4 burning questions & our answers on improving website SEO with fab content
Simon and Rach mucking around with paint brushes to illustrate the point that every business can get to grips with optimising their website images!
Best practice for website SEO when dealing with keywords, headings & products
As a website design studio in South Devon, designing stunning websites for creatively-inclined businesses across Devon and the UK, we answered a series of questions on how to write good, people-friendly content that also boosts your website SEO. This was off the back of our latest Website Club session and follows on from Part 1 in our mini-series on getting started with website SEO for small businesses.
The long and short of improving your SEO when it comes to structural elements like headings in your blog articles is to think of them as signposts.
Signposts give people the confidence and direction to go deeper in your content.
With this in mind, using the right keywords in them is an important want to ensure that they are as effective as possible - a written cue to go further.
We also talk about using your blog to take advantage of seasonal traffic, such as around Christmas, and then drive that to products on your website in order to increase sales.
Are pages with keywords in headings better for website SEO?
In terms of your website overall, it's really important to think about the keywords that you want to get known for. These will often be directly related to your services (e.g., branding or website design) or specific products you are selling (e.g., yellow hand-made teddy).
Location is often a vital keyword, as visitors typically search for a service or a product in their local area. This creates what's known as a keyword phase (e.g., website design in Devon), so keywords can be singular or in a short string.
Given the overall priority with your webpages is to demonstrate relevance, expertise, authority and trustworthiness, incorporating keywords into heading is very important. Headings help Google and visitors scan your content and affirm that they are likely to find what they are looking for.Are
Overall, yes, definitely look to fit keywords into your headings, as well as page title, meta description, image filenames and alt tags. However, only do so where it makes sense and is natural!
Avoid creating clunky text that reads like it has been written by a robot. It should make sense and feel natural to a human reader.
Additionally, do not cram as many keywords as possible into headings (or anywhere else for that matter) - this is known as keyword stuffing and Google specifically warns against it in its official guidelines.
As ever, write pages and content for human visitors, not search engines (although obviously be aware of how they work).
What’s best for website SEO: Heading 1, 2, 3 or 4?
What you want to do with headings on your webpages and blog articles is be very logical.
Best practice is to treat Heading 1 as the main subtitle for the entire article, and it typically goes at the top of the page. After you've used Heading 1 you don't use it again on the page.
Thereafter you use Heading 2 for the main points on page or in your blog entry. The structure looks something like this:
Page title [off page]
Heading 1 [on page]
Heading 2
Heading 2
Heading 2 [and so on]
As you can see, throughout the bulk of the article, the main headings are Heading 2, and you can repeat them as many times as you want. Some of our articles have ten or 11 sections with Heading 2, but you don't need as many as that by any means.
If you then want to develop subheadings, you use Heading 3 within Heading 2 and so on if you want further sub-sub-headings. For example:
Heading 1
Heading 2
Heading 3
Heading 4
Heading 2
However, what you want to avoid with headings is jumbling them up and using them illogically and out of order. Don't mix up them up or use them to highlight text (use bold or italics) or emphasise quotes or testimonials.
Should I include headings in webpages and blogs on my website?
Yes, the same principle above applies.
Ultimately people are going to be scanning through your website, whatever the page, and so they'll make decisions based on your headings, as these will ideally summarise the key content.
Headings acts as signposts for people so that they can understand what to expect and decide whether to read on. Subconsciously, there'll be asking themselves, 'Does this actually answer my question?'. And they might jump to the bit that they want to read and continue going if there's helpful content.
If there's just lots of text and no subheadings, it's hugely overwhelming and doesn't guide people to information and the answers they want. Headings help you to break things down for your visitors, as well as tell Google how relevant your pages are to visitors.
Multiple images of one product: what's best for SEO on my website?
In the grand scheme of things, image filenames are a low value signal to Google when it comes to SEO. They do help, but there are other things you can do to get more traction.
Putting keywords and their various destinations aside for a moment, our advice is to come back to the questions people put into Google.
Write blogs that address those searches and then point to your products from those articles.
The reason for this is that you can take advantage of seasonal surges in searches, such as Christmas, which address people's questions more specifically. This tactic makes it easier to capture the traffic and point people to your products, rather than going to extreme lengths to optimise your products for every eventuality.
For example, you can talk about topics such as, 'Top five jewellery ideas for Christmas'. This speaks to the seasonal activity, which will get a spike of traffic every year around Christmas, making it more 'evergreen' (a content marketing term: relevant all year round).
This approach takes advantage of those who are still open to what to purchase, sets you up as a friendly expert and gives them a chance to buy.
More specifically, some of the things we do to optimise specific products:
Most importantly, differentiate one product from another in your collection and don't copy and paste text between them
Use different adjectives and verbs to describe variations of the same product
Include your location where appropriate, if it is meaningful to a search
Angles a photo is taken from
Where things are sourced from or whether they are handmade
For whom they might be suitable
That’s our latest FAQ session, answering questions from UK small businesses and business owners grappling on how to work with keywords on their blogs as well as in the structural elements for better SEO. If you’d like to learn more from us on website design or get visual inspiration, follow @wildings.studio on Instagram, or browse our blogs on website design below.
