099: How to Improve Your Website’s SEO and Accessibility with Simple Tweaks

In this episode, Jules White carries out a live website and SEO audit with Suzanne from Inclusive Communication, uncovering simple, actionable ways to improve her site’s visibility, accessibility, and clarity.

Jules identifies quick wins that can make a big difference - from adjusting font sizes in the navigation menu for better readability, to tightening up homepage messaging so visitors instantly understand what the business does and why it matters. They also explore how to make the most of trust signals like reviews, improve heading structures for both SEO and accessibility, and ensure the right pages are appearing in Google’s index.

You’ll hear practical tips on using tools like Google Search Console and the AIOSEO Chrome plugin to spot technical issues, plus why refining page titles and descriptions can strengthen how Google understands your site.

Key Takeaways:

• Clarity Above the Fold: Your homepage’s top section should instantly show what you do, why it matters, and the action visitors should take.
• Navigation Matters: Increase font size and spacing for accessibility and user experience, especially on mobile.
• Trust Signals: Collect and showcase reviews on your website and relevant industry platforms.
• Structure for Success: Use a clear heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3) for better SEO and screen reader accessibility.
• Control What Google Sees: Use Search Console to check indexed pages, fix unwanted results, and set clear titles and descriptions.
• Think Like Your Visitor: Make the customer the hero of your website messaging, focusing on their problems and transformed results.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Google Analytics & Search Console Setup Course – step-by-step guidance for setting up and using these free tools from Google.
• Book a Power Hour – get tailored, actionable advice to improve your website’s SEO and performance.
• Find out more about Inclusive Communication – bespoke communication boards for schools, playgrounds, councils, and organisations.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:41 About Inclusive Communication
• 4:25 Website Navigation Analysis
• 6:30 Customer Journey and Messaging
• 16:16 Technical SEO Review
• 23:18 SEO Recommendations
• 25:51 Closing and Contact Information

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

Introduction

Jules: Hi.
So today we are diving into our website, SEO Audit for Suzanne from Inclusive Communication. So welcome, Suzanne.
It's great to have you here. Thank you so much for inviting me along.
Yeah, I'm excited to dive into this with you. So hopefully by the end of this episode we'll have identified some simple, quick wins for your website for just improving your SEO.
But before we start, a question I always ask is, if we were to meet in six months' time and you were telling me about the amazing things happening in your business, how would your website and SEO be helping you with that?
Suzanne: I think as well as everything that's in place at the moment on the website, we'd want it to be a platform to showcase everything that we've already achieved. So the communication boards that are in place in schools and playgrounds and organisations around the country.
So that it can be a place of trust. People can see other organisations that have used us and how successful their installations have been.
Jules: That's fantastic. Trust is such a big part of SEO and in moving forward into AI searches as well, then this is good.
Trust is gonna be such a big, big part of that as well.
So that's a really good goal to have for your website. Definitely.
So before we start, tell us a little bit about your business and how your website kind of sits within your current marketing activities as well.
About Inclusive Communication
Suzanne: So we are a team of speech and language therapists, and we design and create bespoke communication boards.
They go in schools, playgrounds, any organisation that wants to become more accessible to individuals who have communication difficulties.
So our website, hopefully, it's the place where all of the information about us can be easily accessed. So from who we are, building up that trust about our specialist knowledge and skills, to how to contact us.
And then, some blog posts as well. So sharing information and education at the same time.
Jules: Fantastic. Sounds amazing.
Okay. What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna start sharing my screen and we're gonna have a little look at your website and just see what areas we can find for some quick wins and just some things that you can kind of dive into really.
Do you have someone in particular who does your website for you? Or do you, is it something that you do in-house?
Suzanne: It's in-house. So it was, yeah, one of our first creations when we kind of came together.
So it was a lot of time spent on it in the first few months. And I'll be honest, we haven't done much to it in the last kind of six months.
We do have a blog post. It's nearly ready to go, so that will be going on there.
But as I say, we're hoping to add more photos onto it soon with reviews and people who have used us.
Jules: Okay. Fantastic.
So where are you getting your reviews? Where are you gathering your reviews?
Suzanne: So we're sending out our link. Copy and paste a link for people.
Jules: Over to your Google business profile? Fantastic.
Suzanne: Love to hear...
Jules: ...that.
Suzanne: Yeah. And so that's what we're sharing.
And then obviously once we get them, they can hopefully be transferred onto the website and then shared on social media as well.
Jules: Yeah, it's good to do that.
Definitely, it's good to collect reviews in different places as well. I'm all about Google business profiles, but actually, if there are other places within your industry that are relevant, like they might not necessarily be for every industry, but for things like hotels, you'd be wanting to get...
Yes, if you can get Google reviews, it's great, but maybe you'd wanna get TripAdvisor reviews. If it was a plumber, you might wanna be getting trusted trader reviews as well.
So I definitely say focus on Google first. But actually, yeah, it's good to think of other places as well.
And sometimes it can be getting a few Facebook reviews or some LinkedIn reviews if you've got a company profile on LinkedIn. It's those kinds of things as well that can also often be helpful.
But yeah, it's good to focus on Google as well. We love a bit of Google.
So looking at your website, there is one thing that immediately jumps out to me and it is something that is SEO relevant, that was me squashing my words together, SEO relevant. But also it's an accessibility thing and a communication thing.
Website Navigation Analysis
And obviously this is a big thing for you, that actually your navigation menu here looks a bit small. Okay.
Yeah. Your website, I'm looking at it on desktop. Most websites, people are looking on mobile nowadays.
Really. Yeah. The majority of websites, and you can check that out if you've got Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
You can see in there what percentage of people are looking on desktop and mobile.
But most people, you know, we want our websites to be very mobile responsive, so this is better on mobile. You can see here that actually, yeah, it's easy to read.
It's bigger. It's always worth making sure on mobile as well that you've got plenty of room for if people are tapping and they've got accessibility issues or they've just got bigger fingers to make sure there's plenty of white space around the, you know, and I say white space, I mean like just space basically.
Yes. Around the items on a menu. If we come back to the desktop version, this font up here is pretty small, tiny, isn't it?
It's quite tiny. Yeah. Google isn't keen.
I'm just gonna open my inspector and that might just tell me. So this is 14.4.
Google isn't keen on any fonts below about 16 pixels.
I tend to not use really much less than an 18, and it does depend on the font as well. Some fonts definitely look bigger than others, but I would be upping the size of that font immediately.
The navigation menu is really important for our website. It's important if somebody comes into your website that they can immediately have a really clear journey.
They know what to do. They know how to find the things that they are looking for within your navigation menu.
So that's one that's like, it's just a tip, but it's definitely something that you could do. I haven't looked to see if you've got small fonts anywhere else down the page.
It looks like it's clear and you know, that it's just literally in that navigation menu there really.
Suzanne: I seem to remember that was just a struggle we were having. Okay.
Like I don't, we wanted it to be that small, but I seemed to remember there was something about it all fitting on the page, but I think that's something we can look at again.
Jules: It'll be a tweak. You're using a Squarespace website, so it'll be right in there and yeah, so that won't, it shouldn't be too difficult to do.
One of the things I would think about if somebody's coming into your website is have you thought about what you want them to do?
Customer Journey and Messaging
So when they come into your website, what action do you actually want them to take? Is it to contact you or get a quote?
Suzanne: I mean, I guess it's mostly been about, well first, the education of what we do and who we are, and then the contact.
But again, if they're coming from somewhere like Instagram, I'm guessing it would be straight to contact because they might already have a bit of an idea about us.
Jules: Maybe, but maybe not. I think we always, with any page on our website, and especially this is your homepage, we always want somebody to be able to come into our website and within three seconds to, like we say, three seconds, ideally because people have such short attention spans.
But we want them to know ideally within three seconds what you do, how you're gonna make their life better, and what they need to do to get it.
So don't assume just because somebody is coming from your website, and to every page of your website they land on, we want them to not have to burn mental calories to understand what you do. Is it immediately clear if somebody came in and they knew about us, or if somebody came in and they didn't?
Is it immediately clear what we do? And I think this is part of the problem that we have is we have our own kind of curse of knowledge.
You can't really read the label from the inside of the jar. So you don't necessarily see that actually this could be clearer.
This isn't immediately, you know, sort of obvious of how we're gonna help people.
Suzanne: Sorry, I did just have an idea literally as I was waiting for the call that because our kind of unique selling point is that we create unique, bespoke symbols that represent the playground equipment that's in people's spaces. I had an idea that we could do like a before and after, so a photograph of a specific tower with a slide.
And then how Laura, our graphic lead, has produced that and made that into a symbol, because then that's really easy for people to see, ah, I know what this is all about and how they can make our playground look on the communication board. So I have been giving it a little bit of thought because I think, like you're saying, it's not.
It's not straightforward when you land here. You know what it is that we can do for you.
Jules: Definitely.
Suzanne: I love...
Jules: ...what you're saying there about having it displaying it visually. I think that's really important.
But what you've kind of described there is maybe taking it a step back and thinking about like, why do people need it?
Because we need to hook people in and help people understand why they need what you are selling. I think that's a big part of what you'll be doing is the education around that.
So maybe either thinking of it as the problem that you're solving. So what is the problem that they have?
Why do they need what you are selling? And having that there clearly, you know, straight away.
So have you thought about this at all with your messaging? Have you done any work around your problems that you solve and who your ideal client is?
Suzanne: Well, a little bit. So if you scroll down, and down again.
So I think hopefully our aims kind of make it clear about what we're hoping to do and within that, a bit of that education as well.
Jules: Okay. So one of the things I would say is when we're thinking about our customers as well, we kind of wanna make, and this goes for sort of everywhere on our website and it's quite a common thing where we end up creating our website and talking about us and talking about what we do and our mission and those kind of things.
Actually, what we wanna be doing is putting the customer as the hero of the story. Yeah.
I'm a big fan of Don Miller's Build a StoryBrand, and that's all about making the customer the hero. And you are their trusted guide.
And I very much think that this applies with what you are doing because they're not necessarily gonna know why they need what you sell.
Yeah. But you are the person to make sure that they get it right.
So I would be thinking about that. Thinking about, okay, what is their transformed state?
How is their business going to be better or how is their organisation going to be better from what you are doing?
Because that's not to say the aim part of it isn't important because it absolutely is. And I think that's part of the mission part of it definitely.
But I would be thinking about what's the consequences of them not getting what you are selling basically, if that makes sense.
Suzanne: That makes a lot of sense.
Jules: Yeah. And it's not something that's gonna, you're not gonna like literally solve this on, you know, a 20-minute call.
This is something that's gonna take some time to think about.
Suzanne: Of course.
Jules: Just taking that step back, I would definitely recommend checking out Donald Miller's stuff like he has a five-minute marketing makeover video series and it's really good. It just explains basically all that, all of what I've just said about making the customer the hero, making it all about them.
And this applies to any type of business, whether you are selling business to business or business to consumer. It always applies, I think, really.
So you've got a bit there about the importance of being an accessible organisation. What is inclusive communication?
Who has communication difficulties?
So, oh, okay. So communication difficulties.
Suzanne: Maybe that could be higher up.
Jules: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Again, this is the, this is the how, so thinking about the why. Why would they want to do this?
What's it, how is it gonna help? And maybe that is taking the, like the how they help, how communication boards help.
Yeah. So for the organisation.
Suzanne: So that's a tiny part, isn't it? And actually what you're saying is that that needs to be front and centre.
Jules: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Thinking about the problems that you are solving with this, and is it something that, where it is a problem, is it something that companies come to you or is it something where you are having to educate them and show them?
so probably a bit of both.
Suzanne: A little bit of both, but a lot of it I would say is about the education. Because obviously we are specialist speech and language therapists, we're aware of the communication difficulties that children and adults have in outdoor spaces.
And so a lot of it is about the education and helping them to feel empowered that they are doing something and can do something to help.
Jules: Yeah, I would think about where you have reviews from people and where businesses and organisations have used your services and what it's done for their business. Think about that as well when you're trying to think of the language people would be using around that.
Then definitely have that in with your messaging as well. There's lots of potential and even though you've had your website live for six months, it's still quite early on.
You're still early on in getting this messaging right. And it will evolve, it will tweak over time.
But ideally what we want is something here that sort of is gonna grab their attention here in terms of why they need you. I would definitely have that in there really.
Suzanne: That makes a lot of sense. Thank you.
Jules: Good, good. So when we're thinking about like, the structure of your website, 'cause obviously we said we wanna sort of focus on SEO, but I think a big part of that is actually getting that language there.
Getting the language of what problems you're solving, those sort of core topics, the things that you need to be talking about.
If you are launching a blog and if you're writing blog content, then you want those blogs to be, again, speaking to the problems that you solve.
You can certainly talk about your mission and those kind of things in your blog posts as well. All of this language, it needs to be the things that people are actually typing into Google that's gonna help them to connect with you.
It's sort of the, you know, it sounds pretty basic and it is really, it's all we're doing when we're trying to get our website showing up on Google is working out what we wanna show up for, working out what people are actually searching for in relation to that.
And then working out which page of our website is the best one to get that across really. And then optimising that page really.
So when you come into the site here, I would say definitely. I mean this, this area above the scroll, above the fold, the bit when we first come in, before you start scrolling down the page, and the same with this on mobile as well, is the most valuable space on your website.
This is the bit where we need to hook them in. We need to get that message across.
We need to get some trust across there as well. And I would certainly say on the desktop version, I would be making this navigation menu a lot smaller.
We can often end up making our logos look very big, but actually most people don't care about our logo. No one cares about our logo as much as we do.
They've not put thought into it, basically. So I would think about maybe making this a little bit smaller.
So you're gonna make the font size bigger on the navigation menu, but make the menu itself actually smaller and just use this space in sort of a more effective way, really.
And maybe if you start thinking about the problems or thinking about that transformed state. So thinking about how your, how it helps and whether that is.
Things like making staff communication easier or, you know, those kind of things. Maybe you could have that here.
So you could have one headline, so where you've got enabling communication everywhere.
You'd have that as a headline in this hero section here, and then maybe underneath it you could have some icons of the problems that you solve or that transformed state, depending on which way you want to sort of go with it really.
Suzanne: Great idea.
And then they're there, aren't they? Yeah, absolutely.
Jules: And it just, it gets it across visually. Obviously you want to have the words there as well.
So you do need it in the actual copy on the site, the words, but. Having that with visuals and especially for your business as well, obviously that's important that you...
Suzanne: Oh, absolutely.
...well, really. So looking at the actual structure of your site, 'cause this is always important for SEO as well, this is a little plugin that I use.
Technical SEO Review
It's a Google Chrome plugin called AIOSEO, all in one SEO. And I'll link to that in the show notes for this episode.
What you can do with this is you can just download it on Google Chrome and it helps you to see like the backend structure of your website.
I talk about this in almost every episode of the podcast that I do about the fact that we need our website to be laid out as if it was like an English essay.
So if I come over to the headings tab here, we can see that we've got a H2, then a H1, then a H4, then a H2, then a H4, and then lots of H2s.
Ideally what we want to see is we want to see one H1 heading for every page of our website, and ideally that would be at the top. So if you think about your English essay, you would have one headline, one heading, and then everything else would come naturally underneath that.
So then you would have some H2 headings underneath that, and then maybe you would have a H3 within that.
The H1 would be your main title. The H2s would be your subtopics, your subtitles, and then maybe you'd have some H3s within that if there were some sub-subtopics within that.
So ideally we want it to follow that natural hierarchy. I think this is more important with your business than any other business I've probably spoken to, because it's not only for the bots that read through your website, so whether that's Google bots or AI bots or whatever is reading through your website and trying to understand where to rank it.
It's not just for that, it's also for accessibility as well. So if somebody is using a screen reader to read your website, that hierarchy helps it to read it in a more structured way and to understand it better as well.
So that's something that is gonna become more important than ever with AI search.
It's something that I can usually tell if a website has had any SEO work done on it from the fact of how their heading structure is or the site structure is.
Suzanne: And it sounds, it's really clear that, yeah, ours does not have that. I can see from the structure you're showing me on screen.
Jules: Yeah. I mean it, but it's not the worst one I've seen. Definitely worse ones and unfortunately the website builders do set us up to fail with this a little bit.
So we tend to use it for making it look pretty, but actually it is that backend code that it is then producing behind that. That then is the important part of it really.
And what you'd want to be doing with this is thinking about as your homepage, think about the most important thing that you want your business to be showing up for on Google. And generally that would be the target keyword for your homepage.
So that's always good to have a target keyword.
It's not always necessarily easy on the homepage. But if you were thinking about like, if you'd written a blog about inclusive communication.
And that was what your target keyword was for on that page. So you were trying to get that particular blog post to rank on Google for inclusive communication.
Then you would want to have that within the headline and within at least one subheading to have that in there. And then thinking about other ways you can explain that, so either similes or related terms, those kind of things, how you would have that in there as well.
But that's something that you could do as a fairly easy way to actually update your website and make it more readable by Google.
Do you have Google Search Console or Google Analytics?
Suzanne: No. No.
Jules: So I would definitely recommend doing that if you need some help with that. I have a little short course on my website that you can go to and check that out.
It talks you through how to set up both Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Google Analytics is the one that tells you where people have come from and like once they've landed on your website and what they've done once they're there. Whereas Google Search Console tells you how Google understands your website and what search terms it's relating to your website and that you can check in there to make sure that there aren't any issues with Google actually indexing your website as well.
So what I've done is gone to a Google search and I've typed in site colon and then your website address.
And what this is then gonna do is tell me how many pages roughly Google is indexing. So as Google has put into its index and is available to be shown in search results.
So you've got about 24 results in there. So.
Like no one else is gonna go and do that for your website, basically. But it's worth looking at this because then you can see some of this backend stuff that ideally you don't want that showing in Google.
Like blog one. You don't want pages indexed in Google saying blog one.
Suzanne: Yeah. And this one here appointments. What's that?
That's not even our stuff.
Jules: So I can't get an appointment with you for $199.
Suzanne: Right. No. What?
I don't even know what that is. I've never seen that page.
Jules: So this is connected up.
You've got Acuity Scheduling, which is a scheduling software for some reason. You've got that hooked up to your website and it's offering to book an appointment, and it's even got a calendar on there as well. So.
Suzanne: Oh my goodness. I've never seen that in my life.
Jules: I love it. I love it when we come across stuff like this.
It's like, okay, yeah, I need to sort that out as a priority. Pop into Squarespace and try and turn that off if you can.
Suzanne: Yeah, I'm sure when I've gone into editing, I've never seen that, but yeah, we'll find out why it's there.
Jules: So it's on your, what page is it? It's so you've got a page called appointments in the back end of your website, so that's it.
Wow. Okay. Thank you Jules.
Jules: I love it when you see stuff like this, but yeah. What we would want to be making sure in here is that what's showing up here is what you want it to be really.
And the good thing about having Google Search Console is you can see what pages Google has actually put into its index.
You can make sure that you've got your sitemaps submitted there as well, and that everything's basically the way that you want it to be really. So if we are looking at this.
The blue link is basically your page title, and the bit below it is your page description.
So if I come back to your webpage and fire up my little AIOSEO, you can see that your page title you've got set for your homepage is your website address.
So that's something I would definitely suggest in the backend of Squarespace you'll see something where it either says Title, page title, SEO title, or something like that.
Okay, you can go in and change that and ideally what you would want to have in here is whatever you decide you want your homepage to mostly be showing up for on Google.
Whether that is inclusive communication for brands or inclusive communication for organisations, definitely come up with something.
I'm not a copywriter, so come up with something that's better than that basically. But you would want to put that in your title, and then ideally include a page description as well.
So the page title up to about like maximum 70 characters, if you can.
Normally around 60, 65 is good to use. Page description is up to 155.
I normally say about 135 seems to be the ones that Google prefers, you know, so put that in there.
And Google doesn't always respect your description for the page. So if you put something in there that doesn't actually really talk about what that page is about, Google may rewrite that in the search results and obviously that's part of what we were seeing there, is that this is your homepage and Google is basically just taking some of the information from your homepage and showing that in that page type there.
SEO Recommendations
But yeah, definitely could go in and do that. And if you do that for all of your pages on your website, that immediately will give clearer signals to Google about what your business is about, what your website is about.
And I think that's probably the most important things you could do right now.
It's just going through, looking at the structure of those pages. So looking at the headings and just correcting that part of it, correcting your page titles and descriptions, and then just taking that step back and thinking about the broader messaging really.
Suzanne: So yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Jules: Yeah. Any questions about that? Anything at all that sort of has, obviously, apart from the fact that you don't have acuity scheduling and that's on there, but anything else that's jumped out at you or anything?
Suzanne: It's just, yeah, thank you. Because there's so much I just didn't know because like you are saying, you just trust that Squarespace kind of setting you up for success because everything is there.
The tools all seem to be there. And actually there's so much more behind it that will help with our visibility. So yeah. Thank you.
Jules: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but the big thing that I see with most businesses is just taking it that step back and really thinking about.
Okay, what do we need to be showing up for? And and sort of going from there really.
Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. Brilliant.
Any other questions or anything? No. You feel like you've got plenty to do now anyway?
Suzanne: I really do. Yeah.
Yeah. Absolutely. But all good stuff.
Jules: Absolutely. And it's all just, as I say, this is all a work in progress.
Never think of your website as being done because it's something that, it's the asset. It's an asset for your business.
And actually just keeping, keeping on working on that over time is so valuable.
We spend so much time pouring our energy into our social media and we don't own that. And it could go away tomorrow.
And it's not necessarily an asset for our business, but actually I see this so often where people are really clear on their social media about what they do and how they help people.
But then you go to their website and it's like, well this is a different story here. I dunno what you, I dunno what's going on here really.
Suzanne: Absolutely. And I can already see that, like our little tagline on Instagram, that can be our page description.
You know, it's there, we've got it already.
Jules: And maybe that needs to be your headline on your homepage as well.
Yeah. So yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Have a look at what you've got available elsewhere. And it might just be a case of bringing that in as well, really.
Brilliant. Thank you. So before we finish, I would love you to give yourself another little shout out and let everyone know specifically what you do again, and more importantly, where they can connect with you and find out more.
Closing and Contact Information
Suzanne: Yeah. So, we are inclusivecommunication.co.uk.
We create and design bespoke communication boards for your space, whether that be a school playground or playground of a local council or an organisation, to support the accessibility for individuals who have communication difficulties.
Jules: Fantastic.
Suzanne: And you can follow us on Instagram and Facebook as well, inclusive communication.
Jules: Brilliant. Fantastic. I love the fact that you shared your website first as well, so welcome.
Suzanne: Oh, of course.
Jules: Absolutely. I think that's something else that we can often forget about doing is that we always send people to our social media rather than sending them to our website, but actually that once they're on social media, they're off scrolling.
So actually if you are ever sharing, it's always a good thing to share your website because people will scroll down to the bottom and actually look for your social media icons, but actually. They're off on social, then they're, they're kind of gone aren't they really.
Yeah, they're watching cat videos. Oh, I love it.
So if this episode has made you think about your visibility and getting your SEO in action on your website and you'd love some more help around that, then book a Power Hour.
We can dive in, we can have a look at your analytics. We can have a look for quick wins like this.
We'll dive in and just see where you need to focus and getting your website working for your business. So thank you so much for listening.
Thank you, Suzanne, for being here, and we'll see you soon. Bye.
Suzanne: Bye.