Search engine optimisation is a major source of online visitors for many businesses, and it is arguably one of the most complex digital marketing channels to manage and implement.
This becomes especially true for larger websites used by e-commerce businesses and information sites. The more pages you have to think about, the harder it becomes.
This has become especially true since lockdown where more and more people have been online ordering goods. As such, the chances are your industry has probably become more competitive.
With this in mind, let’s examine the mission-critical elements needed to manage and SEO large websites successfully.
Bring in an SEO Agency in London
The fact is to manage and successfully SEO a large website, you need to have professionals doing it for you. A good, experienced SEO agency based in London will be able to deploy best practices to keep your site Google-friendly and sitting high in the search engine results pages, which is where you want it.
To SEO a large website it is a full time, ongoing job. If your businesses is successful, you will need a full-time competent team such as Verkeer, a SEO Agency based in London to do this. Even if you know what Schema Markup and Canonicalization are you still have to implement it correctly. This is particularly difficult on larger websites.
Search Engine Optimising Audits
One of the key areas that often reveals issues that could potentially become problems is conducting a robust SEO audit. Like audits on other parts of the business, this is designed to uncover areas of search engine optimisation that need improvement and or fixing.
With Google becoming ever more stringent in terms of what is acceptable and best practice, something innocuous could turn into a serious problem. A worst-case scenario would see you removed from search pages. This happens more frequently than you would think.
In addition, an audit will reveal how you measure up to your competition. Often, you will find you can mirror a successful competitor strategy to make you a more competitive player in your industry.
Thorough Keyword Research
Keywords drive SEO, especially SEO for larger websites. If you haven’t changed your target keywords for a while, there is more than a strong possibility that some will be out of date, new ones would have appeared that are not in your strategy, and possibly user trends would not have been factored into your marketing.
Keyword research should be conducted regularly as this allows you to keep pace with trends. Not optimising your keywords not only means you’re missing out on search traffic, but the context between your search engine result and landing page may be broken, resulting in fewer conversions.
Mobile SEO is the New Normal
Google’s move to mobile-first has not been greeted by overwhelming love by the SEO community. Some have cited that it is the end of the beautiful website as everything has to operate well on the small screen.
Now, should your site not work well on a small screen it isn’t going to do very well in search results. Today, you should ensure you have a mobile-first design. i.e. it works brilliantly well on an Android or iPhone and is fast to load.
It should be responsive, i.e. adapt to screen size and not be an m-dot website due to duplicate content issues. Again, the services of a good SEO agency in London are vital here.
Make Your Site is Crawlable
There is quite a lot of work needed to ensure your site is crawlable. It goes without saying extra care is needed when conducting SEO on a large website. A few broken links, no sitemap, architecture not quite right and 404 errors and all kinds of problems can occur.
Poor administration of robot.txt can make the difference between search engines crawling and indexing your site or making it invisible to Google’s bots. To be clear, if your site can’t be crawled, it isn’t going to appear in search results and cost you significantly in all kinds of ways.
Indexing for SEO Glory
It is very easy to make heinous errors in your SEO setup that can have a severe impact on your site. For example, not identifying trailing slash issues on your canonicalised pages can cause all kinds of indexing problems.
Relying on Fetch as Google and not submitting a sitemap again generates issues. Severe ones. All of these things which seem insignificant may prevent your site from being indexed and from that point it really is game over.
Content is King
‘Content is King’ has been true from day one of the internet, and it is still true decades later. At all times, strive to create content that is useful, informative, and engages your target audience. Mix things up and use video where you can as more and more people are using their phones, and research shows that video, not words work well on a small screen.
Getting your SEO right is essential. As such, get the SEO pros in to ensure your large website earns your business and hard work Google love!
