101 Quick SEO Tips
Where these tips came from
I founded broadband.co.uk in 2004 and since then have built, ranked and monetised a complete portfolio of websites covering a diverse range of topics.
Over this time my websites have received hundreds of millions of visitors from Google, generated well over one hundred million dollars worth of sales for affiliate partners and earned tens of millions of dollars in commissions and advertising revenues.
In 2021 I sold broadband.co.uk in a significant deal.
2022 saw the launch of keywordspeopleuse.com to help others benefit from the exact same process I’ve developed over the past 20 years to research keywords, build content and then rank websites.
KeywordsPeopleUse is now one of the favorite keyword research tools for thousands of SEO and marketing professionals worldwide, we have users in more than 158 countries!
Over all this time I’ve developed a deep knowledge across SEO and through lots of experimentation, testing and experience, have a whole heap of tips I can share with you today.
My Quick SEO Tips
In no particular order...
Tip 1: Make your website as fast as possible, Google hates sites that load slowly and so do users.
Think about it yourself, you don’t want to be using a website that’s slow and takes a long time to load pages. Google knows people hate that and it doesn’t like promoting websites that are slow. So make yours as fast as possible.
Tip 2: If Google can’t find a page it can’t index it, make sure new pages are linked to from existing pages.
Make it easy for Google, and your site visitors, to find pages, every new page you add must be linked from the most obviously related pages. Google will thank you, your visitors will thank you.
Tip 3: Google loves secure sites, always have your site running on HTTPS.
You wouldn’t share any personal information with a site that wasn’t encrypted, so why would you expect anyone to use your site if it wasn’t secure?
Do yourself a favour and make sure your site is running on HTTPS, your visitors and Google will appreciate it.
Tip 4: Despite what some people say, backlinks from other websites help you rank better.
This is because Google sees them like “votes” for your content. The more links from legitimate third party websites the better.
A word of warning though, Google doesn’t like people buying backlinks, and if it thinks you are doing this it may penalise your website.
So don't get tempted by people offering easy links in return for payment.
Tip 5: Backlinks coming from external sites and pages that are more relevant to your website's topic are better than from completely unrelated sites.
Relevancy doesn’t have to mean a website that’s exactly the same topic as yours, just that they are linking to you from a page that’s relevant to their topic and also relevant to you. An example might be a campsite's website having a page about local places for their visitors to eat at and linking to local restaurants.
Tip 6: H1’s are important, every page should have one. Put the main keywords you want to rank a page for in the pages H1.
On a webpage the H1 is the main heading of the page content, in a CMS like Wordpress it will be the page or post heading, most web page editors might also call it the Heading 1
H1’s help Google work out what the subject of your page is, as well as being helpful for your site visitors and accessibility for those using screen readers.
Tip 7: Page titles are important, It should be descriptive of the page content and include the keywords you want the page to rank for.
Google uses the page title as one of the most important features to work out what the subject of your page is.
Your page Title is also what Google will often use to display in the search results when it lists your page, though sometimes it will create its own title which can be annoying, but it’s best to put in what you’d prefer your potential site visitors to see.
Tip 8: Internal links (links from pages within your site to each other) help provide context to Google about what your pages are about. Use them to help boost the rankings of your pages for your target keywords.
Use anchor text that describes the content of the page you are linking to, this anchor text provides an additional signal to Google as to what the page is about and what keywords it should be ranking the page for.
In addition, good internal links help your site visitors discover more of your content.
Tip 9: People who go to Google are looking to answer a question. To build a successful website you need to aim to answer peoples questions.
Build your content strategy around discovering and answering the questions your audience has, you’ll create great content that actually helps people and will naturally cover a huge variety of keywords across your topical area.
A great place to find actual questions real people are asking online for any topic is our tools at keywordspeopleuse.com
Tip 10: SEO changes a lot over time, always check that advice is still relevant.
Over the years Google (and other search engines) have made several changes as to what they deem important for ranking web pages. They regularly implement entire new ranking systems and algorithms and thus can change what is and isn’t important for ranking.
Therefore you need to be careful when looking at any SEO advice, look at how many sources are confirming any advice and how old any published advice is. Reading an SEO guide that’s not been updated for several years might lead you to be following outdated advice.
Tip 11: Make sure some of the content on your website is ‘evergreen’ content that doesn’t go out of date quickly and can generate traffic for a long period of time.
The very best content, from a return on investment point of view, is that which stands the test of time without the need for a great deal of updating and refreshing.
This kind of content covers the topics that people come back to again and again, or which is constantly bringing new people to them.
For example there are always people becoming new parents for the first time, that’s a guaranteed refreshing audience who will have the same questions over and over again, great for evergreen content.
Tip 12: With a new website, target longtail traffic to start with, you will start to build rankings and traffic faster this way. Grow your content and authority over time.
It’s just a fact that with a brand new website that unless you are targeting a very very specific and underserved niche, then you will have a hard time ranking for high traffic popular terms. To the point that it’s not really worth trying.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to enter a popular topic, but you should target long tail keywords which you can cover in better depth than anyone else.
Over time you will build a body of content and authority that will start to enable you to start targeting and ranking for higher traffic keywords.
Tip 13: One of the greatest SEO skills is patience. Building out content and traffic takes time. Patience will be rewarded eventually.
Most people who start websites (or indeed almost any endeavor) will fail because they don’t give it enough time to work.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be constantly working on a site, rather just having the patience to build out an initial site and then leave it for a while (maybe even a year or more) to pick up some links and traffic before starting work back on it later.
Tip 14: The best time to have started a website is 20 years ago, the second best time is now! Get started!
Any website that isn’t started and remains just an idea in your head is not going anywhere or going to achieve something.
Every successful site you see today was started from scratch by someone someday in the past.
Get that site started today, not tomorrow, not in a week or a month, but today!
Tip 15: Familiarise yourself with Google's Spam Policies so you don’t get yourself penalised for doing something they don’t like.
It breaks my heart every time I see a website owner complain they got penalised by Google for following and implementing an SEO tactic that turned out to be against Google’s Spam Policies.
Google is very clear on what tactics they consider against their rules, so make sure you read them and keep up to date with them as they change over time.
You really have no one to blame but yourself if you cross their lines and get penalised.
Tip 16: Don’t scrimp on web hosting, always pay for decent, fast and reliable hosting.
As well as wanting your hosting to be fast (as we covered in Tip #1), Google also wants sites to be reliable.
It doesn’t want to be sending people to a website that is offline for any reason, so you want your hosting to be as reliable as you can afford.
Google accepts that every website will very occasionally have downtime, but if your website is down often or for extended periods it will start to affect your rankings, as well as being bad for your users!
Tip 17: Make sure your website is backed up, or hosted on a service that provides auto backups. If something disastrous happens you need to be able to recover it.
The nightmare situation for any website is losing all the hard work you put into creating and building a website because of an unrecoverable server error.
You absolutely must ensure your website is backed up regularly and that you have a plan in place to recover if the very worst happens.
Tip 18: Sign up for SEO newsletters to stay up to date with news and updates.
As we covered in Tip #10, SEO tactics change a lot over time, it’s a must to stay up to date with new developments.
A great way to do this is to sign up to SEO newsletters. These are published by a number of SEO experts and industry commentators, perfect for staying in touch with the latest news and views every week.
Tip 19: Listen to SEO podcasts to hear stories of how different people use SEO to build audiences and businesses.
I’m a big fan of podcasts and find them to be a great source of both learning and inspiration.
There are lots of great SEO (and related disciplines) podcasts out there, I’d strongly suggest you search to find some that you enjoy listening to.
I even launched my own in 2023, called ‘SEO Is Not That Hard’, why not check it out!
Tip 20: Think about how you will monetise your site, options include affiliate marketing, display advertising, digital products, e-commerce and more.
It pays to start thinking about how you will monetise at the planning stages of building a site, even if you do not plan to monetise at the start.
Different monetisation strategies will need different functionality to be considered, e-commerce sites need product catalogues, user accounts, payment gateways and the like, whereas a site planning to concentrate on display advertising is much simpler.
Tip 21: Need help? You can hire specialists quickly and easily (and usually affordably) on marketplaces like upwork.com
Finding a specialist for any task is now very simple with these job marketplaces. Don’t let a skill gap keep you from achieving what you want.
Tip 22: Looking to launch an e-commerce store but don’t know where to start? Try Shopify.com
Shopify is a great hosted e-commerce platform which will get you up and running extremely quickly, no need to worry about hosting, software installs or updates.
There’s no tech skills required at all, no excuses to not get going.
Tip 23: Want to launch a blog but don’t know where to start? Try Wordpress.com
As Shopify is to e-commerce in Tip 22, Wordpress.com allows you to get a blog up and running without the need to get your own hosting or install and update any software.
Tip 24: E-commerce store owners, always include an FAQ for every product and product range to boost your organic traffic reach.
You want to not just be the place to buy a product, you want to be the expert on every product you sell.
You will attract more search traffic by answering all the potential questions a prospective buyer has, meaning more potential customers landing on your pages.
Having all those questions answered there on the product page will convert more visitors into buyers.
Tip 25: A picture is worth 10,000 words, if you can include images within your pages then do.
I don’t think any additional words on this tip will help!
Tip 26: Decided to remove some old pages from your site? Always 301 redirect them to the next most suitable page.
A 301 redirect will pass any links that point at the removed page to the redirected page.
Google will pass most of the ranking signals of the old page to the redirected page which means the hard work and effort you put into the removed page won’t be completely lost from an SEO perspective.
Tip 27: Don’t buy a domain name that includes the trademark of another company, especially bigger companies, you’ll end up in a world of pain if you try to monetise it.
Trying to benefit from another's brand or trademark can be seen as an attempt to ‘pass off’ and can lead to quite serious legal consequences if the other company discovers what you are doing.
Many brands can be quite aggressive at protecting their trademarks and brands and there are many examples of them getting those ‘passing off’ shutdown and domains seized.
In short, it’s better to build your own brand from the start.
Tip 28: Keywords in a domain name won’t help you rank by themselves, but when people link to you using your domain name as anchor text then it might.
This is one of the more controversial ones, as you might find people having quite strong opinions both for and against it.
In my opinion it’s the keyword in the anchor text link where people link with the domain name that’s the benefit though.
Tip 29: If the anchor text for a link says “cheap laptops” then this is a sign to Google that the page being linked to is relevant for the term “cheap laptops”.
This is why when creating links that you control you should always try to use descriptive anchor texts rather than generic ones like ‘click here’ which are a waste of a good ranking signal!
Tip 30: Keyword volume is an overrated metric (that’s why we don’t use it at keywordspeopleuse.com). Don’t chase keywords based on volume. 20% of all searches everyday on Google have never been seen before.
Too many people get fixated on chasing keywords by volume, all they are doing is making life hard for themselves in the first instance because more volume equals greater competition.
When you are starting out it makes more sense to chase less longer tail keywords that naturally have lower volume. It’s only by building a broad base of content at this level that over time you’ll start to gain topical authority and then naturally start to pick up higher volume keyword traffic.
Tip 31: Use Google Search Console to get insights on how your site is indexed by Google and what keywords drive you traffic.
Google Search Console (or GSC for short) is a fantastic resource that Google provides to website owners for free.
All you need to do is follow their simple steps to verify your ownership of a domain and away you go.
Tip 32: Get analytics setup on your website so you can see how many people use your site and how they use it.
Without an analytics package you are blind as to how many visitors you are attracting to your site and from what sources.
Analytics allows you to see which of your content is performing well and how over time it gains or loses traffic.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure, so get some analytics set up.
Tip 33: Want to know when new People Also Ask questions appear on Google for your topic, brand or keywords? Then use our Search Alert tool to be kept up to date.
The Search Alert functionality at KeywordsPeopleUse.com allows you to set seed keywords that we’ll watch automatically in Google People Also Ask for you.
When new questions start to surface we’ll automatically save them for you and let you know so you never miss a chance to jump on trending topics.
Tip 34: It’s better to start than to be perfect, launch fast and improve over time.
This is a real key principle for me. If you wait till you have something absolutely perfect then you’ll never get anything finished to the point you are ready to launch it.
Start quickly, get something going and then come back and improve it. When I started my podcast it was not anywhere near perfect, I know I’ve improved over time (and I will keep improving the more I produce) but if I was waiting to be perfect I would never have launched.
Most people get nowhere because they never just start. Don’t be most people, give yourself permission to be rubbish to start with and just get on with it!
Tip 35: Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a day, yet underestimate what they can achieve in a year. Keep at it!
This is another of my key principles I use to keep myself motivated. It can seem like a real slog on a day to day basis to get things done, and it often seems like you get less done by the end of the day than you had hoped.
However, look back over a longer period of time like a year and you will realise you actually got more done than you’d guess would be possible before you started.
The key is to keep going and rack up achievements over time.
Tip 36: Finding content ideas on your own is hard! Try using our Google Autocomplete search for a topic to find lots of ideas that match what real people are searching for.
Blank page syndrome is hard to beat by yourself, you need inspiration, that’s why I founded KeywordsPeopleUse, to help people beat that Blank Page syndrome problem.
Google Autocomplete search takes the guesswork out of deciding what content to cover for a topic.
Tip 37: Been hit by a Google Update? Don’t panic. My biggest tip is to do absolutely nothing for at least 2 weeks. Google updates take a while to roll through and traffic levels can vary a lot for a while. Wait till the dust has settled.
Google is getting better now at announcing when their major updates are taking place and crucially when they have finished rolling out.
Always wait till an update has completely rolled out before trying to even start making sense of what has happened. I have seen on many occasions sites take big hits at the start of updates then recover before the end.
It’s tough to have to wait, but it’s what you need to do.
Tip 38: When Google pre-announce an update don’t try and guess what’s going to happen and make changes in advance. Wait to see what actually happens first.
Occasionally Google will pre-announce an update, but even if that announcement sounds like it may hit your site, it’s best to wait for the update than to make changes in advance.
The only time this isn’t the case is when they are very specific about what they will be taking action on.
Tip 39: Fed up of GA4? I use clicky.com as well for an easy overview of analytics.
I have to admit I miss the old Google Analytics, it was much more accurate and easy to use compared to GA4.
I do have GA4 on all my sites, but very rarely venture in there nowadays.
I use Clicky to keep an eye on day to day and real time traffic, it’s fantastic for keeping tabs on how things are performing.
Tip 40: Site suddenly disappeared from Google? Make sure that your robots.txt file hasn’t been accidentally set to block Googlebot (and other web crawlers).
This is a somewhat frequent SEO cock-up that we’ve seen many sites make over the years.
Probably the most common way this happens is when the robots.txt for a staging site (a copy of a live website where new developments are tested, which have a robots.txt that blocks Google as you don’t want a staging site indexed) get’s accidentally copied to the live site when a site update is released.
Always check your live sites robots.txt when releasing code from staging to live servers!
Tip 41: Have your site use either www.domain.com or just domain.com and 301 redirect one to the other. Don’t have the site available on both.
This is because technically if you have the website being served from both the www and non-www version then you are duplicating every webpage and it can cause some issues for Google in deciding which version of each page it should index.
It just avoids all potential problems if you choose the one you want to be indexed and make sure any requests to the other version are 301 redirected.
Tip 42: SEO is often more an art than a science, you’ll see lots of conflicting advice out there, look for consensus.
Spend enough time with the SEO community and you’ll find that while we can agree on some things most of the time there are lots of things where agreement is harder to find.
At the end of the day you have to consume SEO content widely and try your own experiments and build your own experience.
Tip 43: Nothing beats experimenting when it comes to SEO, always try testing things, and be ready to roll it back if it doesn’t work.
You’ll always be asking yourself “what if” unless you try things. Treat everything you do as an experiment, measure the results of each experiment and decide whether to keep and move forward or roll back and try a different experiment.
Tip 44: There is no ideal keyword ratio for content.
Sometimes also referred to as Keyword Density. If you come across someone talking about keyword density and ratio as something that you need to pay attention to then my advice is to be very wary about the rest of the advice they give.
Tip 45: There is no ideal length for an article, it needs to be as long or as short as it needs to be to cover the topic of the page.
Another SEO myth is that there is a minimum, maximum or ideal length for an article on a website.
Just make any page or piece of content as long as is needed to cover what you want to achieve on that page.
Tip 46: Doing a site migration? The most important thing you can do if possible is keep page URLs the same. If not then make sure they are all 301 redirected to the new URLS.
If you change a page's URL then Google will consider it to be a brand new page, even if the content stays the same as on the original URL. This means that the page is starting from scratch again in terms of ranking.
This is why ideally you’ll keep the URL the same, even if you have moved platforms. If for some reason you can’t keep the URL the same then the next best thing is to be sure to 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL to let Google know of the change and to pass ranking signals to the new URL.
Tip 47: Don’t worry about bounce rate, some of my affiliate sites I want people to bounce off to a merchant as quickly as possible. Bouncing back to the Google SERPS from a site might be a different answer though.
Bouncing forward from your webpage to another page on site, or a third party site you are linking to, is not a bad thing, it’s often what you want people to do. It shows that you are helping people get where they want to be.
Quickly bouncing back from your site to the Google SERPS could however be seen as a negative signal, your page didn’t satisfy the users intent so they have to go back to Google to try another link.
Tip 48: “Google My Business” is now known as “Google Business Profile”
Google Business Profiles are for businesses which Google considers in-person type. Examples would be shops, pubs, restaurants, plumbers, electricians etc. Businesses that serve people in-person.
Google Business Profile helps you let Google know where your business is located, what areas you service and helps you appear in places like the local pack on Google search results.
Tip 49: Got a local business? Register with Google Business Profile (free) to get shown in the local map results.
See Tip 48 for more on why you should be considering creating a Google Business profile.
Tip 50: Always keep an eye on your competitor websites, especially when ranking updates occur, you can get insights into what is and isn’t working for them.
I spend a lot of time watching competitor websites, especially to see when they add new features or change their design or content significantly. Seeing how changes they make correlate with changes in ranking can give you some real clues as to what works (and doesn’t work) in your niche.
Keep an eye on what they are doing off-page as well, such as any PR campaigns or link building they are doing.
Tip 51: Want to quickly and easily speed up your website? Use a Content Delivery Network like Cloudflare or Amazon Cloudfront.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) cache copies of your website contents at edge locations around the world. This means that your site visitors get content served to them from the nearest edge to their physical location meaning that your site loads faster for them.
This ties in well with Tip 1, make your website as fast as possible.
Tip 52: Want to learn more about SEO and meet others in the industry? I highly recommend attending SEO conferences (like BrightonSEO) and other SEO meetups.
I’ve made many friends and great contacts from going to conferences and meetups over the years. Especially important for me as I live in a very rural location.
The network I’ve built up from these events are great for sharing hints and tips with and for getting advice when things aren’t going to plan.
Tip 53: Got a specific SEO question? Find me on twitter @channel5 and just ask!
I’m always happy to help if you have a specific question you can’t find the answer to here.
Don’t be afraid to get in touch, I don’t bite!
Tip 54: Got a manual penalty from Google? This means you’ve done something against their terms of service and have been manually penalised. It can be very difficult to get this penalty removed.
Difficult, but not impossible. You can request that a manual penalty be removed by submitting a Reconsideration Request via Google Search Console.
You are more likely to be successful if you make changes to your site so you are no longer in violation of Google's rules and also are open and honest when making your request.
Tip 55: Linking to a third party site where you gain commercially, like an affiliate linking to a merchant? Always nofollow these links.
If you have a commercial relationship of any kind with a third party site then Google considers these to be paid links.
It’s fine to have these kinds of links as long as you mark them as nofollow or sponsored, Google can then not count them as a ranking signal and neither you or the linked site will risk any penalty.
Tip 56: Want to find out how many sites are linking to your site (or any site)? Use the ahrefs backlink checker to find out.
It’s good practice to keep an eye on who is linking to your website. It helps to see what kind of content is attracting backlinks to your site and what types of pages and content are attracting links.
Look for patterns in the types of sites that are linking to you, if you discover that lots of property sites are linking to you for example, then this could give you good ideas for the type of sites to outreach to.
Tip 57: Google doesn’t use Meta Keywords, so don’t waste your time on them.
Simple. As. That.
Be very wary of anyone who tells you any different!
Tip 58: Google will sometimes use your Meta Description in the search results, sometimes it will construct its own description.
This can vary depending on the search query a user makes. It’s annoying if you’ve created what you think are great descriptions, but there’s not much you can do about it.
Google claims it does it to make better descriptions for the user based on the search query.
Tip 59: I highly recommend you use a sitemap.xml file to help Google find all your content, especially for larger sites.
A sitemap.xml should contain the URL of every page on your site that you would like Google to index.
You should link to your sitemap.xml from your robots.txt file and you can also upload it to Google Search Console (my preferred method when launching a new site).
Tip 60: Make sure your site is responsive, so that it renders well on devices of all different sizes.
This is so that your site will work well on small screens like mobile phones and tablets as well as on desktop screens.
Google will render your site on different screen sizes to test how it performs before deciding how to index and rank it.
Tip 61: 404 pages (page not found) should return a 404 header code. If they return a 200 header code this is known as a soft 404 and it’s not advisable to do this.
This is because if you return a 200 header code you are telling the search engine that the page is OK and exists.
It then risks Google looking at the page and deciding it has thin or non-valuable content, if this happens often then it could cause Google to decide your site is full of thin content and this can have a detrimental effect.
Tip 62: Prioritise quality over quantity for backlinks.
Not all backlinks are created equal. A backlink from an established site that itself has a lot of backlinks will be worth more than a link from a brand new website that has few or none of its own backlinks.
Additionally, a link from a page or site that is topically relevant to your website has additional value.
Tip 63: Be very very careful if you decide to try buying backlinks. It’s against Google's terms of service. Not that it can’t work, but just ask anyone who remembers the Google Penguin update how bad the consequences can be.
You will find lots of SEO influencers telling you that buying backlinks work and often they’ll also try to sell you backlinks as well (conflict of interest there maybe?!). They won’t often tell you of the risks of doing this.
Buying backlinks can work, for the short term, in the long term if you are lucky then Google will just discount these links and you'll have only wasted some money.
In the worst case Google will penalise or even deindex your website, then you’ll have wasted money and hurt your website.
I speak from bitter experience having been badly hit by the Google Penguin update many years ago. I haven’t bought a single backlink since.
Tip 64: Buying an expired domain that has existing backlinks can give you an easy ranking boost to start a new site with, just beware that the site wasn’t previously penalised for something.
This tip may now be dated, as Google announced in March 2024 that it now considers using expired domains to manipulate search results as expired domain abuse.
So treat this tip with extreme caution.
Tip 65: Some niches are seasonal, so traffic levels can vary a lot through the year. Have this in mind if you see traffic dropping, it could just be seasonal.
For example if you have a website that targets gardening then you’ll see natural dips in traffic as you head into autumn and winter.
At broadband.co.uk we found December was always an awful month for traffic and sales as no one wanted to switch broadband in the run up to Christmas.
January would always be our best month as people who had overspent at Christmas were looking for ways to save money on their bills by switching to a cheaper broadband supplier.
Tip 66: The weather can affect your website traffic, a sudden heatwave can drop traffic in many niches quite significantly as everyone rushes to be outside.
I’ve seen e-commerce traffic and sales drop dramatically for short periods when we have heatwaves in the UK as people decide they’d rather enjoy the sun than spend time online.
On the opposite side, if we get significant snowfall it can boost sales and traffic as people stay indoors!
Tip 67: Downtime can kill your rankings, use a service like UptimeRobot to monitor your site and alert you to problems.
Google doesn’t want to recommend a site that is often not available. Occasionally you can get away with it, but if it becomes frequent then it will hurt your rankings.
Be proactive, set up monitoring so you get alerted as soon as your site develops any issues so you can fix it ASAP.
Tip 68: Looking to find websites that might link to you? Look at your competitors backlink profile to find sites that link to sites like yours.
They’ve already shown that they are willing to link to other sites like yours, so reach out to them and see if they will also link to you.
Tip 69: Always use alt-text with images. It’s good for Google and it’s also good for people with visual impairments.
This is just good practice both for SEO and for accessibility.
For Google it’s another chance for you to reinforce what your content is about.
For the visually impaired it can be the difference between your site working for them or not.
Tip 70: Don’t neglect internal links, they help Google navigate and understand your site and real people use them as well!
You should consider that Internal links are just like backlinks from external sites, but they are ones that you control.
Use the anchor text to send a signal to Google what the webpage you are linking to is about.
They also help Google and your site users to find new and relevant content on your site.
Tip 71: Use breadcrumbs on your site to help people (and Google) navigate and understand hierarchically related pages.
Breadcrumbs work as a great way to enforce great internal linking on your site and to indicate the hierarchy and relationship between your pages.
They also help users to see quickly where on a site they are and to move around within the site.
Tip 72: Use schema markup on your site wherever you can, it helps Google understand the information on your page.
Schema Markup is structured data in a specific format that is machine readable so that Google can read and understand specific content on your webpages.
There are Schema for all sorts of entities, from Breadcrumbs (See Tip 71), people, organisations, products and much more.
You can learn more about what Schema markups are available at schema.org
Tip 73: Want to see how topics trend over time or what is trending now? Try Google Trends
What people search for changes over time. Some topics wax and wane, others are very seasonal, some are one hit wonders!
Google trends allows you to see how popular different keyword searches have been over time and to compare them to other keywords popularity over the same time period.
Tip 74: Want to share your KeywordsPeopleUse account with others? Follow this guide.
Most of our accounts allow you to share access with multiple users, great for brands and agencies that have many people involved in developing the strategy and content for websites.
Tip 75: Our graphical results are great, but make sure to click the other tabs for more data and related information.
We know from customer feedback how people love our graphical representations of keyword relationships and keyword clusters.
However to get the full picture don’t forget to explore the other tabs where even more data and insight is available!
Tip 76: Despite what some people say, it is possible for a site with really good content to naturally gain links without any outreach or buying. I’ve done it many times, it’s not always fast, but it’s safe!
This is known as organic link building, where you just let the quality and usefulness of your content be the thing that attracts other people to link to you.
It’s not always as quick as if you try to take shortcuts, but it is the safest method of link building and over time becomes the one which is hardest to beat.
Tip 77: Don’t be afraid to link to other websites when it’s relevant and makes sense for your audience.
I think many websites should be linking out to others more than they do. You’ll see that in these tips I’ve linked to many other websites where it makes sense to.
This is, if nothing else, good and helpful for your site visitors and Google wants websites to be helpful.
Tip 78: Does running Ads on Google help your search rankings? No!
The idea that running Google Ads would somehow help your organic rankings was quite a persistent SEO myth for a while.
It’s absolute nonsense of course, thankfully we don’t often hear it repeated nowadays.
Tip 79: Need to run a large number of queries for any of the KeywordsPeopleUse searches? Try our Bulk Search
A very useful feature if you need to generate huge numbers of questions really quickly.
I often run a Google Autocomplete search first to generate one to two hundred related keywords for a topic, then use these keywords as bulk search to generate many thousands of people also ask questions that really cover a topic in depth.
Tip 80: Use short, descriptive URLs.
Keywords in your URL’s help indicate to Google what a page is about as well as what the structure of a site is.
But don’t stuff keywords, make it descriptive but not overlong.
You want it so that just by reading the URL a reader could get a good idea of what the page content was going to be about.
Tip 81: Use rel=canonical to tell Google which version of any page that can be found via multiple URLs is the one that they should consider the authoritative version.
In some cases you may find that a page can be found on more than one URL. This is common on sites that use CMS’s, like Wordpress, that allow you to have pages in multiple categories.
This could lead to Google deciding it was duplicate content, and we’d rather avoid that.
Setting one version to be canonical allows you to tell Google which to use as the one to index and to treat as the authoritative version.
Tip 82: Always nofollow links that are within User Generated Content.
If you allow users to post their own content on your site (say if you had a forum on your site) and this can include links you need to tag these links as either “nofollow” or “ugc”.
This is because you want Google to know that you don’t endorse these links as a site, and it protects you should a user decide to link to a site that may harm your site.
Tip 83: If you allow any kind of User Generated Content then I strongly suggest you moderate it before allowing it to be posted.
Following on from Tip 82, the very safest way to deal with user generated content is to proactively moderate it before allowing it to be posted.
This works well for sites that allow reviews. Not so well for forums as adding in a delay for moderation would be detrimental to the site experience for your users.
Tip 84: Concentrate on Topics not individual keywords. Write about a topic and the keywords get included naturally.
Too many people obsess over individual keywords and trying to rank for them. This can lead you to focus too narrowly when producing content to your detriment.
By focusing on writing naturally on a topic and the sub-topics within you will naturally cover many more keywords and in a way that flows for your readers.
Over time this builds your site into a topical authority.
Tip 85: There is nothing wrong with old, evergreen content, but every so often give it a re-read and update anything that’s now out of date.
Many in the SEO world obsess a little too much about fresh and new content, convinced that you have to keep churning out new content all the time to stay relevant and keep ranking.
That’s really not my experience. I have sites that I haven’t added any new pages to for years, but they still rank well.
Do make sure that pages keep up to date as things change (like keeping up to date with new broadband tech on broadband.co.uk) but don’t just churn out new content all the time for the sake of it.
Tip 86: Create FAQ pages, and use KeywordsPeopleUse to find the questions people are frequently asking!
People search on Google to get answers to their questions. It’s just plain common sense to cover frequently asked questions on your site.
FAQ’s work particularly well on product pages and review pages, but pretty much any page can benefit from an FAQ section.
Tip 87: Your site should have these basic pages: “About”, “Privacy Policy”, “Terms & Conditions”, “Contact”.
The Google Quality Rater Guidelines specifically recommends that raters look for these types of pages when trying to evaluate E-E-A-T (Experience - Expertise - Authoritativeness - Trust) signals for a website.
They also add trust signals for your audience to show who you are, how you will look after their personal data and how to get in touch with you.
Tip 88: Use a content calendar to plan what content to produce and when to publish it, especially if you are working with a seasonal topic.
This is especially important if there is any kind of seasonality or time sensitivity to your site's themes.
E-commerce sites tend to have busy seasons and you’ll want your content lined up and ready before you peak.
If you cover sports then you’ll know what upcoming events you’ll need to be ready for, think big sporting events here.
Tip 89: Build on existing pages. Add new content to existing pages that rank well to make them rank for even more related terms.
Always keep an eye on existing pages that are doing well, can you improve or add to it to increase its reach even more?
It can often be easier and bring quicker results to build on existing contempt rather than starting from scratch.
Tip 90: Try and build a brand over time so you become the authority for a topic area.
Google loves brands, people love brands. By building a brand you’ll send positive signals to your customers and Google.
Your end game is to get people to think of your site when they think of a topic.
Tip 91: Are you a business with physical locations? Then add your locations to your website!
Make it easy for people to find out where your locations are and how to get to you.
If you have multiple locations, have a page for each location. Include maps, telephone numbers, opening times, what services and products are available at each location.
Tip 92: Have clear Calls To Action (CTAs) on your page so your audience knows what you want them to do next.
Every website has an end goal or goals that it wants its visitors to complete. Buy a product, download an ebook, sign up for an email list. Even if you are a display site you want people to view more pages.
Make sure on every page you have a clear call to action (or even multiple calls to action) so every site visitor knows what you want them to do next.
Tip 93: Keep track of major Google Updates at Google Search Central
This page has details of all announced Google Updates going back to 2020.
Google also makes more minor updates more frequently, but these tend not to be announced.
Tip 94: Google doesn’t just index webpages, it also ranks other document types like PDF’s, Word docs, txt files and more.
This is why it’s worth adding links to any non-webpage documents that would be valuable for people to find and you are happy to make publicly available.
PDF’s are probably the simplest and easiest to add and share if you have them.
Tip 95: Avoid Blackhat SEO techniques that try to get around Google's Terms of Service. They sometimes might work in the short run, but tend not to be sustainable over time.
Sure Blackhat techniques can and do work, but they are loopholes and Google is constantly looking to close these loopholes.
The additional downside is that once a site is discovered using blackhat techniques it’ll quickly be penalised by Google.
If churn and burn is your thing then fine, but personally I like to build for the long term.
Tip 96: Looking for content ideas? Look at what videos in your topic area are popular on Youtube.
Youtube is an underrated source of content ideas. Very few people think to look there.
As it gives publish dates and number of views of each video it’s easy to see which video subjects drive the most interest.
Tip 97: Looking to monetise an informational website? Look into Display Ad networks like Google Adsense, Mediavine, Raptive and Ezoic.
Informational websites can be the hardest to monetise directly.
Adding display adverts is easy and you don’t have to deal with individual advertisers, it’s really hassle free.
Just one word of warning, don’t overdo the amount of ads you show to the point that it becomes too intrusive for your site visitors, it will annoy them and it could start to negatively affect your search rankings.
Tip 98: Offer your audience some valuable content (like an ebook, product sample or trial) in return for their email address so you can build a relationship with them.
Building an email list of people interested in your site and topic can become a very valuable asset.
Having an email list makes it easy to launch new pages and features, you can push news out to your audience without having to wait for people to return to discover new developments.
But don’t just ask people to sign up for a newsletter as most won’t, you have to offer them something valuable in return for their email address.
Tip 99: Look into A/B testing to test different versions of a webpage to see which performs better.
You will never get a website design and page contents perfect the first time. A/B testing is where you create a new version of a page (the B version) and show this to a percentage of your visitors and see if it performs better than your original version (the A version).
Doing this you can see which performs best for you in terms of what you want people to do, such as seeing which version of a product page leads to more sales for example.
When you have a winner, make that your new default page, then think how you could improve it further and run a new A/B test.
Tip 100: Want to see how real people use your site in real time for free? Try Microsoft Clarity.
When you create a site yourself you obviously get to know it inside out and how you expect people to interact with it.
However, to know how people really interact with it you need to watch them to see what happens.
Clarity allows you to do this and actually watch people interacting with your site in real time.
Discover what does and doesn’t work for people, trust me, it’s a real eye-opener!
Tip 101: Make it easier for people to sign up to your site by letting them use their Google account to sign in.
If any part of your site requires people to create a user account then I strongly recommend allowing them to use their Google account to do so.
It makes signing up so much simpler for the user and will increase the likelihood of people creating an account with you.
When we added Google Accounts as a signup option at KeywordsPeopleUse our sign up rate almost doubled overnight!
Author:
Edd Dawson
Founder KeywordsPeopleUse
