Optimising SEO on the front end of your website – 3 tips for improvements

If you’ve found this article then you’re likely setting up your website or looking to reconfigure SEO on your current website to help users find your website. 

First of all, let’s quickly go back to basics; SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimisation, allows users to discover your content. Search engines, such as Google, need help understanding the content on your website so that users can discover your website and then choose whether or not they want to visit your site. Not only is SEO is about the meta data in back end of your website, but also it’s about front end copy (copywriting) and images on your website that website visitors can see. Here’s 3 tips on how you can optimise SEO on the front end of your website:

1. Think like the user

Shift yourself into the minds of the people that may want to visit your website and think about what they might type into the search engine to find what they’re looking for. Think about the most simple terms users may type into a search engine and also the more complicated terms for someone who may know more about the subject they are searching for. Use your unique keywords within your website copy where it makes the most sense. 

You can also conduct keyword research to help you discover the best keywords for your website copy and how they are ranked when someone searches for them through a search engine. Hint: google “free keyword research tools” to help find a research tool if you don’t want to pay for one. It’s also important to avoid repeating keywords over and over, only use them when they make sense to the user reading your content. 

You can also use a tool like ‘answer the public’ to discover the common questions users might be asking in relation to your product or service. You can then add copy in relation to answering typical questions in your market.

2. Ensure the content on your website is compelling and user-friendly 

When organising the text on your website make sure it is easy to read and flows naturally so that the user can better understand your content. This will naturally mean the content is more understandable for the search engine robots that crawl websites to evaluate them for how relevant the content is according to what people are searching. This can be done by double checking spelling and grammar, and bringing in the use of headers to break up large amounts of content or text. Make sure you use the proper H1, H2 etc. formatting on your headers when styling your text. 

Keep your content unique to you and avoid using text that has already been use by other websites. Update any older or out dated content that isn’t relevant anymore with fresh and up to date copy. Again, you’ll want to think like your users and write content that is helpful, reliable and addresses any pain points for anyone visiting your website. 

3. Add images to your website 

When you add images to your website remember that they can also get picked up by search engines. Users love visuals, especially when they’re high quality, and sometimes they don’t have time to read text. Embedding an image against relevant text on your website means that the search engine may pick up the image and the text at the same time which in turn gives the user more context for what the page is about.

Remember to add alternative text when adding images to your website, which is a short, descriptive sentence that explains what’s happening in the image and how it relates to the text that it’s paired with on the web page. Alt text is used by screen readers to help visually impaired people. Search engines naturally view it as a good thing if websites are helping make their content more accessible to everyone, so adding alt text will be to your advantage no matter how tedious it might be to do!

Every business is different but there are some things that are considered irrelevant when we implement SEO today and don’t matter as much in the current SEO world, such as minimum and maximum content length, and how many headers you have and how they are ordered. It’s always best to do your research or discuss any questions you may have with an SEO copywriter. 

If you think you need support from an SEO copywriter, then please get in touch with us to enquire about our copywriting services, we are here to help and our knowledge and experience will ensure you’re getting the most out of implementing SEO on your website. 

About Andie Johnson

Andie is the owner of Flex Marketing. Flex Marketing helps businesses grow by allowing them to have the help of senior marketing resource without needing to employ a full time marketing manager. How flexible! Part of this work involves copywriting – not only do we have expertise in it, we really enjoy it. We take on copywriting projects such as re-writing copy for websites or creating client case studies as one-off projects. You can enquire about project based copywriting here. Flex Marketing has been helping businesses in this way to tell their stories and communicate their messages since 2011 and is based in Auckland, New Zealand.