In 2020 to be obtaining the most relevant organic traffic, you have to be implementing at least the base levels of fundamental SEO practises to your site - and it doesn’t have to be as complicated as you may think.

I’m going to show you some simple SEO practises that will position your website in the right direction for 2020 & moving forward. 

Unique Content

Google is constantly improving & updating it’s algorithms, trying to create the greatest experience for each user & ranking the webpages they believe are doing so accordingly.

A big determining factor Google takes into consideration when ranking a webpage/site is how unique the content is, now what do I mean by that -

Well to start from the ground up you want to make sure your Title Tag’s & Meta Descriptions are unique.

These are your page titles & description that are displayed when a user inputs the keyword your page is ranking for.

So as a starting point you want to make sure each page title & description is unique and captivating the user’s attention *note you can use things such as title qualifiers which you add to the end of your page title for more relevance ie “Best SEO Tips - New Unique Discovery 2020”*

Now once all your Title Tags & Meta Descriptions are unique & you’ve added some title qualifiers, you are ready to move onto your websites page content. 

You want to make sure for each keyword your trying to rank for on your chosen webpages that your content is unique - If you have other webpages in which are ranking for a different keyword but using very similar content, you want to cake these together and create a better more in-depth unique page to rank for.

You can use a tool such as Siteliner to identify how much of your content on your website is unique, having less than 25% duplicate content is what you should be aiming for but the lower the better.

Site Speed

The factors to determine your rankings, aren't always complex. Most are just simple tweaks that can push your position up to the first page on the search engines.

Site Speed is one of them - there are hundreds of ways to test your site speed ensuring that you are providing a quick & responsive experience for each user that reaches your webpages. 

You can use google very own Page Speed Insights to get an idea of how well your site is currently performing, as well as analysing your competition’s performance, to know if you need to be upping your game. 

If your site is underperforming, using a tool such as GTMetrix will reanalyse your site speed, give you the reasons why your site is underperforming & what you need to be doing to get it up to scratch.

Don’t take this step for granted as it could be detrimental to your website rankings.

Website Architecture & Internal / External Linking

Your website architecture is how search engines will perceive the format of your overall site.

Say for instance you have an electrical repair website, you want to have your categories listed within the main menu followed by the sub-topics of repairs. 

For Instance:

Domestic Repairs

• Rewiring upgrade & home improvements
• Electrical heater repair
• Home lighting installations

Your URL permalink should also be following the correct structure being:

electricalrepair.com/domestic_repairs/home_lighting_installations

Providing the information to search engines in this format enables each page on your site to be easily understood, giving you more of an edge when it comes to ranking against your competition (alongside all the information included above).

Internal & External Linking

Linking throughout your own website & out to others is the best way to pass authority as well as gaining some in return. When it comes to Internal Linking this is the greatest way to pass authority and traffic throughout your website.

Going back to the example of the plumbing website, say for instance we are on the Home lighting installations page, to pass authority throughout the site we want to ensure we are including relevant information about another service say for instance:

“When it comes to rewiring your home, don’t forget that you may need to remove your old lighting - not to worry we have expert electricians that can serve you with home lighting installations”

Here we are internally linking back towards another page with a relevant anchor tag passing over authority with traffic that helps rank other topics on the site. When internally linking you want to ensure you are being relevant and it flows well within your content and not just stuffed in. 

External Linking

Sometimes you may use information you found on another page & its only right to link back to them. As a result, if passing over lots of relevant traffic you are able to outreach and mention the link you have mentioned in your content that’s driving traffic towards there site, which could if the content is well written, result in a free link back to yours.

A win-win situation. 

Make sure the sites your linking to are relevant & not just linking to any site to try to bring back a link - The only links that are going to be beneficial to your website have to be relevant to your content & business overall.

Work Your Way Up - Ranking Keywords

Now we’ve got some of the technicals & duplicate stuff out the way, let’s talk about some basics when it comes to ranking target keywords. There seems to be a misconception out there to what individuals or businesses believe they are going to be able to rank for right off the bat…

You may be a business owner & have used keyword planner, for instance, to analyse that if you try to rank for the keyword “lawyer in my area” you going to obtain 100,000 monthly searches - Wow, sounds great right!

Well…

Unfortunately sites ranking for this keyword in the top 3 most likely have a high domain rating enabling them to hold this position close to them tightly.

But all hope is not lost.

We can use tools such as Ahrefs, for instance, to type in the keyword “lawyer in my area” and find similar keywords in which hold a lower keyword difficulty, drive a lower amount of traffic but still giving us the ability to begin to rank for relevant keywords.

If your site, for instance, has a domain ranking of below 20, you want to be focusing on ranking keywords below this, relevant long-tail keyword variants, that are congruent with your site to slowly build yourself up the ladder.

The main focus keywords such as “lawyers in my area” may not even bring you as much traffic as 10 lower rating long-tail keywords that are relevant to your business and as a whole bringing you traffic never the less, building your domain ranking overall which will enable you to start to rank for higher keywords as time goes on.

Don’t burn yourself out, start from the bottom and work your way up and you’re guaranteed results.