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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Understanding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to increase the likelihood of your website being seen and indexed by search engines.

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What is SEO marketing?

Search engines, such as Google or Bing are the main way people find websites. Google is the biggest search engine by far, although most search engines work in similar ways. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the name given to the process of increasing the likelihood your website will be seen and indexed (appear in search results) by search engines.

How to use Google Search Console

There are many different tools you can use to analyse how visible your site is to search engines - one of the most useful is Google Search Console. This powerful (and free) tool charts data about your website – including traffic, keywords, popular links, broken links, visitor statistics, user locations and browser types, as well as more sophisticated information such as Core Web Vitals and page experience. It also helps you make sure your site map is error free and previews how your website will appear in search engine listings.

Sophie Ballinger, Eureka! The National Children’s Museum

VisitBritain/Eureka!

Girl with Downs Syndrome, imitating an image on the wall in museum

“We initially worked with a specialist agency, Climbing Trees, on our website SEO. As the set-up and requirements can change with SEO, Google Ads and Google Ad Grants, we can trust them to keep on top of developments and advise us.”

“Unlocking a small monthly budget to pay for their specialist support makes sense, as the process of setting it up and maintaining it is a bit overwhelming if it isn’t something you do regularly. As a charity, we are eligible for the Google Ad Grants programme, which provides free Google advertising.”

Sophie Ballinger, Eureka!

Schema markup

An advanced approach to optimising content is to use Schema markup. This means ‘tagging’ your content with specific terms to help search engines understand what the content is about. Known as ‘structured data’, this is a more technical aspect of SEO. For more information see Google Developer’s Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search.

Find out more about paid search advertising and pay-per-click (PPC).

SEO checklist

  1. Read as much as you can about SEO – there is lots of useful advice available online.
  2. Install Google Analytics to monitor who is visiting your site and who you need to target your content towards.
  3. Use Google Search Console to make sure your site is verified and preview how it appears in search listings.
  4. Slow sites can lose visitors. Find out how fast your site is. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights
  5. Consider consulting with a specialist SEO company for support.