Here is Adclick Africa’s SEO Checklist for better business in 2022.
Review your setup
Your Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics should be set up, sitemap submitted and website indexed. Check your SEO plugins and installations. Double-check your setup to ensure you have these basics in place or take advantage of Adclick Africa’s Free SEO audit offer here.
Technical SEO points to check
Check for broken links across your site. Correct your orphan pages, reduce the number of redirects and ensure you have no duplicate sites showing. Remember to consider your user’s experience on your mobile site and more importantly, your loading speeds.
Conduct a website health audit to assess your on-page SEO
Health audits help to understand the overall health and performance of your website, providing you with an overview of your backlinks and detailed information about your website pages. Key to this is your on-page SEO (internal) and referring domains (external). While Google may not always reveal its algorithmic secrets, Adclick Africa’s Free SEO Audit also includes a Website Health Audit and two additional SEO reports.
Do your keyword research
Start with refining the basics. Using the tools available identify the keywords you should rank for pertaining to your offering and look at what your competitors are doing. If you aren’t ranking for the right terms, your website traffic won’t convert at the rate that it could.Google is removing fluff from title tags so avoid keyword stuffing.
Slow internet and loading speed will impact SEO performance in South Africa
Slow internet speeds will affect your SEO if the general public is accessing the network through slow connections. The first point of call is to check your hosting provider and where your domain is sitting.
When it comes to loading speeds, there will always be factors that are out of your control especially for countries like South Africa, and others with similar telecommunication challenges. If you only have local traffic, use a local hosting provider to avoid latency or delays.
A slow-loading website impacts your Google rankings and could result in higher bounce rates and lower website conversions.
Here’s a few things you can do to help your loading speed:
- Compress videos and imagery.
- Try to keep consistency in terms of page layouts.
- Location and setup of hosting provider.
- Clean and compress your code.
- Activate browser caching.
- Implement a Content Delivery System for global organisations.
Optimise your website according to Google’s Core Web Vitals
According to Google, “Core Web Vitals is a specific set of metrics site owners should focus on when optimizing for user experience.” They have developed a set of measurables you can use to ensure you are delivering a better all-round user experience on the web.
It is still quite technical even for the most tech-savvy individual and professional guidance and assistance is recommended.
For best results work with Google Certified Partners
While there are multiple tools you can use to truly measure, gauge and optimise your website. Save yourself time by contacting our experts at Adclick Africa. We are Google certified partners who can effectively audit your sites, assess the core web vitals and implement the SEO changes you need to ensure organic digital performance and growth in 2022.