Be accessible.

First, before taking any other steps toward improving your SEO, it’s important to ensure your site is accessible to bots and crawlers by making your robots.txt file visible to search engines. Once this is visible, search engines will be able to crawl and index the pages of your site. Once this is done, it’s important to ensure that you’re following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These include requirements like providing alt text for images and corresponding text for any non-text content on your site like video and audio. WCAG also requires things like captions for videos, the ability for users to navigate your site using only a keyboard, and non-reliance on color, among other requirements. You can find more info about WCAG here.

Reduce your page load time.

When it comes to search rankings, page load speed is definitely a factor. One thing you can do to speed up your load time is to make sure your images not weighing down the page. You can quickly compress images before uploading them to your website using online image compression tools like: https://compresspng.com/ for png file formats and https://compressjpeg.com/ for jpg formats. Be sure to check these out to ensure your images are optimized. Additionally, you can check with your developer to ensure there are not any scripts that are weighing down your page and increasing your load time.

Communicate effectively.

Make sure you’re incorporating other forms of media (audio and video) on your site to ensure you are communicating effectively with all members of your website audience. It’s also important to make sure your call to action (CTA) is evident to your website visitors. If you are trying to solicit donations, for example, this would mean a large “Donate Now” button on your page. If you’d like visitors to fill out a form, make sure the headings on the page or the button linking to the form, indicate that this is what you want them to do. Similarly, if you’re selling a product to raise funds, make sure your button clearly states “Buy Now.” When website visitors scan your page, they should be able to easily identify the CTA to best understand what your content is about. For more information on using effective CTAs on your website, check out this post.

Make sure your site is responsive.

Beginning in the first quarter of 2018, Google introduced mobile-first indexing, meaning they started ranking websites based on the mobile version of the site, rather than the desktop version. That said, Google strongly recommends a responsive design for your site, rather than a separate mobile version, typically beginning with “m.”, which can confuse website crawlers.

Do your homework.

One extra step you can take when trying to improve your SEO is to compare your site to high ranking sites. Perform a Google search for the keywords you want to rank for and see what type of content shows up on the first page. Take a look at the top results and compare your content to what is found on these pages, and consider what you can do to your own page to provide even higher quality content than what you see on the first page of the search results.