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:



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.