My 5 Quick SEO tips for Living Made Easy

Living made easy is a website developed by UK non-profit organisation the Disabled Living Foundation (DLF), a charity offering free, impartial advice and information from their website about daily living equipment and other aspects of independent living for people with disabilities.

The DLF’s Head of Marketing and Fundraising, Steve, reached out to me through a friend at work to get some SEO advice and kindly offered to shout me lunch in exchange for a hand. As much as I’m excited about meeting up for lunch and discussing SEO, things are a little busy right now and I’ve been looking for inspiration for a blog post for more than a week. So, I suggested we look at his site together, do a little research and offer up some actionable tips for them to implement via a blog post. That way, I have something to write about and we can get the DLF more advice from the wider SEO community through the comments section on this blog.

Here are my 5 SEO tips for Living Made Easy. In total I had an hour or so to spend on this but I’m sure there could be more advice available from a wider group of SEO’s – if you like what you read, and would like to contribute, then please leave your comments below.

1) Do some detailed keyword research covering generic terms and try to get a hold on long tail search behavior by category

As far as the generic, head terms available for traffic generation go, it looks like the following terms are the ones to go for (LSV – Local Search Volume on Google Keyword Tool)

-          disability aids (9900 LSV)

-          disabled equipment (6600 LSV)

-          disabled aids (1900 LSV)

These would be ideal to put on the homepage, and we’ll cover that later. Looking at keywords related to an activity, eg: Bathing, it became clear the top 4 related terms by search volume in the UK looked like this:

-          bath aids (1000 LSV)

-          bathing aids (590 LSV)

-          bath aid (320 LSV0

-          bathing aid (58 LSV)

These search categories (and sub-categories) are relevant terms to apply to what I’d call “category” pages, like this one and with adequate page titling, relevant copy and meta code, the site would be much more capable of getting traffic for these terms.

What I did notice is a slight disconnect between the category page names and the actual search phrases likely to generate traffic to the pages. For example, this page currently titled “stairs” might be much better suited to being optimized for “mobility aids” – that term has a search volume locally of 8100 according to Google.

2) Optimise the homepage for your top 3 terms (on page and meta)

As we’ve identified the top 3 terms need implementing in 3 key areas on the homepage:

-          Meta code

-          Page heading

-          Body copy

Here’s the meta code that could be implemented on the homepage:

<title>Practical advice on disability aids & disabled equipment - Living made easy</title>
<meta name="description" CONTENT="Living made easy is an impartial advice and information website about disability aids & disabled equipment and other aspects of independent living. ">
<meta name="keywords" content="disability aids, disabled equipment, disabled aids, living made easy“>

And this is my suggestion for the homepage title and copy:

It’s important to have your main keywords feature in the page heading and body copy on the page, though according to the search ranking factors at SMX advanced panel, H1’s are less important (at least SEOmoz found less of a correlation between the use of H1′s and influence over rankings) – make the change from H2 to H1 if you have the time, but don’t sweat if you can’t.

3) Optimise the category pages for more relevant (or more searched for) phrases and link internally using the appropriate anchors

So earlier we looked at the keywords for the bathing category page. My suggestion would be optimize the page title, body copy and meta to reflect those keywords a little better:

Similarly, internal links pointed to this page could read “bathing aids” instead of “bathing”:

That text on the homepage could be made to link, too.

There were a few category pages that need a rethink. “Stairs”, for example could be considered “mobility” – which has a much higher search volume available.

4) Optimize the body text link from the homepage of http://www.dlf.org.uk/ to http://www.livingmadeeasy.org.uk to target your strongest keyword

The parent site to Living Made Easy (dlf.org.uk) has much larger numbers of links and therefore, a lot of authority. By changing the link to http://www.livingmadeeasy.org.uk that reads:

impartial advice about all types of daily living equipment for adults…

to

impartial advice about all types of disability aids for adults…

Using the body copy link, we could possibly squeeze out a better ranking for our main, targeted term.

5) Take every PDF guide from pages like this and convert it to a proper html based page.

It’s a fact that search engines are just better at indexing and ranking HTML over PDF. Recreate your PDF pages as HTML, but do keep those PDF’s live at the same URLs. They may have picked up a few links themselves…

Got some advice for the DLF? I know they’d be really grateful, as would I for your contributions.