How to raise your website's search ranking, increase audience
engagement, and optimise SEO.
More than 5 billion Google searches take place every day, so search engine optimization
(SEO), which involves modifying your website to increase the quantity of high-quality
traffic that it receives, is crucial for engaging your audience.
According to Chris Homer, an SEO Analyst at Mailchimp, "SEO is free publicity for your
business." "You'll draw in the right audience if you take steps to ensure you rank highly
for relevant queries.”
Designing and updating your site for SEO is simple when you know what improves your rating
in a search result and what makes it fall. Utilize the checklist to incorporate SEO into
your digital marketing strategy after learning more about SEO in the section below. SEO
checklist: How to improve your results
The good news about SEO planning is that what works for SEO also aligns with providing a
positive user experience (UX) for people who visit your website. So, SEO-friendly changes
equal a better site for the people you want to engage.
“SEO should be a consideration throughout every step of your website build and your
marketing journey,” says Ade Lewis, Partnerships Director at Mailchimp. “It’s the number one
way a consumer will find a small business.”
Review this checklist to learn about the changes and adjustments you can make to improve
your SEO.
Feature relevant keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that people type into search
engines to find something. All areas of your website—including page names, headlines, site
copy, image captions, page descriptions, and URLs—need to include keywords in a natural way
that doesn’t sound too forced.
Since people search with specific needs in mind, your keywords should be “long tail,”
meaning descriptive and narrowly focused. For example, “wedding photography Newport RI” will
work better than just “professional photography.” Specific keywords will bring in less
traffic overall, but ranking for more detailed searches will result in a higher conversion
rate.
Have a clean site structure. Make sure your website is organized in a way that makes it easy
for users and search engines to travel through your site and find what they’re looking for.
Internal links from one page to another within your site should provide content that
educates your visitor, answers a question about what you offer, or engages them in some
other valuable way. Internal links give Google more clues about what your website is about,
so it can send relevant visitors your way.
Feature substantial content. Create website content that’s relevant to your top keywords and
hefty enough to be valuable. While punchy, skimmable content is great, keep in mind that
Google wants content that solves the search intent, so pages with fewer than 200 words will
not be highly ranked. If you want to add meat to your copy, be sure each page solves a
problem, answers a question, or moves a visitor forward in their journey through your site.
Use relevant title tags.
A title tag or page tag is the “headline” for a page when it
appears in search engine results pages (SERP). The words or phrases in your title tags
should be specific and descriptive. Think, “Learn How to Paint Landscapes and Portraits"
instead of "Painting Class." Combining this with the meta description—a longer blurb in
search results that says more about what your content provides—encourages users to click
through to your website. Title tags also appear in your visitors’ web browser tabs and in
social media when your content is shared. This is easy to do in Mailchimp’s website builder.
Simply go to the page settings and edit the SEO title to create a title tag and the SEO
description to write a meta description.
Add alt tags. An alt tag is a text description of an image. It serves 3 important purposes.
Search engines can’t interpret images, so alt tags help them identify and rank these pieces
of content, improving your SEO. They also help website visitors when an image doesn’t
display properly on their screen or load quickly by providing a clue about what image they
should be seeing. Last, and definitely not least, alt tags are easy for screen readers to
decipher, so they help with web accessibility. Alt tags should be short and
descriptive—think, “paddle board on lake with smiling boy” or “chocolate cake with vanilla
frosting and strawberry.”
Optimize for mobile. Google prioritizes mobile websites, so making sure your website is
mobile friendly is critical. This means providing a visually pleasing and easy-to-use
experience no matter what device someone is visiting from. Mobile sites also must load
quickly on a 3G connection, render properly on any sized screen, have well-spaced site
elements that users can easily tap on to take action, and feature content that’s entirely
visible without having to scroll left or right. Mailchimp websites are built with mobile in
mind—the website builder allows you to preview your website on a mobile phone to see how it
looks.
Enable fast load times. Ideally your pages should load in under 2 seconds—less than 3 is a
must. If they do, it’ll improve your search rankings. There are several things that can slow
down your load time, including issues with your content management system (CMS), poorly
written code, low bandwidth that can’t handle your traffic volume, or numerous large images
on a page. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to test how quickly your website is loading. Be
sure you host your website on a platform that enables fast load times.
Install Google Search Console and Analytics.
Google Search Console will help you see if
Google is finding and indexing all of the pages on your website to highlight places you can
improve performance. It can also help you set up your own site search tracking. You can
connect to Google Analytics from your Mailchimp dashboard to monitor your traffic, see what
pages are being visited the most, and what links direct visitors to your website. Here's a
guide to help you set up Google Analytics.
Make sure your website and URL are secure. Google considers HTTPS encryption a top priority,
and will show a security warning in search results if a website is not HTTPs encrypted. Work
with a website builder that makes security a priority. All websites created with Mailchimp
include an SSL certificate—this encrypts data and guarantees the authenticity of a website
to visitors.
