SEO for company website - where to start?

People searching for information on the web do not treat natural results as advertising, but as answers to their questions. Therefore, if you take care of high positions for the most important key phrases for your company - you can get valuable traffic that will turn into customers. If you want to appear on Google - you have to focus on positioning.

In today's guide you will learn:

1. How to prepare the website structure for SEO?
2. How to choose keywords?
3. What system should I put my company website on?
4. Why is it worth writing extensive content on the website?
5. How to get links to your website?
6. What's next?

If you want your website to be visible on Google - be sure to read!

1. SEO - where to start? The right website structure

In order for your website to be ranked high, it should comply with Google's guidelines, which are included in the guides for webmasters. However, there is no simple recipe for success - no one knows how many factors affect visibility. Google's requirements are also a set of good practices rather than an imposed pattern of action.

Learn from the competition!

Regardless of whether you already have a website or designing it for now - you need to start with the competition analysis in TOP10 results. Check what the website architecture looks like, what tabs it has, how much content it has on individual subpages. Pay attention to how it places keywords in the texts as well as usability. Thanks to this, you will know at what level your website must be.

How many subpages must my website have?

The more valuable content subpages, the more keywords your website can rank for. The best solution is a separate subpage for each product or service - and each should contain extensive content. It is thanks to the content that the Google crawler is able to understand what the website is about - and assign it to specific keywords.

2. Keywords - how to choose and where to get ideas?

In SEO, the basis is the use of words in the content that are searched by users as often as possible. Include keywords naturally in your content, but don't forget to include them in title tags, headings, and tab and category names.

The growing popularity of phrases from the so-called long tail

Currently, more and more people search for long, multi-word and precise phrases. Thus, the volume of searches for simple one-word phrases is reduced. One of the reasons is the growing popularity of voice search.

If you want to know what users are looking for, select a few phrases related to your business and put them in any of the tools from the list below. You will receive suggestions and the number of monthly searches. In addition, you can not only easily check individual phrases, but also export entire lists.

What tools will be useful for you when determining keywords?

• Keyword Planner - free
• Senuto, Semstorm, Ahrefs - paid

Keyword Planner

The Keyword Planner is a tool found in Google Ads. It used to give very accurate search numbers, but these numbers have been hidden for some time. Currently, only users running Google Ads campaigns receive precise data - for the rest, the results are inaccurate. However, it is still a very useful tool to start with.

It is worth checking the competitors' websites and paying attention to how they name their products and categories.

Each subpage can effectively position itself on about 5 key phrases (so-called money keywords) that bring the most traffic. Therefore, the more subpages - the more opportunities for online visibility. In addition, thanks to the extensive content, the website naturally starts positioning for multi-word phrases that you did not even think about.

3. What system should I place the website on?

There are many ready-made content management systems (CMS) on the market. And almost any page can be placed on one of them. We recommend WordPress - lots of customization options, a large plugin repository and a knowledge base. The system itself is easy to use and intuitive, and allows for quick changes.

SEO plugin for WordPress

There are a lot of plugins for WordPress that help with SEO. We use Yoast. It helps to easily set meta and title tags, redirect low-value pages created automatically by the system. It also doesn't overburden the page.

There are also ready-made solutions for online stores - incl. PrestaShop, Shoper, WooCommerce.

Alone or with an agency?

Remember that if you buy a website design that will be on a proprietary system - you can become addicted to the agency. If you want to make a lot of changes quickly (which is crucial in the initial stage of the website functioning), you may run into a brake in the form of invoicing each change. That is why we prefer ready-made CMS systems - even if the website is made for you by an external company, you will be able to apply changes yourself.

The website must be good both in terms of search engine robots and the user.

Build a new website with an SEO agency

If you are just at the stage of creating your company's website - work with an SEO specialist from the very beginning. The entire process of technical optimization and content preparation should be completed before the launch of the new website. Unfortunately, many agencies that create websites forget to optimize them for SEO.

We've been changing the site from the very beginning, we've been auditing the new site on a regular basis. After the change, the visibility doubled during the week.

The client changed the page without paying attention to SEO - the visibility went down straight away. The old page was restored and we were working in the background on the new one.

4. Writing content for the website - remember about SEO and about the user

The content on the website must be original. It cannot be copied from any other page. A common mistake is to duplicate product descriptions from the manufacturer's website or at Ebay's own auctions. Plagiarized content significantly reduces the value of the page, which is especially difficult at the beginning of the site's operation.

The content allows you to rank in Google for the words it contains - so without content, positioning is impossible.

What should the content be about? It certainly cannot be artificial - it should encourage you to buy, get involved, talk about products or ways of use. So there should be a marketing description here, in which the keywords will be naturally placed.

How much content should there be? We used to recommend that each positioned subpage should contain about 2,000-3,000 characters with spaces. Today it all depends on the industry and competition. There are categories where around 400 words are enough, but there are also categories where you have to put up to over a thousand words! The SurferSEO tool or the SEO Quake browser plug-in will be useful to analyze the content of the competition. Thanks to them, you can check the number of content, keywords or headers.

Blog on website and SEO

We already know that the more valuable subpages with content, the greater the potential in terms of keywords. Therefore, a blog is very useful in this regard. Systematic publication of content strengthens your image as an expert, additionally strengthens positioning. If you take care of linking inside posts to products related to content - you will take care of a sales funnel and you can effectively direct traffic to product subpages.

It doesn't always have to be a blog

Many people are afraid of having a blog on their website. However, it does not necessarily have to be a section with this title. "News", "Guide", "Knowledge Zone" will be equally good - any place where you will successively add valuable content. You can write it yourself or with the help of a copywriter.

You don't know what to write about? Try to answer the questions that arise at the sales stage. Thanks to this, you can use such articles in various ways - both for ranking in Google for popular questions, and in terms of sales - to target users at the sales stage or use in newsletters.

5. Gaining links to the site = strengthening the authority of the entire site

The more valuable links to a website, the more valuable Google considers that page. And this makes it rank higher for more keywords.

Many myths and restrictions have multiplied around gaining links. According to Google's guidelines, links leading to your website must be natural, i.e. placed by users in order to share knowledge. The link must help the user in something, develop the topic. Artificial link acquisition may be considered spammy. But! There is nothing to be afraid of - the links are the fuel for positioning.

Links from Ebay?
One good link is worth much more than a few dozen junk links. Links from spammy sites can even lower the authority of the site and block its progress in positioning for some time. So do not buy link packages from Ebay or OLX. Not the way.

Proven ways to get links

1. Check if there is a possibility of placing a link to your website on the portals of your subcontractors, contractors and associates. Such links are thematically related.

2.  Search for valuable industry directories, companies and websites.

3. Take advantage of sponsored articles - write a short article on a topic related to your product and link to yourself.

4. Send press releases to the media - maybe one of the websites will be interested in the news and will place it along with a link to your website.

See link-building competition

A good method is to watch your competition. Check where they have links from. This will give you a hint on which websites to look for offers and what type of links work in a given industry. However, use common sense - because it happens that sites with links from spammy sites are in the top positions.

Gaining links must work in parallel with the optimization of activities on the site. Link-building alone or just writing content is not enough to achieve top positions.

6. Optimization, content, links - and what next?

How quickly the effects of positioning appear depends primarily on the industry and competition. Sometimes it is enough to wait a few weeks for the first effects, but sometimes you have to wait six months or even a year. This is not a one-time process - you have to keep an eye on your visibility, check your competition, react to market changes and update search engine algorithms.

In Silence! we carry out control audits from time to time - we check the situation, what can still be improved, what can be done for the client's side. If you position yourself by yourself, you also need to pay attention to it.

Google is a monopoly - you need to realize it and adapt your website to it. Every now and then the algorithm undergoes a major update, which may lower or increase the position of your website overnight. With us, after the latest update, many customers went up - but sometimes there are drops and then you have to look for new ideas for optimization.

If you work closely with an SEO agency, you have the opportunity to make quick changes and react to the market situation. Website positioning is a process that you have to work on all the time - once a proper optimization is done, it is not a guarantee of success. If you do nothing on your website - the competition will eventually overtake you. SEO is a constant fight over high positions

Are you interested in working with us? See what we can do for you!