George Cotter

Number 1: Making structural changes to your website

Why?

Had this happen to me.

A website owner decided to make a “few updates” to their product catalogue, including an overhaul of categories. This involved adding new categories (with new links) and deleting many of the existing ones.

Organic visitors and rankings mysteriously tanked.

Why?

Because in Google’s eyes some of highest organic landing pages no longer existed.

What NOT to do without speaking to an SEO consultant first:

❌ Renaming URLs because “this new one looks better”
❌ Deleting pages just because they’re old
❌ Changing your navigation to “tidy it up”
❌ Assuming Google will magically figure it all out

A quick chat might just save your rankings and your SEOs sanity.

Number 2: Deleting blogs, products or pages

Why?

Before you start hitting delete on those old blogs, pages or discontinued products… pause.

No problem if you’re want to clear up your website, but if you don’t seek advice or speak to your SEO first, you could end up removing much more than just outdated content.

That blog post you don’t want anymore from 2019? It might be quietly bringing in steady visitors to your website.

That old product page? It could have backlinks pointing to it that help boost the organic visibility of the whole website.

That service you no longer offer? Maybe it’s ranking and generating leads you can offer different services to.

SEO often isn’t about what you can see, it’s about what’s happening in the background.

Instead of deleting pages, your SEO might recommend:

⭐ Redirecting the page URL into another relevant page
⭐ Updating or repurposing the content
⭐ Keeping it live for simply for traffic and link equity

Cleaning up your website can be a positive thing to do, but don’t do it simply based on opinions, look at the data.

Number 3: Launching a new website or some big new updates

Why?

You’ll be surprised how often this happens.

Redesigns are exciting. Often they come with a branding refresh, new page layouts and more simple website structures. However, if you’re not including your SEO the updates could easily do far more harm than good.

Classic scenarios are:

🚨The new update includes widespread changes to URL and website structure
🚨New updates removes tracking codes and conversion events
🚨Updates pushed live with zero thought to redirects or current traffic driving ranking positions.

And then the message arrives: “Hi, why has our visitor numbers dropped off a cliff?”

As an SEO we’re far more effective being part of the plans rather than having to fix problems after they happen.

Website updates should be a step forward, not a complete reset.

Leave your SEO in the loop from the start and you’ll avoid a ton of unnecessary headaches.

Number 4: Doing your own keyword targeting

Why?

I know choosing your own keywords sounds simple. Afterall you know your business and customers better than anyone.

The problems start when people pick search terms they would use, not what target customers are actually using when products or services.

Keyword research isn’t guesswork, there’s loads of data available around search volume and competition. The target keywords of any SEO campaign need to be a happy medium between the search phrases people are actually using, what your website can realistically rank for and what will convert into new enquiries.

I’ve seen it before:

❌ Choosing keywords that sound nice but have zero search volume
❌ Broad keywords that will attract the wrong audience
❌ Local businesses trying to rank for national keywords
❌ Benchmarking against 10 variations of the same keyword – Google will see very little difference

As an SEO we don’t pick target keywords at random. We’re doing the research to find the search phrases that are actually being used by your target audience to attract website visitors that matter.

Number 5: Buying links in large volume off Fiverr

Let’s have a little chat about links…

I get it. Buying 1000 high DA backlinks for £4.99 off Fiverr looks tempting. The seller has created a good profile, they have good ratings and they assure you they can rapidly make your website rank number 1 for competitive keywords.  What could go wrong?

Well… a fair bit to be honest.

Buying links at all isn’t a great idea, but buying cheap links in high volume is highly likely to do your SEO more harm than good.

What actually happens when you buy links in packages like this:

🚨Your links get placed on websites that are part of massive networks that thousands of people have bought links off

🚨These website will likely receive next to no visitors themselves and contain a huge amount of poorly written content and point links at poor quality websites

🚨There’s a good chance the websites also contain large amounts of completely irrelevant content

🚨Your own backlink profile goes supersonic overnight which looks particularly unnatural

🚨Chances are Google has long since started to ignore all links off these websites and potentially penalise those who are still acquiring links from them

🚨Continuing this tactic could lead onto a manual penalty where Google makes of point of lowering or even removing your ranking positions

Google has spent years ensuring they pass zero link authority from these networks. Their systems can quickly identify familiar link patterns. Some networks that potentially have passed authority in the past can get shut down, along with all the links you paid for.

Effective ink building is about relevance, quality and long term growth. Not buying a load of links on websites hosted across the world and hoping Google won’t notice.

Number 6: Judging the success of SEO by the results on an automated website “audit” tool

Everyone has used SEO audit tools to “score” their website. There are even some agencies out there that will use them to dictate an SEO strategy.

There’s no doubt they are useful to pick up technical issues that can be resolved but no one should be using the scores they produce as a key metric of SEO success or failure.

Why?

🚨They flag issues as “critical” or “important” that really aren’t
🚨These tools don’t understand priorities
🚨They love to use dramatic language
🚨They judge websites based on a technical checklist

The problem is that Google doesn’t judge a website based on your tool’s checklist. Google does care about having a technically sound website, but they do that alongside analysing the whole user experience, the content you’re producing and the authority you’re building through links and social engagement.

Automated tools cannot read your website like a human. I could show you a host of websites that rank well for competitive keywords that produce a relatively poor score in your SEO audit tool.

Number 7: Publishing content you’ve “written” by predominately copy and pasting from your chosen AI tool

The age of AI has brought with it the power for website owners to quickly produce infinite amounts of content. Apparently gone are the days when you should pay someone to write unique, relevant and high quality wording for your websites.

Look, AI tools are fantastic. They are great at creating ideas and speeding the process up. However, its now so easy to tell if a blog, product description or intro text is predominately AI generated… In today’s digital world?

Use AI as a kind of assistant to guide you if you need but all the content your publish needs to be written by a human. Google loves content that demonstrates authority, and what better way to do that than get a writer knowledgeable in your field or even write it yourself. You know your business, products or services better than anyone.

So what’s the negative impact on SEO of publishing AI generated content?

❌ The content will likely be similar to any other person who’s used a similar prompt
❌ AI won’t get your tone of voice. It’ll use generic language that doesn’t reflect you or your brand
❌ It doesn’t show your real world experience or industry authority
❌ The content could be keyword stuffed leading to over optimisation
❌ You’ll produce large volumes of content that don’t mean a great deal
❌ The pages will produce poor user engagement rates and result in people leaving your website

All the content your publishing should be worth reading to your target customers.

Number 8: Migrating your website to a new hosting provider

There are many reasons why as a website owner you might choose to move your hosting provider, and for many the process shouldn’t be too complicated.

You may choose to switch hosting because of a poor experience, server performance, cost or features you need. But you should plan any major steps like this as it can have big impacts on your SEO.

Not so long back I was working on a website who’s rankings suddenly started going backwards. I couldn’t understand why until a spoke to the client who said: “I’ve not done anything to the website recently other than move to a new hosting server”… alarms bells started going off.

So what can happen with unplanned server moves?

Now website hosting can get technical so bare with me…

🚨There can be delays in the DNS propagation. If the DNS isn’t managed properly it can result in the website being down for a period and people (including search engine bots) seeing varying versions of the website. i.e. bouncing between the servers leading to inconsistent crawling.

🚨Broken SSL or even no SSL certificate. Some servers charge extra for SSL certificates or take a great deal of time to implement one. This leads to websites being marked as “unsecure” by many browsers.

🚨Redirect rules missing. It’s amazing how often this happens with server moves. It can be avoided by your SEO taking back ups and immediately checking everything is in place following a move.

🚨Physical server location shifts. Moving from a UK based server to a random (probably cheaper) data centre overseas can result in slower speeds and affect geotargeting signals.

🚨Slower load speeds. Google likes to rank websites that load fast and provide good user experiences, and a key part of page speed can be the hosting environment.

Moving hosting provider doesn’t need to be a bad move. But tell everyone involved in your website management first, and choose a new provider that provides real technical benefits.

Number 9: Adding an removing plugins that have “no impact on SEO”

Most local businesses I come across are operating a WordPress website, and for good reason (I do too!).

With WordPress its relatively straight forward to add or remove features or functionality using its vast library of plugins.

However, unless you have a crystal clear understanding of what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be adding or removing plugins. Every plugin has the potential to break something unrelated or slow something down.

Here’s some guidelines on plugins:

❌ The truth is that most plugins will add load to your website and slow it down
❌ Some plugins will clash. This leads to broken navigation bars, confusing page layouts and general messy websites – or even bring websites down
❌ Unmanaged plugins are a security risk. Hackers love to find backdoors into websites through outdated plugins
❌ Removing plugins could remove important functionality or significantly impact the general design

A small plugin change can have a surprisingly big impact on how your website behaves or looks. I’m happy to discus plugin options with everyone I work with, website cleanups following random plugin additions are not fun at all.

Technical SEO refers to the optimisation of the technical elements of a website to improve it’s performance and bring it in line with current best practice. Generally when someone refers to technical SEO they are pointing to strategies specifically related to boost search engine rankings, but many elements are also aimed at improving the overall user experience.

Now a days you’ll find a few terms used in the SEO industry to describe different aspects of search engine optimisation.  You’ll have heard of strategies such as on-page SEO, local SEO or digital PR – but a crucial foundation of any website is the way it’s built and how the content is executed and this where technical SEO comes in.

Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO and involves many factors, but at a high level it exists to ensure your website is easy for search engines to crawl, loads efficiently and works well on all devices, and is structured to enable users to efficiently find what they’re looking for.

These technical elements should not be entered into lightly as you can easily tank your website rankings if you make an incorrect technical change.

Some key aspects of technical SEO can include:

• Ensuring search engine bots can crawl and index the website’s pages efficiently
• Improving load speed and performance to provide a great user experience
• Checking the website provides a seamless experience across different devices
• Introducing a URL structure and architecture that’s both user and search engine friendly
• Implementing structured data markup to help search engines understand the content
• Creating a sitemap that shows search engines a clear website structure
• Setting up tools to monitor and track user insights

Why is technical SEO important?

If the pages on your website are not efficiently accessible to search engines, and don’t provide a great experience for your users, they’ll struggle to rank highly. Plus, once someone does find your website, if they are presented with a confusing site architecture, they won’t be able to find what they need and will ultimately leave.

If your website doesn’t work and look great on all devices, or it’s slow to load, this also provides a poor experience to users. And more importantly, both these issues are confirmed Google ranking factors. However, as with any modern SEO strategies you shouldn’t simply focus on what the search engines want but focus on creating the best website for your users – one will follow the other.

Let’s talk about website crawling

The very first step to technical SEO is ensuring that search engines can crawl all the content on your website. Crawling is the way search engines find websites and begin to understand what their content is about. If they can’t crawl, or find that it’s taking too long to crawl, they simply won’t rank your content.

Crawling occurs when search engines find and follow links around your website. By linking to new content from pages you know search engines already know about you can ensure they find it efficiently. For example, this article is listed on our Digital Academy page, which is included in the website navigation. We know search engines know about the Digital Academy so every time they visit our website, they will see any new content listed.

Here’s some ways you can help search engines to crawl your website:

Have an SEO friendly website structure:

Your website structure / architecture is the term used to describe how your web pages are linked together. An effective structure is one that’s setup to help search engines and users to find your content efficiently.

A typical website structure will have a home page, which includes a navigation menu that links through to different parts. Then subpages are linked to from those. All pages should be found through just a few clicks from the home page. A structure like this will mean your website is organised into a logical hierarchy.

Submit your sitemap to Google

A “technical” sitemap will be in an XML file format which contains a list of all the pages you want search engines to find, and more importantly where to find them. Once you have an XML sitemap ready you need to submit it to Google using Google Search Console. If you have a WordPress website commonly used plugins such as AIOSEO and Yoast have a free tool for generating XML sitemaps.

Let’s look at indexing

Once search engines have crawled your pages they will then attempt to understand the content. At this point they will “index” the content, and pages must be indexed before they will rank in the search results. The content will be stored in databases, so this is why any updates you make to pages will take time for search engines to understand.

The easiest way to check if a website has been indexed is by simply searching for it on Google. A quick hack is to perform a search like the following:

site:www.tallmarketing.co.uk

See below:

By searching for that exact text on Google it will show you all the pages on this website that have been indexed. Simply replace the Tall Marketing website address with your own.

The use of Noindex

Often they’ll be pages not your website you want to intentionally not be indexed. This is common on eCommerce websites for example where you can hide away the checkout or account pages – here’s some other reasons why you might not want a page to be indexed:

• Temporary or incomplete content you’re working on
• Avoid duplicate content issues that exist of different landing pages which can dilute your SEO efforts
• Development or stage environments that you don’t want to be discovered by search engines

To use the “noindex” tag, you need to insert the following line of code within the HTML head section of the page you want to exclude from indexing:

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”

This tag tells search engine bots that they should not include the page in their index. As a result, the page will not show up in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It’s worth noting that the “noindex” tag does not prevent the page from being crawled by search engines or accessed by users. It only tells search engines not to include it in search results. If you want to prevent search engines from accessing the page altogether, you can use the “disallow” directive in the robots.txt file or implement other methods like password protection.

Master technical SEO best practice

Use HTTPS

Virtually all website addresses will now begin with https rather than http as it’s more secure, and has been a ranking factor since 2014. It protects sensitive information such as payment details and logins by creating a level of encryption between the website and the hosting environment.

All https websites will have an SSL certificate installed which authenticates it’s identity and establishes a secure connection. Most browsers will now mark websites as “not secure” if they don’t have a valid SSL certificate.

Have only one version of your website

All search engine crawlers and website users should only be able to access one version of your website, i.e. it doesn’t exist on multiple versions of the domain like one that starts www and one that doesn’t. Having more one version will create duplicate content issues and dilute your backlink profile. It’s more common than you might think for websites to have more than one version and is a crucial starting point of any technical SEO review.

All versions of your domain (www. non www. etc) should redirect into one main version.

For example:

tallmarketing.co.uk
www.tallmarketing.co.uk

All redirect to: https://www.tallmarketing.co.uk/

Work on load speed

Improving the speed of your website can have a huge impact on how user friendly your website is. Your visitors will be on the go and have little patience for a slow loading website.

Speed is also a crucial factor for search engines like Google. Websites that load faster are more likely to appear higher in search results, gaining better visibility and attracting more organic traffic.

Have a mobile-friendly website

You can’t ignore needing a mobile friendly website as Google now uses mobile first indexing – meaning it uses the mobile version of your website to rank content.

By providing a mobile-friendly experience, you make it easier for users to navigate your site, read content, and interact with your calls to action. This leads to increased user satisfaction, longer session durations, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates.

Use structured data

Structured data provides additional context and meaning to web content, making it easier for search engines to understand and display relevant information in search results.

It allows website owners to provide explicit details about their content, such as product information, reviews, events, recipes, and more. By incorporating structured data markup, search engines can extract and interpret this information more accurately, leading to enhanced search result features like rich snippets, knowledge panels, and other visually appealing elements.

Find a resolve broken pages

Encountering a 404 error, or “Page Not Found,” can frustrate users when they attempt to access non-existent webpages on a website.

404 errors result in a poor user experience. Users may become discouraged and abandon your website if they repeatedly encounter broken links or missing content. By addressing and removing 404 errors, you create a smoother and more user-friendly browsing experience, keeping visitors engaged and satisfied.

Search engines consider broken links when evaluating a site’s quality and relevance. A high number of 404 errors could result in lower search engine rankings and reduced visibility. By proactively removing 404 errors, you demonstrate your commitment to providing a seamless experience for users and increase the likelihood of retaining traffic and maintaining search engine positions.

Stay on top of it all

No part of technical SEO should be treated as a one-time project. New problems will crop up over time as new pages are added and best practice evolves. Regularly monitoring is crucial to catching issues as they arise.

Demonstrating first hand experience and authority in the website content you publish is more important than ever if you want your content the rank highly.

Previously just E-A-T, Google has now upgraded this to include an additional “E” and in short E-E-A-T standards for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

E-E-A-T signals are becoming more and more prevalent thanks in no small part to the Helpful Content updates, which reinforces the need for high quality and original content that’s been written by an expert.

The basics of E-E-A-T

Google explains the concept of E-E-A-T in its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, with the stipulation that content that meets with the guidelines is of high quality, has taken effort, is original and taken some talent to create.

So what does the concept of E-E-A-T mean?

Experience

As reference earlier, the additional E is for Experience. This guideline is to ensure that the content creator has first hand experience of the subject. Pages that are created by individuals who have personal experience will tend to be more reliable sources of information. For example, you’re more likely to trust a product review from someone who has actually used the product over one written by someone who hasn’t.

Expertise

Who has written the article you’re reading? What information can you find out about them? Is the article you’re reading on employment law been written by a qualified solicitor? Or has the article been written by an external content writer who’s done it to get keywords on the website and attract clicks?

For many subjects this part really matters. People reading a piece of content that could seriously impact their life need to know it has been written by an expert. Taking legal, financial or medical advice from a generic content writer is a terrible idea, and Google doesn’t want their users to do this.

If you’re not an expert you can negate this by carefully researching the subject and referencing other experts and their content to build yours.

Authoritativeness

An author or business can establish authority when your work is mentioned by other parties in your field. The absolute sweet spot is to get related websites with good authority levels referencing and promoting your content. If other experts are linking or mentioning your content it clearly demonstrates how trusted you are.

It’s unlikely any content is going to be a success without a level of authority, and it’s also a key way to boost the authority of your whole website domain.

Trustworthiness

This is a wider signal than just the words on the page, Google wants to rank websites it can trust is giving users the best experience. In its most basic form a trustworthy website is user-friendly and loads quickly, but that’s just the start. The business or organisation that’s hosting the content also needs to demonstrate its trustworthiness.

In Google’s view a trustworthy business is one that is transparent about it’s physical location and who works there. Trustworthy content should link to other authority sources, especially when mentioning someone else’s statistics or insights.

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

There’s lots of chatter about E-E-A-T but the fact is that it’s not a ranking factor. There isn’t anything specific within the guidelines that you can point to that has to be in place.

When ranking websites Google uses a host of signals to form its own opinion.

Thinking about E-E-A-T when creating content is recommended as it’ll boost engagement with users but you still shouldn’t be ignoring technical and offsite SEO strategies. Google never really tells us how its algorithms work so it’s not a good idea to obsess over each part, simply work towards creating the best website and content possible.

E-E-A-T vs YMYL

YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life”. This is related to website content that can literally cost readers their money or their life.

Pages that fall into YMYL are those about health, well-being, finance or safety. It can impact a wide range of websites, not just doctors, lawyers or financial advisors. If you’re trying to influence someone’s decisions you are at least touching on YMYL. Even just accepting online payments pushes your website towards YMYL.

Google wants to give these websites extra scrutiny due to the fact the content can have a significant impact on someone’s life. In the time of AI and lots of misinformation, it’s becoming increasingly hard to know what online content you can trust. What Google is looking for is YMYL content written by experts, who have a transparent and visible online reputation and a history of proven experience.

E-E-A-T and YMYL are not separate ranking signals and there is lots of crossover, but E-E-A-T is particularly relevant for websites that land in YMYL.

To conclude

There’s no shortcuts to developing strong E-E-A-T signals. Google also looks at the bigger picture, so even if you think your content meets all guidelines but your website is dated, slow and hard to navigate, you can’t expect it to rank highly.

The good thing is that if you nail E-E-A-T your competitors will find it very hard to out rank you. This won’t happen overnight and all your work should be aimed at your users, not pleasing Google. One will follow the other.

We’ve seen it many times: A company creates a website they love, which acts as a crucial source of customers. Through the use of certain SEO practices, they’ve built strong, organic rankings on Google for their target keywords and then… it all changes. Their rankings drop literally overnight, visitor numbers to their website plummet, and enquiries or orders dry up.

So, what’s happened?

If you’re encountering a scenario similar to the one above, it’s highly likely that your website has been penalised as part of a Google algorithm update. It’s something you probably weren’t prepared for or even aware might happen. But it’s possible to recover from this with some focused graft.

Nb. If you’ve just seen drops in visitor numbers, rather than drops in rankings, check out our blog around why website visitor numbers might have dropped.

What is a Google Algorithm update?

Firstly, let’s talk about what an algorithm update actually is. In recent years, Google Search has evolved in order to present its users with content that is more high quality and more relevant to what it thinks they’re looking for. Google wants its users to feel like they are finding the best answers to their questions, from the most useful websites.

To do this, Google’s search algorithms will hunt for and rank websites, from high to low, based on which ones look like they will deliver the best results for their users search. The benchmarks that Google’s algorithm is looking for, to rank your website more highly on its search results, are good quality links to your website (from other websites and pages), the quality of the content you publish, and how technically sound the set-up of your website is. The way Google analyses and interprets these elements is constantly evolving through the use of their search algorithms. Depending on the scale of an update, it can have a major impact (both positive and negative) on your site’s ranking performance, but it could also not affect it at all.

So how do you know when an update has taken place? Check out Search Engine Journal’s history of algorithm updates

How to recover if you’re hit – a 3 step process

What you specifically need to do will vary depending on the nature of the latest update. On a more occasional basis, Google will release a “core update” which is more universal and can impact on a number of metrics. However, the more frequent, smaller updates will specifically target certain types and aspects of websites. This means that some updates will only be relevant to some websites and irrelevant to others. This provides webmasters an opportunity to gain an insight into why some websites get hit when they do.

For example, in Feb 2023 Google announced the “Product Reviews Update”. This is a sixth iteration of an algorithm, aimed to target websites that focus on reviewing products. But if you’re a digital marketing agency (like us), then it’s highly unlikely to impact your website at all.

If you have noticed your website has lost ranking positions recently, then the good news is that any website can recover. So, here’s an action plan, using a logical 3 step process.

Research why your website has lost rankings

Before you can begin recovering your ranking positions, it’s really important to understand why they’ve dropped in the first place. If you don’t track when any Google algorithm updates happen, then reading this article may the first step towards understanding what has happened. And going forward, it’ll be a great idea for you to start tracking these updates.

Once you have established that there has been an update that has affected your website, you need to determine what the update was targeting, and check whether other websites in your space have also been affected (both positively and negatively).

Next, have a look at which specific content on your website has been affected. This involves  going through each page and investigating if any have declined in rankings. Or conversely, if there have been any improvements in rankings. This is relatively straightforward to check, if you’re actively monitoring your ranking positions. If you’re not doing this already, you could use tools like SE Ranking or SEMRush to help you.

Once you have determined which rankings have declined – have a think about the web pages that were affected. Ask yourself:

• Which keywords have declined and how do they relate to the pages? Are they optimised for both target keywords and other related search phrases?
• How much do you know about the latest algorithm update?
• Based on what you know about an update up to this point and your own opinions, are there things that could improve both the content and the user experience on these pages?

2. Create a plan of how to recover lost rankings

So now it’s time to create a plan to recover your lost rankings and the first step here is to confirm what you already know.

1. You know if there was a recent algorithm update, and you know what it was targeting.
2. You know which pages on your website were affected and what rankings you’ve lost
3. You know what your website goals and how that relates to the latest update

All this information will help you develop an effective strategy.

How?

Let’s go back to the previous example we used of the update that was targeted at review websites. And let’s take a website that reviews the latest smartphones. The website is full of articles of varying lengths and detail around smartphones and their accessories. Many of these articles are accurate and useful, but then Google releases their “Product Reviews Update” and all of a sudden, loads of pages lose ranking positions.

Your research shows that the update advice revolves around providing qualified opinions and info about the product being reviewed, that goes above and beyond what the manufacturer says about it. Such as explaining how it’s evolved from previous models and providing ways that make it easy for users to purchase the product. All of this, aimed at delivering more in depth and useful content to Google’s users

The first step here would be to identify which external web pages have actually benefitted from this update. Evidence might suggest that the competing web pages that have benefitted from the update are longer, that they include links to historical related content (blogs/landing pages etc), they link out to high authority sources of information, and also offer easy ways for readers to buy.

Using this information, you can create a list of tasks or changes, aimed at making your content better, in the eyes of the Google ‘bots.

3. Sensibly and strategically make updates to your website

So, now you have a clear understanding of why your website has lost rankings and what you need to do to begin recovering them. Next, you need to generate some updates. Depending on your website setup, this could present some challenges.

For example, if you have direct access to your website content through a CMS, such as WordPress, you could action small updates quickly. But if you don’t have the tools, or your website setup doesn’t allow for more significant changes, this could be a longer process.

We understand that seeking the expertise of a developer to help could be costly. But before you rule this out as an option, ask yourself why you want to make these changes in the first place. And also what the end goal could look like. If the ranking drops are significantly undermining your business, then you need to find the right balance. Inaction won’t get you back to where you were or where you want to be now!

Get a website set up for winning results

Google algorithm updates are an unfortunate challenge that every website owner or webmaster has to face, and trust us, we know it’s frustrating. However, try to look at algorithm updates as opportunities to move forward. Staying on top of the latest best practice will not only keep you ahead of your competitors, it will also ensure you’re providing the best content and experience for your users.

Still not sure what’s going on with your website? Speak to some friendly experts.

So who doesn’t want their website to appear in the top positions for relevant searches on Google? Every business regardless of sizes wants to be found online, but it’s far from easy (don’t let anyone tell you it is).

Having a strong online presence is crucial to the success of your business online. SEO is the process of optimising a website in order to rank higher in search engines, increase organically generated visitor numbers, and ultimately improve the overall visibility of a website. Whilst SEO can be a long term strategy, there are a number of free SEO tools available that anyone can start using today.

From keyword research through to backlink monitoring and technical issues, I’m going to introduce you to some of our favourite free tools – at least those with a good free version to get started.

Google Analytics

If you have no idea how many people are actually visiting your website, or where they’re being generated from then Google Analytics is where to go. At the time of writing Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is being introduced to supersede Universal Analytics (essentially GA3). GA4 is a set up in terms of how easy it is to navigate and understand but still a great free tool.

The setup will need a snippet of code adding to your website, but it will only take any webmaster a few moments to do if you not yourself. There’s plenty of guides out there depending on the platform your website is built on.

Search Console

Another free tool from Google is Search Console. This is probably more important than Google Analytics for SEO but they’re both a great place to start. Formally known as Webmaster Tools, Search Console is where you can monitor and evaluate how your website is performing in Google organic search results.

You could simply use it to view what keywords are triggering impressions (views) on Google and the position your website currently holds for each. Perhaps then moving up a stage would be to monitor more technical issues affecting SEO performance or check what links currently point at your website – both serious factors for successful SEO. Search Console is especially useful for new websites as this is the place where you submit sitemaps to Google and view insights into how your pages are appearing.

Google Keyword Tool

OK, this one isn’t completely free as now a days you need to have spent money on Google PPC Ads to be able to access it, but it’s very useful if you have. Within the keyword tool you can research the specific searches people are using on Google when research the products and services you provide or sell. In my experience, this often differs from the way business owners refer to their own products.

Simply input a keyword / search phrase and the tool will produce a list of closely related keywords and how many searches they’ve recently received.

Google Trends

Google trends is only useful is you are researching keywords that receive a high volume of searches. Within this tool you can analyse how search trends have changed over years and can often explain why you might have seen a downturn in a certain business area.

It’ll also show you any seasonal trends that certain keywords enjoy. This can also be narrowed down to certain regions for more localised search trends.

Looker Studio (Was Data Studio)

The free tool from Google is Looker Studio. Here you can create reporting dashboards that can pull in data from all tools into one easy to digest website report. It’s ideal for both in house marketers and agencies to produce clear reporting that even the most technical novice can understand.

Screaming Frog

Although a paid for tool Screaming Frog has a free version which still produces a great level of detail for smaller websites. It’s easily the most popular desktop website crawler, with the free version allowing up to 500 URLs to be crawled. It’ll produce a spreadsheet style report showing where there are gaps in website fundamentals such as title tags and heading structures.

Ultimately Screaming Frog is ideal for large websites where an SEO needs to do widespread crawls of a website to identify how to prioritise their work.

SEOptimer

Need a high level overview of your website which produces a list of action points to boost SEO performance? Head over to SEOptimer.

Simply input your website URL and it’ll do a crawl which analyses key SEO metrics and will give a rank for each – On-Page SEO, Links, Usability, Performance and Social.

Don’t treat what it’s tell you as gospel as it’ll need some context around the stats, such as it doesn’t really know what your website is about or what the content is saying.

In conclusion, there are numerous free SEO tools available for individuals and businesses looking to improve their online visibility. These tools can help you identify areas for improvement and take steps towards higher search engine rankings.

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or just getting started, incorporating these tools into your strategy can help you achieve better results and gain a better understanding of SEO.