For the latest Smart Cookies Breakfast Club,  SEO wizard Jon Payne (Technical Director – Noisy Little Monkey) shared his top tips on mastering the ART of SEO.

ART stands for Architecture, Relevance and Tech. He took us through how your website’s architecture should be optimised, the process you can follow to make your content super relevant to your potential customer when they search, and how to check and improve your tech stack to ensure Google loves your site.

You can watch the replay below or read on for a summary. Jon listed all relevant links to tools from his talk in this handy Twitter thread.

Architecture

The way your page is structured is a vital part of SEO. There are key pieces of your webpage you should focus on getting your keywords in for it to rank:

• The page title
• In the slug
• Your H1 headline
• Image alt text
• H2 headlines
• Body text (without spamming!)

Relevance

It’s all well and good creating content, but how do you ensure it’s found by your potential customers? If you know what they’re searching for/asking the web, then you know what content to create. There are a number of tools you can use to find these golden nuggets of information.

• Google suggested searches – You know when you type something into Google, and it shows you other, similar searches? That’s Google using real human data to show you what other people are searching for. You can then look at all of those suggestions, see who ranks for them and assess whether it makes sense for you to create content in that space to attract people to your site.
• Answer the Public. Many SEO tools suggest searches based on Google Ads data – i.e. stuff other people are bidding on. You want to find terms that have no or low bids. ATP shows you questions relating to your chosen topic that are commonly searched for. This gives you potential things to write about and tells you problems your potential customers are having that are related to products or services you sell.
• Majestic.com: Google determines relevance by understanding who links to your website and how trusted those external sites are. Majestic.com spiders all the pages Google does, and shows you who links to you and how relevant to your industry they are.

Tech

Optimising your tech stack in a way that Google loves is a huge part of ranking in those highspots. Key areas to focus on are:

• Sitemap: Go to yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. This is what search engines will immediately look for so make sure it exists and make sure that in it you have a link to your sitemap.
• Performance: Look at key pages on your website using Lighthouse. Make sure that your performance score is high – above 75 and up to 80 or 90 if you can. Lighthouse will list technical issues on those pages –  to improve performance you can send the information over to your web developer for fixing.
• Google Search Console: Log in and check your core web vitals. See how many poor/bad urls you have that need improvement. Fix your core web vitals, and you will rank higher.
• Service pages: Make sure your pages respond the way they should eg yourwebsite.com/kevin-bacon should bring up a 404 page. Using the Redirect Path extension from Ayima will tell you if it’s a 404 or an ok 200. Google does not like ok 200s!
• Javascript: Test whether your site can run with JavaScript turned off. If it can’t, this is a problem for Google! Get on to your web developers for a fix.

And that should get you on your way to mastering the ART of SEO! A big thank you to Jon for a great session – you can find out more about Jon on the Noisy Little Monkey website, follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Why not join us at our next Smart Cookies Breakfast Club session? Bitesize chunks of top quality content to help you take your business to the next level. All before 9 am!