5 Quick SEO Wins to Boost Your Website's Reach Organically

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is one hell of a deep subject, and far too much to cover in a single blog post. When I was first building my portfolio – the very one you’re looking at now – I struggled with finding concrete SEO-related information that would actually help me to boost my website’s reach organically.

The Internet is packed full of guides telling us how important the long game of SEO is, how you have to churn out hundreds and hundreds of blog posts before you’ll see even the tiniest hint of boosted traffic. And whilst some of that is true – you do have to put in the work – there are a handful of things you can do in five minutes to put you on the right path.

So in this guide, I wanted to list those quick, five-minute wins you can do right now!

Set up website analytics

With it fielding an estimated 5.6 billion searches a day, Google is the biggest search engine on the Internet. And with all these searches is a plethora of data for what users are searching for, how long they’re spending on websites, and much more.

If you don’t already have it set up, spend a few minutes hooking up your website to Google Analytics. This will give you tonnes and tonnes of data detailing what people are doing when they visit your website, including how long they spend on certain pages, what they searched to get there, and much more.

With access to this data, you can make positive changes to your website, based on data-driven decisions.

Actionable Advice: Set up Google Analytics for your website.

Add links to existing blog content

Google (other search engines are available) understands web pages based on the content that they contain. Search engines will look at the text and determine what the subject of that page is. They’ll also see what pages link to it, and what other pages it links to.

It’s these links that we want to focus on.

Adding both internal and external links to your blog posts helps to inform search engines what the content of your website is about, by giving them extra context to work with.

It’s for this reason that many blog posts you read – this one included – will include plenty of links to internal and external content.

Actionable Advice: Go through your existing blog posts and add relevant links to both internal and external content.

Grab yourself some backlinks

Backlinks are exactly what they sound like, links that point back to your website. Think about a tweet that asks the reader to head to a blog to learn more about a subject. The link that’s embedded in the tweet is a backlink.

The more backlinks you have, sites like Google will see your website as being more valuable. That may sound like you can just go forth and tweet endless links to your blog. Sadly that’s not how it works.

Backlinks are judged on something called domain authority. Essentially, this means that the more respected a website is, the more valuable Google will judge a backlink from it to be. For example, a link from BBC News is much more valuable than a link from a small, unknown cookery blog. You can learn more about how backlinks work here.

Actionable Advice: Create and plan share-worthy content. This is why I create infographics – they’re much more likely to be shared than a regular blog post.

Add alt text

Alt, or alternative, text should be present on all your images. This is for two reasons: Firstly, they allow visually impaired visitors of your site to fully understand what’s going on on the page. And second, they give you the chance to provide additional context for search engines to better understand your page’s content.

A good rule of thumb to follow is that if the image is vital to the context of the page’s content, it needs alt text. If an image is simply decorative, like a section divider, alt text isn’t required. However, it’s still a good idea to include something there.

Actionable Advice: Go through your website to find images. If they don’t have any alt text, add it in. Make sure to be relevant to the context of the page the image appears on.

Check for broken links

A broken link can be damaging to how your website is perceived by visitors. If they click on a link expecting to see content they’re interested in, but are instead taken to the dreaded 404 page, that’s a problem.

Luckily, fixing broken links is quite a simple process, and there’s a tonne of tools to help us do it. My personal favourite is the Broken Link Checker from ahrefs. Just throw in your domain and it’ll show you all the broken links that appear both on your website and external platforms. Then all you need to do is open them up and fix the URLs. Easy!

Actionable Advice: Locate your website’s broken links and get to fixin’!

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