October 29, 2023
Have you ever heard the phrase, "The best place to hide a body is on page 2 of Google."? Sure it's a corny joke marketers might use, but the stats tell the truth -> 75% of people never scroll past the first page. In this guide, we will discuss 10 practical steps you can take to improve your website's SEO. By taking actionable steps, you can help your website reach the top of the search rankings... so your future clients can actually find you!
To best describe an SEO-friendly site or webpage, it's better to compare it to one that isn't.
We have already said 75% of people never scroll past the first page. This is why SEO is important you want to be doing all you can to get on page 1 and get higher rankings. The higher the better.
Higher rankings produce more clicks and traffic to your website. More clicks turn into more calls & sales. More sales means more beach vacations for you.
This is why focussing on SEO is a great free way to market and grow your business. Next we will go into the 10 steps that make a website SEO friendly.
Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster are two free platforms made to index your website for search and provide valuable stats on how people are finding your website.
Now Google is able to send robot crawlers to track and rank your website.
The steps for setting up Bing Webmaster are the same as above.
Setting these tools up is important, but just submitting your sitemap won’t improve rankings without further optimizing your website.
Websites should have clear, easy-to-read URLs that humans can read, for example which URL is easier to read:
Clean URLs and navigation are not just for humans, they also help crawlers better understand your content.
If you include the keywords you want to rank for in your URL, it helps crawlers better understand your content.
Internal links are links from one page on your website to another page on your site. You should be including the target keyword you want to rank for in your internal link.
This is a strategy we use as an Edmonton Digital Agency. Do you see what I just did there?
Google better understands your website when using keywords for internal linking instead of having generic links like:
While not new to 2025, more searches are happening on the phone with the latest report showing 64% of searches happening on a mobile device.
Gone are the days when a nice-looking desktop site was enough and the mobile version as an afterthought. Your website should be designed and responsive for all screen sizes.
47% of people expect websites to load in under two seconds and 40% will abandon your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds (Portage CyberTech).
You need to optimize your website to load fast, to no miss out on potential customers.
Google Page Speed is a great free tool to check your current speed and it also gives suggestions on how to improve your performance.
The most common issues we see regarding slow load times are:
You may wonder what is an SSL Certificate or do you need one? SSL certificates act as a digital shield for your website, protecting your site from a variety of potential threats caused by hackers, virtual bugs, and so on.
Customers get a warning if websites are not secure, which may scare people off your website. This is a reason why SSLs are a ranking factor.
Most hosting companies include SSL certificates in your hosting package and you will know if your website has one if it has a little lock icon in the URL.
Google and Bing do not like duplicate content. For example, imagine you have three versions of the same product page:
To a human, this is clearly one page with different colour filters. But to a search engine, these can look like three separate pages with very similar content.
This causes a problem: instead of one strong page, your rankings get split across three weak ones. You end up competing with yourself.
That’s where canonical tags come in.
A canonical tag is a small bit of code that goes into the <head> of a page. It looks like this:<link rel="canonical" href="URL">
This tells Google which version of the page is the “main” one. So even if you have several versions, search engines know which one to focus on.
You can add schema to your pages to help search algorithms better understand your content and page.
Have you ever been searching for the best chocolate chip cookies and noticed a section just for recipes?
These recipes are all using page schema and more specifically recipe schema.
Schema markup can be used for: recipes, faqs, local businesses, books, movies, jobs and much more.
Adding schema allows your website to show up in a larger number of searches and perform better than a regular listing. It's easy to set up with tools like this:
https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/
Just select your schema type, fill out your information and paste the code in your website <head> tag.
Now your website is mobile-friendly, fast-loading, and meets all the technical requirements needed to rank. While these are important, content is still king.
Before creating a new page, you should ask yourself what keyword do you want to rank for. Search engines read your website like a book and look for keywords in specific sections.
You should include your target keyword in the following spots on your page:
Most of the websites in the top rankings will include their target keyword in all these spots.
If you have competitors ranking higher than you, you can use this tool to find out why: https://detailed.com/extension/.
This tool allows you to easily see websites: title, description, headings, and word count. Using this will show you why competitors outrank you and with the correct tweaks you will steal some of their clicks & rankings.
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. The more quality backlinks you have the more search engines trust your website.
Some foundational backlinks websites should have are:
Foundational links are free to get and signal to Google that your website is a trusted business. Don't just stop at these links. The top-performing sites get backlinks from places you can’t just create a free profile.
It's important that you get backlinks from trusted sites that are relevant to your business. An Edmonton web design company like us will get more value from getting links from Edmonton review websites or tech blogs than a backlink on a fitness blog.
There you have it, a 10 step guide for ranking and improving your website's SEO in 2025. SEO is a long game, and changes don’t happen overnight. Consistently posting new helpful content, getting links from trusted websites, and having a fast-loading mobile-optimized website, will give your website the best chance to rank.
If you’re a local business needing help with SEO services, reach out to us today, and we will give you a FREE SEO audit to show how your website currently ranks and compares against your competitors.
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