SEO is a process in which you set up your website and content to show up through online search results. While typical marketing tactics rely on reaching out to an audience, having a good SEO strategy would mean that your audience would reach out to you, after actively searching and finding your services.

Google can be difficult to navigate for even the most experienced search marketers, and studies have shown that 90% of your SEO strategy needs to be focused on figuring out how to rank higher on Google.

During this lockdown period, I am trying to improve my SEO and discover some points which can help to improve your website SEO under an hour.

1. Improve your title tags

It is no surprise that keywords play a huge part in any SEO strategy – especially your title tags. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages as a clickable headline, and they also function to indicate the relevancy of the web page in the users’ search results.

However, as over-optimization is an issue these days, Google is less likely to rank titles that are long, in all capital letters, and have too many keywords.

Having said this, Google’s SEO ‘rules’ are ever-changing so if you have a spare hour, why not ensure your title tags are in line with today’s best SEO practices. If you are stuck, consider enlisting the help of a website provider that does the SEO for you, or start with simple SEO by following this title tag formula:

Title tag= ‘[SEO target keyword] + descriptive phrase | [branded keyword]’

2. Add links internally and display relevant pages

To keep visitors on your site, it is important to display relevant pages and links to other blog posts within your article. This way, consumers can click on another landing page from your site for more information, rather than looking elsewhere.

Essentially, this keeps their interest from swaying to competitors’ sites, and Google can work out the relationship between various posts to determine which pages on your site cover similar topics. If you have an hour to spare, add hyperlinks within your articles which direct users to your other blog posts.

3. Write and publish a content piece for your website

Whilst SEO and Content Marketing are two separate practices, they do share some similarities illustrated below:

Imagine creating an informative piece of content in just under an hour, and then using it to attract traffic from other sources.

Whether this is a simple social media share, or outreaching the content to other reputable, high authority sites in order to generate backlinks, writing fresh and engaging content will never go amiss when benefitting your SEO.

If you are stuck on content ideas, write something which will benefit your readers such as a recent news item in your industry, a personal experience that had implications for your business, or a review on a business book.

This will not only benefit your readers and keep users coming back to your site for information, but it will allow search engines to identify new keyword relationships from the additional content you are adding.

4. Add a caching plugin

There is nothing that will make a visitor click off more quickly than a slow website. In fact, studies show that 53% of mobile users will be put off by pages that take longer than three seconds to load.

All your web pages should load instantly. Otherwise, this can impact user experience, SEO performance, and sales. A simple but effective way to increase the SEO of your website is by adding a caching plugin to your website.

Caching plugins enable the storage of previously accessed information, meaning visitors won’t have to download all the pages to your website every time they visit your site.

There are plenty of different caching plugins available, so make sure to do your research on what caching best fits your site or talk to your website developer if you are experiencing problems with site speed.

5. Crawl website for broken links and repair them

Too many broken internal links can stop search engines from correctly indexing your site, which can lead to missed opportunities. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to find and fix broken links such as Google Analytics, Xenu, and ‘Broken Link Checker’ plugins on WordPress.

Once you’ve repaired these dead links, pages on your site should no longer list as a 404 error, the user experience will increase, and your website’s rankings should go up. Unfortunately, more broken links will inevitably appear after you have fixed them, so it is best to keep on top of this practice.