SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of receiving traffic to your website from search engine results pages (SERPs). This traffic can be organic or paid for.

SEO has continued to advance over the last decade and is no longer limited to just search engines. The search results on platforms like Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LLMs like ChatGPT can all be optimised.

This marketing channel is so broad, and naturally there is so much to discuss; this article focuses on SERPs rankings.

How does it work?

Search engines have bots which crawl websites to understand what your website is about so that it knows when to serve your website in SERPs. This includes checking the copy, images and hyperlinks. Once the bots have crawled your site, this data is stored in the search engine index; this process is called indexing.

Once your website is indexed, it is then ranked against other webpages which are in the running to answer the search query. This ranking is how sites appear in SERPs. Essentially, websites offering similar products or services are always in competition with each other for the number one spot.

5 top tips to improve your website ranking in SERPs

1. Use strong keywords – when bots crawl websites, they are searching for keywords that are relevant to the content that is on the page. Ensuring that you have used the right keyword enough times will all help towards ranking the page in SERPs. Keywords should be naturally integrated into the copy and not forced or overused.
   
2. Increase the accessibility features on the website – accessibility has a big impact on SEO. Search engines favour websites which are accessible to all. Tips to make your site accessible include: using an easy-to-read font, adding alt text to all your images, as well as installing various plugins, for example to enable translation in multiple languages and for your site to be dictated for the blind.
   
3. Improve the website speed– the faster a website’s loading speed, the higher the chance it has to rank. This is because a faster-loading website provides a better user experience, and this is favoured by search engines. To increase loading speed, try compressing images and videos or reducing any unnecessary code.
   
4. Ensure your website functions on different devices – your website should be able to adjust its functionality to suit various devices, like desktop, mobile and tablet. When a website can optimise the user experience per device size, the overall experience is improved. Search engines such as Google use mobile-first indexing.
   
5. Make use of Meta tags, Meta descriptions and Title tags – All of these items are checked by crawlers and help the search engine to understand what the webpage is about. This contributes to the ranking your page will receive from the search engine.

SEO is a key tool to utilise in marketing and can make a big difference in the visibility of your website. Attracting more visitors to your website can lead to more conversions, so it is important you have an effective SEO strategy in place. By understanding how SEO works (which hopefully you do if you’re at the end of this blog) businesses can take advantage of these tips and improve their ranking.