Full SEO audits and an ongoing strategy are key for maximising your online potential, however, there are a number of quick wins that can give a fast impact on your site’s SEO performance.

Make the most of the quieter winter days and level-up your website SEO with these easy to do updates...

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Meta Title

What can it impact? Ranking/CTR

Changing the title of your page can have an extremely quick impact on your ranking, and can have an effect on your CTR too.

If you leave it missing, Google will assign a page title for you. Not a total disaster, but you have control over your title, and you might as well make the most of it. So get your keywords in there and try to make users want to click on you. Your page meta title (and description) are what users are going to see in search results.

It’s very possible to see ranking changes (for better or worse) from page title amendments within a day or two. The above graph shows a ranking increase from 5th to 3rd after a simple title change (no other changes were made to the page).

Meta Description

What can it impact? CTR

No, they don’t have a direct effect on your rankings, but as mentioned in the Meta Title section, it’s going to be seen in the search results. Your meta description is effectively ad space, so get writing, because you can increase your click through rate with a good meta description.

A study has shown that brand recognition and meta descriptions were the leaders in why a user clicks on a result.

The amount of missing descriptions we see is shockingly high. You’ve got nothing to lose, so write a compelling description and increase that click through rate!

Copy/Content

What can it impact? Ranking/Session Time/Bounce rate + More

Maybe you’ve got a wordy piece of content that’s well written, informative and useful, but has a bounce rate of nearly 100% and an average session time of 2 seconds. It also happens to be a giant wall of text. Get reformatting!

Make use of header tags, break it down into readable chunks. People only really skim headlines and subheaders. Patience on the internet is almost 0.

Thin content? Expand on the points raised in it. Get different varieties of your keywords and related search terms in there and help it rank for more than one specific keyword.

Formatting in certain ways can even give you Rich Snippet opportunities, something we touch on in our Evergreen Content post.

Img alt tags

What can it impact? Ranking

Super quick, super easy. Get some image alt text on your images, and when doing so make sure you put your desired keywords in there! Search engines will peak behind the curtains and see what you’ve got to say about the image, for internet accessibility reasons and to further piece together what your page is about.

Identify and Fix Internal 404’s

What can it impact? Bounce Rate/Ranking

Clicking a link to another page on the same website only to be with a 404 error can be a frustrating experience.

How do you find your broken pages? You could create an internal 404 custom report in Google Analytics and instantly see any 404's that have been experienced on your site.

There are also many applications out there of course that will crawl and report on all the links on your site and show you the broken ones.

Hunt down those internal 404's and correct them. You have the power. Don’t allow users and search engines run in to those pages because it leads to a poor user experience and marks against your SEO standing.

Images

What can it impact? Page load time/Bounce Rate

Run speed tests and optimise your images. GTMetrix is free and will make a big song and dance about whether you have any unoptimised images. Trimming down an image can make an immediate impact on how fast your page loads. Remember what I said about patience on the internet, plus we all know how much Google loves a fast loading website.

Got a question about any of the above? Get in touch with us and we'll be more than happy to help you out. Perhaps you have some quick win suggestions of your own - let us know.

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