Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation is a very important aspect of your website and it determines whether or not a page is found in organic lists and how highly it's ranked for relevance and how much credibility search engines give to your website pages.

Accessibility

In addition to playing a very important part in the overall optimisation of the website for the benefit of search engines, accessibility also makes your webpage inclusive of users with disabilities or technological limitations allowing them to have the same fully immersive experience as other users.

The rest of this guide will focus on SEO techniques in particular. You should read and follow the guidance given in our Accessibility guide.

SEO is a very effective way to increase traffic to your webpage but it suffers from diminishing returns, so do not overthink it.

Most of the benefit tends to come from knowing what your page wants to communicate and roughly what users are searching for, and linking those two things together. Then remove the words that have low impact.

For example; in the UK in 2022, changing the word 'review' to 'report'  would increase search impressions by 300%. While 'analysis', 'study' or 'survey' would increase impressions by 320%-350%. Most of the benefit comes from simply changing the word 'review'.

Keywords

Target keywords for an individual page should be incorporated into the meta description and within the page content. If someone is convinced to visit your page because of the search page meta description, the same description that displays in organic search results, and that page delivers what has been promised, you have a winning page.

Focus on primary keywords that people are actually searching for that are relevant to your content. Use this dashboard tool to learn what search terms people are looking for against how your pages are performing for them. Are relevant pages being found for keywords you would expect? Are pages attracting the correct or wrong audience?

Reference the User Guide inside the tool to understand how to use it and the terminology. The digital team is happy to provide training, please contact us to arrange a training session for you and your team.

Long-tail keywords are terms that are more specific. If you use more specific keywords in your content or your website you increase the likelihood to receive more qualified visitors to your site.

LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing) are keywords that are related to your primary keyword. They are not synonyms but homonyms (similar in meaning) and will help search engines understand what your content is about.

Tools to help you discover keywords and phrases

Gemini

Gemini is a Chat GPT tool, there are lots of variants out there, use your preferred one. Ask a question for example; "Give me keywords for this web page "yourpageurl.com". Or paste in a section of text for a page that is not live yet inside the quotation marks.

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is another great free tool available to help you learn what phrases related to your primary keywords are being searched for. Limited to 3 daily searches on the free account.

Website SEO Checker

One final free tool you can use is Website SEO Checker. Enter the page url and the keyword/s you want your page to come up for. It will run a check on your page and give you an SEO score along with Errors and Warnings you should address to improve results for the page.

If you get warnings for slow load speeds check out the section on page load speeds for tips to fix this and review our page load speed guide.

Once you have spent some time researching what keywords and phrases people are searching for that are relevant to what your page is about, the next thing is to include those keywords and phrases in the content of the page. 

It's important to not use the same keywords over and over again, known as "stuffing", as this will be seen as "cheating" by search engines and the page/website will be discredited. 

Instead, you must use those "long-tail keywords" and "latent semantic keywords" we talked about already to help the search engine robots understand what the page is about and also keep the content suitable for human reading.

Keyword volume checker

Once you have a small collection of keywords check how often those keywords are searched for. You are looking for keywords that are searched for at least 50 average monthly click volume.

You also want to avoid keywords with very high competition as well. Don't be too broad with your keyword terms, this will only lead to high impressions with low CTR which will not help the page ranking.

Optimise meta title, meta description, meta keywords, heading and subheadings

Sometimes, reducing bounce rates is about aligning expectations. If a page's meta title, meta description, and page URL don’t match what it delivers, visitors will leave immediately, resulting in a "bounce". High bounce rates on a page can be an indication of a poorly performing page, meaning people leave without spending time or interacting with the page in any way at all.

Be sure to include primary keywords in the Meta title, Meta description, page title, and subheadings. These all carry weight and give search engines like Google a strong indicator of what the page is about. All these items should be aligned.

In Umbraco you can find the relevant sections under the META INFO SEO Tab and OVERVIEW tab.

In Engaging Networks pages you should write a descriptive customised PUBLIC TITLE (this will be the equivalent of the meta title )and a short summary about the campaign or appeal in the NOTES section (this will be the equivalent of the meta description) which can be found in the PAGE SETTINGS.

Meta title

• All meta titles need to be unique from page to page within a site.
• The length should be no more than 70 characters (space included and minus the character count of the Meta suffix). 
• The meta title tag should contain target keywords.
• Use modifiers in your meta title.

Modifiers are descriptive words that are used with primary keywords. This lets search engines know to return the most relevant web pages that contain related content. Some examples of modifiers are titles that start with “how-to”, “solutions”, “best”, “guide to”, “of the year” or “review of”.

Meta description

A meta description is a short paragraph of text under the result title which is used as a preview in search results. This should be up to 160 characters long.

Google may, or may not decide to use your description and may even alter it. Nonetheless, this is one of the places you want to pay attention to as Google will use it when trying to understand what your page is about.

The description given should also be appealing to actual readers that are skimming the search engine result pages.

The Meta Description can be similar or the same as the summary text in the Overview tab of Umbraco or the Notes section in Page Settings for Engaging Networks pages.

Meta Keywords

In Umbraco pages, insert keywords for the page into the Meta Keywords field in the Meta Info tab. This helps with our internal site search functionality (i.e. when visitors use the search functionality on our ciwf domain sites).

Page title and subheadings

The H1 is generated from the page title, there should only be one on the page. You can give the page title one name and provide an alternative name for display in the navigation menu.

When adding content you should use sub-headings (H2, H3, H4 etc) to break up content. You should not add any H1 titles to the content of the page as there should only ever be one H1 title.

It's important to structure headings correctly. Use sub-headings to introduce different sections of the content. Think of H2 subheadings like the chapters of a book. Those individual sections might also use more specific sub-headings (H3, then H4, etc.) to introduce sub-sections. You can not skip headings, you can't have an H3 before you have had an H2, since the H3 would be a sub-section of H2 and so on.

Search engines deem sub-headings and page titles as important parts of the content and are clear signals as to what the page is about.

They should contain keywords or related keywords that are later confirmed in the paragraphs below. 

Keep in mind to write always for the human reader and use headings that help your visitors to navigate your page and break out the content into easy-to-read sections.

It will take some time for any changes you make to optimise your page to take effect. Check the page again in a few weeks and keep an eye on analytics performance. 

Keep content fresh

Website pages need to be continuously updated and kept current. Adding new content, re-publishing content with a fresh image, or a few tweaks to some words are simple easy ways to refresh the page.

Always ensure the content is still relevant to today's world and ever-changing political arena and society all tell Google that this page/site is still active.

Write Substantial Content

Try to make pages contain a good amount of informative content. A minimum target amount of high-quality words to aim for is about 1000 - 3000 words to give the page a good complexity score. Content should be unique and not be duplicated or copied from other website pages.

Formatting

Use formatting styles to help break content up into clear sections that highlight the key points. Use bullets and numbered lists to draw out key points. Search engine robots favour these.

Asking and answering questions is a good way of presenting information when appropriate. Users will often ask questions when searching for information in a search engine. If the search engine can find pages listing those questions with answers this will help the page achieve a high rank.

Links

As mentioned earlier links are a very important part of SEO as well as creating a good user experience. Pages linked to from outside sources, that are relevant to the content of your website pages, are very valuable. These are usually referred to as backlinks.

Linking out to related credible sources is also important. However, you want a good balance and don't want to link out too much. Links to external sources should always open in a new tab so visitors can easily return to the page they were reading with us.

Linking internally from one page to another driving visitors through a logical journey ending with an opportunity to complete one or more of our key goals will help you to achieve a good return on investment.

Page Load Speed

Please refer to the Site Speed Guide to optimise your website pages for faster load times. The longer a page takes to load the less likely a user will stick around to view it and search engines will penalise for slow load speeds.

Using an image compressor and sizing images to the component's dimensions before upload will improve page load times on Engaging Networks pages in particular.

Site Improve

Using Site Improve will help you to maintain your Umbraco website pages, keep on top of accessibility and SEO issues and ensure that users always have a good experience by not coming across broken links, miss-spelling etc.

This is a very user-friendly tool with Quality Assurance policies already set up on our websites. Make time to log into your website once a week for an hour.

The digital team are happy to provide training and best practice for using these tools, please raise a Sales Force case for us to arrange a training session for you and your team

The key things to be checking on a weekly basis are:

• Quality Assurance > Links >
  • Pages with broken links
  • PDF's with broken links (prioritise the PDFs that get hits)
  • Links to Unsafe Domains (there should be very little of these)
• Quality Assurance > Spelling > Pages with Misspellings or words to review
• Policy > My Policies >
  • Broken Media Files
  • Homepages missing alt text
  • Images missing alt attribute
  • External links that don't open in a new tab
  • Links to documents that don't open in a new tab
  • Internal links with utm tracking
  • HTTP mixed content on HTTPS pages (all links should use the HTTPS extension which signals a secure website link)
  • Short words repeated in succession (looking for typo repeated words)

Track and measure results

When you have spent time optimising your website pages use analytics to discover the impact that your changes had. It can take some time to see results so don't expect an overnight change give it about 10 days before making judgments.

Site Improve offers some good high-level analytics information, while Google Analytics is great for very detailed information and data. The Digital Team has also created a performance tool. Data here is taken from GA4 and displayed in various ways to help make analysing key pieces of data easier to interpret. 

• Select the country site or sites you want to study under the "Country" tab.
• Set your date range, the default is last 90 days. Data is gathered from October 2022 when the cookie policy changed. 
• Select which page types you want to look at, ciwf domain pages/action pages/donation pages etc under "Hostname"
• Under "Channel" define what traffic source you wish to study

The digital team are happy to provide training and best practice for using these tools, please contact us by raising a Sales Force with a training session request for you and your team.

There is also a glossary tab to help you with terminology references.

Checklist

Download a copy of this handy checklist when working on content for your website pages. Please view it in the desktop app, not in the web browser as the checkboxes don't work in the browser app.