In the last part, I'll give you five quick tips for working with websites that are helpful for your on-page quality and search engine optimization. These are about working with structured data, multilingualism, the unformatted insertion of texts, texts from legal notice and privacy policy generators and the search functions in page source code mode.
- Working with structured data:
There is a lot of information on websites that you can also provide as structured data. This makes it even easier for Google to display your information in special snippets. Use structured data and make sure that you stick to the exact way Google wants it to be integrated.
https://developers.google.com/suche/docs/appearance/structured-data/suche-gallery?hl=de
https://search.google.com/test/rich-results - Multilingualism:
We ourselves are also about to make our most important project TutKit.com multilingual. Here, too, we set the conditions in the development briefings to adhere almost slavishly to Google's recommendations. We want SEO success in many other languages too, so we pay close attention to how Google wants a multilingual version of a website.
https://developers.google.com/suche/docs/specialty/international?hl=de - Insert texts unformatted:
Especially when editing text on subpages and in blogs, it happens that you simply copy and paste text from another document. Get into the habit of always pasting without formatting. You can do this with the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V. This is important so that you don't bring any external style information into your websites. Once you've got used to Ctrl+Shift+V, it's best never to paste anything else. - Texts from generators for imprint or data protection:
You may also be familiar with legal texts from legal notice and data protection generators being output as text and HTML variants according to your configuration. The headings are usually defined as H1 and H2. We change these H tags, especially for one-pagers, so that this information is not relevant for SEO. So use the styles from the headings, but these are then pseudo-headings because they are based on span tags. By the way: on multi-page websites, we like to set legal text subpages such as terms and conditions, imprint and data protection to noindex so that the typical warning letters no longer find our pages with certain formulations that are queried via Google. This is simply a preventative measure in case a formulation becomes the subject of a warning at some point. You should also not add an H tag to every product in product overviews in online stores if you have a lot of products in the list. It is better to identify products with other tags such as Span or Div. - Search function in page source text mode
If you edit texts in the backend of your website and sometimes insert blank lines, make sure that this does not result in empty h, p or div tags. Switch to code view or use the search function (Ctrl+F) in the page source mode of your browser to find empty tags.
What was the result in the SERPs?
The explanations of our search engine optimization have given you an insight into what we value in the search engine optimization of our own projects and our customer websites. The previous explanations actually cover how we go about it.
We carried out an intensive SEO sprint with our online store back in 2018. The Google Search Console shows us that the visibility of our store has increased by an incredible 50% since we started our on-page optimization. This means we have significantly more impressions - i.e. impressions on Google, which tells us that more customers are finding our search entry. The data from Google Analytics also tells us that we have seen some extreme spikes in daily visitors to the store after the optimization, which we have not achieved in the last 3 years.
We started the SEO sprint for TutKit.com in April 2022 and needed around three weeks to get the SEO score to over 95%. Around 2-3 months after completing the SEO sprint, we noticed how our work was suddenly bearing fruit and we were able to increase our online visibility and click behavior by 400-500%.
For a few months now, we have noticed that we have plateaued again. On the OnPage side, we have done our homework. We can therefore only support better rankings for existing content by continuing to focus on content marketing and off-page optimization. Alternatively, we have decided to make the portal multilingual, as our content (except for the tutorials) is also of interest to users abroad. As soon as TutKit.com is multilingual and the 1,500 German pages are duplicated in different languages, we expect the next boost in the Search Console. There may be a short update from me on this script in which I report on our experiences with SEO for multilingual websites.
Conclusion: So why is SEO important for you?
Here are some reasons why SEO is important:
Improved search engine rankings: SEO aims to improve a website's position in the organic search results of search engines like Google. When a website ranks higher in search results, it is more likely to be found and clicked on by potential visitors.
Increasing organic website traffic: Effective SEO can increase the organic traffic of a website. By using relevant keywords and phrases in the content and metadata, a website can be found more easily for certain search queries. More traffic means more potential visitors, customers and conversions.
Better user experience: SEO also involves optimizing the usability of a website. A well-optimized website is faster, more user-friendly and mobile-optimized. This improves the experience of visitors and increases the likelihood that they will stay on the website longer and return.
Competitive advantage: In highly competitive online markets, effective SEO can mean the difference between success and failure. When a website ranks higher in search results than the competition, it gains more visibility and can attract potential customers.
Long-term investment: SEO is a long-term strategy. While it takes time and effort to achieve good rankings, the investment can pay off in the long run. Unlike paid advertising, organic rankings persist as long as the SEO strategy is maintained.
It is important to note that SEO is a complex discipline that is subject to constant changes and adjustments. Search engine algorithms are regularly updated to improve the quality of search results. Therefore, SEO requires continuous work to keep up with current best practices and maintain a website's online visibility in the long term.
I would like to take away two important lessons from our SEO measures in any case and recommend them to all marketing managers:
OnPage optimization and the measurement of OnPage quality via tools such as Seobility should be firmly implemented in the workflow during a launch or relaunch under quality assurance (quality management & testing). We have always made sure that customer projects are delivered with extremely good performance. It goes without saying that our developers program according to modern web standards. Nevertheless, it is people who program, not machines. And not everyone who edits content for the website is also a proven SEO expert. We ourselves were surprised at the mediocre results after the first crawl for some projects - both our own and customer projects. What we have learned is that both our own and our customer projects are checked via Seobility in order to guarantee very good on-page quality before going online.
SEO is a constant process . Google changes and expands its ranking factors. Website operators have to readjust. It is good and sensible to regularly monitor your own website - both internally and externally. For example, Seobility automatically crawls the website every week and reports the results and ranking changes to us via email. This ensures that, on the one hand, everything is still in order due to new content or website changes and, on the other hand, that everything on the website meets Google's current requirements. Because we realize that there is a lot we didn't know about SEO. And there is probably a lot more we should know. So it makes sense to use an SEO tool like an external consultant who regularly puts everything through its paces, both technically and in terms of content.
Search engine optimization remains a constant companion for us that needs to be monitored. What five years ago was often considered mediocre in the editing workflow for website projects is now an essential part of our daily activities. With the first SEO sprints, you can work on the omissions of previous years. The processing steps grow as a result, yes, but success also increases exponentially at times, which is why it's important to keep at it. And as soon as errors creep in again when creating new products or Google has added new ranking factors, our SEO software sounds the alarm.
We have grown enormously with our customer and in-house projects, have been able to test live how our measures turn into noticeable and sustainable success and have reached a whole new level in the field of SEO optimization. Now we need to pave the way from placements to actual conversions, because the best placement is of course of no use in the end if nobody clicks on the link and ends up buying. This was also a decision to integrate the store function for individual content at TutKit.com, because despite the growth in online visibility and visitors, we couldn't convince many people to take out a subscription. From this perspective, you also remain reactive because you are much more concerned with causes and effects. Stay on the ball and be successful. I hope this script has given you some encouragement to do the same.
