technical perspective.

So the first is speed. Speed is absolutely everything – it’s been important for a long time from an SEO point of view but it’s something that Google has repeatedly spoken about more than ever in the last few years since mobile usage has just grown and grown, so if people can’t access that webpage quickly then Google is never going to prioritise it in the listings. So that’s the first thing.

The second is having SSL certification. Google said a couple of years ago that if a website doesn’t have SSL certification then they wouldn’t know if they could trust it and rankings might suffer, but I would add to that that without SSL certification, very often people will be entirely blocked out of websites so it’s a disaster from a user experience and brand point of view.

The third thing is structured data. So you may have heard of something called schema which is a form of structured data that enables Google to make sense of what a piece of content is – so is it a recipe or a cinema time or a review, etc – and can therefore give you the credit you deserve for your beautifully designed and richly packed landing pages. Whereas if you create all this great content but you don’t have the appropriate structured data in place then Google won’t necessarily be able to understand what each thing means. It will also have an impact on click through rate from the search engine results page because a lot of that structured data can get pulled through to the SERPs, so you might see cinema times or event information or review details often pulled through directly to the search engine results page, which can have a really significant impact on click through rate.

Then there is the general technical maintenance of a website. I think sometimes we can be guilty of approach SEO as a set and forget scenario, but there needs to be a company policy for how you’re going to monitor this on an ongoing basis. For some websites that might need to be daily while for others that could be monthly or quarterly, but there needs to be some kind of policy in place that says that every x period you will use whatever diagnostics tools you have at your disposal, which to begin with may just be search console, to assess the health and performance of the site and create a list of new tasks required to fix any of the inevitable issues that arise with any site that is constantly growing and evolving.

See you next time.