10 SEO tips for your website

The modern must-haves

These strategies reflect how search engines actually work today. These will become the foundation of your new SEO strategy and your success in a competitive market and building a sustainable online presence.

1. Focus on Search Intent and E-E-A-T

The days of simply using a keyword repeatedly are over. Today, Google’s algorithms are powered by artificial intelligence. Their AI programmes care deeply about E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. More than a technical term, it's the core principle of modern SEO. Search engines want to connect their users with the most credible and trustworthy information available. As a small business, SEO is a massive opportunity for you to leverage your unique knowledge and experience to build a loyal audience.

How to apply it 

Think like a trusted advisor, not a marketer. Instead of just writing a generic service page, create content that showcases your firsthand experience. E.g. a financial advisor shouldn’t just list your services; they should write a comprehensive guide on "How to Invest in a Volatile Market" that uses real-world examples and personal insights. By consistently producing content that demonstrates your E-E-A-T, you position your business as a leader in your field.

2. Local SEO is Your Secret Weapon

For any business with a physical location or a local service area, ranking for local searches is the most direct path to attracting customers. While you might not be able to outrank a national corporation on a broad term like "taps", you can absolutely dominate a search term for "plumbing repair parts in [your city]." Local SEO is a level playing field where SME SEO can gain a significant competitive advantage.

How to apply it 

Start by fully optimising your Google Business Profile. Ensure your business name, address, and phone number are consistent everywhere online. Fill out every section of your profile, including your hours, services, and product listings. Actively encourage and respond to customer reviews—both positive and negative. Lastly, create location-specific content on your website, such as "Top 5 Places to Get a Coffee in Midtown" or "Our Guide to Finding a Reliable Plumber in [Your City]." This type of content signals to Google that you are a relevant business in the local community.

3. Prioritise Technical SEO for a Strong Foundation

Technical SEO can sound intimidating, but it's really just about ensuring your website is fast, secure and easy for both humans and search engine robots to use. Think of it as the digital plumbing of your site; if it's broken, nothing else will work well. A site with a strong technical foundation is far more likely to be crawled and indexed properly, giving your content and on-page SEO keywords a fighting chance to rank.

How to apply it 

Use free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report to check your site's loading speed and mobile-friendliness. Ensure your site uses HTTPS for security, which is a key ranking signal. Pay close attention to your URLs structure and meta tags. Your URLs should be short, clean, and descriptive (e.g., yourcompany.com/blog/seo-tips), and your meta title and description should be unique for every page, acting as your business card on the search results page and enticing users to click. Learn more by downloading our FREE ultimate SEO guide.

4. Embrace Video and Visual Content

In a world of short attention spans, text alone is often not enough. Video is an incredibly powerful way to engage your audience, build trust, and showcase your brand personality. Search engines are also increasingly prioritising rich media in their results, often showing videos directly in the search page. This presents a huge opportunity for your business to stand out from text-only competitors.

How to apply it

You don't need a professional studio to get started. Create short, helpful videos on your phone to demonstrate products, share quick tips, or answer frequently asked questions. Post these videos on platforms like YouTube and embed them on your website. Use high-quality images and infographics to break up text and explain complex ideas. These visuals not only improve website ranking and user engagement but also offer new opportunities for search traffic, as Google Images can be a significant source of visitors.

Part 2: The Enduring Fundamentals

These tips have stood the test of time for a reason. While search algorithms evolve, these fundamental principles remain crucial for any long-term SEO strategy.

5. Write Engaging, Updated Content

Your content is your best salesperson, working 24/7 to educate, engage and convert potential customers. However, simply publishing a blog post isn’t enough. Search engines prioritise content that is both high-quality and "fresh." The key is to be a consistent, reliable source of information.

How to apply it

Go back and audit your existing content (like this blog). Are there any old blog posts that are still getting traffic but could be updated with new data, better examples, or more in-depth information? Refreshing these posts not only makes them more valuable to your readers but also signals to search engines that your site is active and relevant. Create a content calendar and commit to regularly publishing unique, well-researched content that directly addresses your audience’s pain points.

6. Encourage Inbound Links (Backlinks)

When another reputable website links to your site, it’s essentially a vote of confidence. Backlinks are still a powerful ranking factor, but their quality is far more important than their quantity. One link from a highly respected industry publication is worth a hundred links from low-quality, spammy sites.

How to apply it 

Focus on earning links naturally by creating valuable resources that others will want to reference. This could be an in-depth industry study, a free local guide, or a powerful infographic. You can also build relationships with other businesses in your community and offer to contribute a guest post to their blog. The key is to demonstrate your authority and make your content so useful that people link to it without you even asking.

7. Check Your Site's Speed

This isn't just a minor technical detail; it's a direct business issue. In today's fast-paced digital world, users expect websites to load instantly. A slow website frustrates customers and can cause them to abandon a purchase or leave before they even see your content. A one-second delay in page load time can lead to a significant drop in conversion rates and a higher bounce rate, both of which are bad for business.

How to apply it 

Regularly test your site's speed using a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights. Optimise large image files before you upload them. Look for and remove unnecessary plugins or widgets that are slowing down your site. If your website is still slow, consider upgrading your web hosting to a more reliable server. Your customers will thank you for it with their business.

8. Track Your Results and Make Improvements

SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time project. You need to know what's working and what isn't to get the best return on your investment. If you're not tracking your efforts, you're essentially flying blind.

How to apply it 

Use powerful, free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor your website's performance. Set up goals in Google Analytics to track key business metrics like phone calls, contact form submissions, or online purchases. Use Google Search Console to see which keywords people are using to find your site and identify any technical issues that need fixing. Regularly review this data to refine your strategy and focus on the activities that deliver the most powerful results for your business.

If these 8 tips seem like a lot to handle while you're running a business, you don't have to do it alone. Livewire specialises in helping SMEs implement these strategies and drive tangible business results. Get in touch to see how we can build a custom SEO plan that works for you.

If you work on these top 10 SEO tips, we guarantee you’ll be generating more organic traffic and getting more engagement with your customers.

If you’re interested in learning more about SEO or having some content marketing for your site, get in touch – we’ll be happy to help!

Don’t be afraid to link to other sites

A lot of people are sceptical when it comes to linking to other websites. You want them to stay on your site, right?

But link building, whether inwards or outwards, is a fundamental SEO tactic!

Think about it, Robots are crawling for relevant pages and content, so if you’re linking to other relevant pages, they can see you’re practising what you preach!

Be careful though, make sure these are high-quality sites and sources. The key is to make your content relevant and helpful to your reader! So, if you’re linking to the right sorts of places, it demonstrates you’re doing the right thing – catering to your audience.

It makes your site more valuable to the reader, and search engines are more likely to reward positive contribution and behaviour.
 

Encourage them to link back to you

Another great thing about adding outbound links to your site is that you’re demonstrating your ability to share links between two parties – a great way to attract inbound links.

Backlinks are still a strong contender when it comes to getting great search engine placement. The key tip here is to generate trustworthy sites to link to you – quality over quantity. When you’re generating decent content that people will not only want to link to but share on social media or even interact with – you’ll definitely get further up the ranks.

You want more people to link to you organically, rather than force your links and that will all come from a solid marketing and content plan centred around your audience.
 

Be wise with keywords

Keywords were one of the first things that Google announced that would help increase your rankings. It was easy for their robots to crawl sites and categorise them if they could scan certain keywords.

Years later, the algorithms have changed so much – it’s time for a different mindset!

YES, keywords are still important, but you need to be focusing on your content first, and keywords after.

Why?

Because you want your visitors to actually read your work and content, spending more time on your site and engaging with what you’ve written.

Ideally, you want to demonstrate your expertise in your field, provide advice for your readers and for them to get out their wallet and purchase your product or service.

The best thing to do is to forget about your keywords whilst you’re creating content, and then review each piece afterwards. You’ll reap the rewards by providing useful, engaging content that enhances user experience.
 

Write engaging and updated content

You may have heard the phrase marketers often use ‘content is key’. Well, it sort of is. Whilst there are lots of different SEO techniques; creating and publishing engaging and unique content can significantly help to improve your position on search engines.

It can often be quite challenging to consistently update your content, whether that’s because of lack of resources, or lack of measurability or even just providing a variety of content that keeps your customers engaged.

Unique and updated content is one of the things that affect what search engines call the ‘fresh factor’. The basics here are that Google measures your site and content for freshness and then gives you a score per page in relation to a search query.

Therefore, recent news or events, regular events or frequent updates can help them determine that score.

What regular content can do for you – is create useful share-worthy blogs and articles you can post across your social channels too!
 

Build your social media

Social media is another tactic that should be a fundamental part of your SEO strategy. Increasing the ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ on your page is one thing, but it’s also sharing content that encourages others to re-share those posts and add their comments.

If you create useful content, like the point before, you’ve got a great start in adding to your social media strategy. What’s more, you can ask people to share your content too.

A good tip to increase your social media presence is to start a competition that encourages your followers to tag a friend and share the content so that it can reach more people. Also mentioning reputable brands and influencers that you work with can also help give you some extra kudos.

Social media is a great tool in getting more people to your site and getting them to share your content, which in turn gives you a nice little boost up the Google ranks. So it’s not to be overlooked.

*Quick Tip* Start with 2 or 3 social channels that you feel are the right fit for you and build from there. B2B and B2C are likely to have better interactions on different platforms, so incorporate this into your strategy.

Get your basic metadata right

If you’re not a digital marketer and don’t know ‘back end’ strategies, this is quite a simple one to get your head around.

There are a few elements to metadata, but the main focus should be on your meta title and description.

This is the first thing that people will see when they search your site on Google.
Each title should reflect what’s on the page and each description should be unique and relevant to the page that it’s pointing to.

It doesn’t make sense to have a description that’s talking about everything you do as a business if it's not relevant to the page. Say for example you offered email marketing, SEO and content but the page only talks about email marketing – it can be confusing for the reader, plus search engine giants are likely to pick up on it.

Also, avoid any duplicate content as search engines don’t like that and could penalise you for it. In WordPress, you can get plugins such as Yoast to help you, and in Concrete5  (our preferred CMS platform) there’s a simple SEO tab set up ready for you to add in your unique title tag and meta description.
 

Pay attention to your URLs

When working with websites (particularly in WordPress), normally when a new page is generated, it will automatically create a URL for you. Often, these can be generated containing a long-tail URL full of different page names.

For example: https://yourcompany.co.uk/blog/post/title/date/12345.

Think about if you had to type in a URL by hand and what would be the easiest route to see. If your readers can’t type it in easily, then Google won’t be able to read and crawl it properly either.

When it comes to blog posts, it may be that the URL is longer than others, but as long as you keep it clear, then people and search engines can identify clearly what’s going to be on the page.

Top URL Tips: Always use hyphens to separate the words in URLs, don’t use capitals, avoid numbers (unless it’s part of the page title) and always put your top content in the root – aka straight after your main URL.
 

Don’t forget your image alt tags

A lot of people who don’t know about SEO can often overlook the images on their site.

We’ve already talked about making sure your images aren’t too large to impact your site speed, but there are other things you want to consider too.

Think about it like this, a robot from a search engine scans your code and doesn’t see the image itself. Therefore, if you’ve uploaded an image all it can read is the file name that you’ve given it, instead of seeing the actual image.

Therefore, step 1 – give it a decent file name, so it is relevant to the image.

And step 2: add an alt tag.

An alt tag is a bit like a ‘caption’ on the image but isn’t normally displayed on the site -  just within the code. This helps Google identify what the image is easily without needing to see the image itself.

What’s more, in situations where the image is unable to load on the page – the alt text should describe what that image is so the reader can see what is supposed to be there and no essential functionality is lost.
 

Track your results and make improvements

Once you’ve got your top SEO tactics in place, you’ll definitely want to track your progress.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are a great place to start when tracking visitors and search queries in relation to your site. They’re easy to implement on your site and can track your progress as you work on your SEO.

If you spot any keywords or search queries that aren’t relevant to your site, it gives you a chance to look at that particular page and make the relevant adjustments.

It also shows you any sites that may be no longer relevant to your users or places where they are dropping off the site. Use this as an opportunity to update that page and create a newer, fresher piece of content that works instead.

If you work on these top 10 SEO tips, we guarantee you’ll be generating more organic traffic and getting more engagement with your customers.

If you’re interested in learning more about SEO or having some content written for your site, get in touch – we’ll be happy to help!