Happy Koala are an SEO Agency who specialise in ranking local businesses on Google with ninja outreach and scientific search engine optimisation tactics.
There are many good reasons why you should hire an SEO agency to help your website rank at the top of search engines like Google.
We have chosen the top 5 that we think are the best reasons to take the leap of faith.
Top 5 Reasons To Hire an SEO Company
SEO Companies Know How To Do Search Engine Optimisation If you are running a business, then you probably haven’t got much time left over to do anything else.
Your focus should be entirely on generating revenue by making sales because that is the lifeblood of your business.
SEO consultants spend all their time doing search engine optimisation so they know a lot about all the right things to do and all the things that can get your website penalised by Google.
It is naive to think that you can outrank a professional SEO expert doing it in your spare time when you are not running your business.
An SEO professional knows has a lot more tricks up their sleeve and know how to get the best results for your website.
So do what you do best which is running your business and leave the Google ranking to the experts.
Time is Money Like we mentioned in the last point your time is best spent on revenue generating activities that you are good at.
So hiring an SEO agency to help with ranking your website in the search engines means you get a dedicated expert looking after your online business.
You should look for an SEO consultant has ranked many websites before and also has an agency website that is ranking high in the search engines.
This is because SEO agencies are competing against one another to be at the top of Google. It is like the Olympics, the best of the best facing their peers in the industry to see who comes out victorious.
Once you have chosen a good SEO company to partner with, then the vital aspect to take into consideration is that they will know how to get your website to the top of Google in the quickest time possible.
If you got a cheap SEO freelancer because you were trying to save money, then it may take 12 to 18 months to get to the top of the search engines but if you get a quality search engine guru then you could perhaps get to the top in 6 months.
Think about all those lost customers that you don’t get coming to your business for an extra 6 to 12 months because you don’t want to invest in a quality SEO Services.
The extra money that you spend on the front end will be more than made up for on the backend when you are dominating in the search results in a shorter time frame.
Bring More Traffic To Your Website and More Customers To Your Business The whole point of search engine optimisation is to bring more qualified traffic to your website in the hope of converting them into customers.
You could have the best product or service in the world but if your not at the top of Google when someone is looking for you then you may as well not exist.
A good SEO consultant will find many different ways to drive qualified traffic to your website, Google is just one of the techniques. But ranking in the search engines is the main focus of any professional SEO agency.
Think about it, every day your competitors who are ranking in the top 3 are getting free qualified leads to come to their website on autopilot. They simply collect the money when they purchase their product or service.
Every day your competitors are gaining new customers and your missing out on new customers. Your competitors are getting stronger and you’re staying in the same position.
When it comes to ranking in the search engines you either dominate and get a lot of the traffic from Google or you’re a nobody that people rarely find.
Better Conversions Equals More Customers Once you have traffic coming to your website that is when a good SEO company will look at ways that they can increase the conversions on your website.
What this means is if 30 out of 100 people who land on your website call you, then the aim is to find ways to increase that number to 40 or 50. The idea is to make the best use of the traffic that comes along to your website, which means you need to have a nice looking website that gives the user what they are looking for. You need a clear call to actions like “Call Us” or “Add to Cart”.
This can also mean other things like making sure your website is technically sound, for example, does it have a fast page load speed, is it easy to navigate, is the content clear, interesting and readable or is it a slow website and looks unprofessional. All these things will have a subtle impact on your conversion rate.
I am sure you have been on a website before and it just feels right, and then other times you have been on a website and not wanted to put your credit card in because there is just something about it.
This is all good reasons to hire a professional SEO agency who understands all these important little things that can help increase your conversions on your website.
Some Search Engine Optimisation Statistics
58% of searches come from mobile
46% of all Google searches are local
The average first-page result on Google contains 1,890 words.
Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices
On-Page Optimization Best Practices
Information Architecture Best Practices
How to Execute Content Marketing & Link Building
Common Technical SEO Issues & Best Practices
How to Track & Measure SEO Results
Additional SEO Considerations (Such as Mobile, International & Local SEO Best Practices)
By the time you reach the end of this SEO basics guide, you’ll have a strong understanding of what search engine optimization is, why it’s valuable and important, and how to get great results in an ever-changing SEO environment.
1. What is SEO & Why is it Important?
You’ve likely heard of SEO, and if you haven’t already, you could obtain a quick Wikipedia definition of the term, but understanding that SEO is “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results” doesn’t really help you answer important questions for your business and your website, such as:
How do you, for your site or your company’s site, “optimize” for search engines?
How do you know how much time to spend on SEO?
How can you differentiate “good” SEO advice from “bad” or harmful SEO advice?
What’s likely interesting to you as a business owner or employee is how you can actually leverage SEO to help drive more relevant traffic, leads, sales, and ultimately revenue and profit for your business. That’s what we’ll focus on in this guide.
Why Should You Care About SEO?
Lots and lots of people search for things. That traffic can be extremely powerful for a business not only because there is a lot of traffic, but because there is a lot of very specific, high-intent traffic.
If you sell blue widgets, would you rather buy a billboard so anyone with a car in your area sees your ad (whether they will ever have any interest in blue widgets or not), or show up every time anyone in the world types “buy blue widgets” into a search engine? Probably the latter, because those people have commercial intent, meaning they are standing up and saying that they want to buy something you offer.
People are searching for any manner of things directly related to your business. Beyond that, your prospects are also searching for all kinds of things that are only loosely related to your business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with those folks and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.
Are you more likely to get your widgets from a trusted resource who offered great information each of the last four times you turned to Google for help with a problem, or someone you’ve never heard of?
What Actually Works for Driving Traffic from Search Engines?
First it’s important to note that Google is responsible for most of the search engine traffic in the world (though there is always some flux in the actual numbers). This may vary from niche to niche, but it’s likely that Google is the dominant player in the search results that your business or website would want to show up in, and the best practices outlined in this guide will help position your site and its content to rank in other search engines, as well.
Regardless of what search engine you use, search results are constantly changing. Google particularly has updated lots of things surrounding how they rank websitesby way of lots of different animal names recently, and a lot of the easiest and cheapest ways to get your pages to rank in search results have become extremely risky in recent years.
So what works? How does Google determine which pages to return in response to what people search for? How do you get all of this valuable traffic to your site?
Google’s algorithm is extremely complex, and I’ll share some links for anyone looking to dive deeper into how Google ranks sites at the end of this section, but at an extremely high level:
Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant informationabout the searcher’s query.
They determine relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, mostly based on the keywords it contains.
They determine “quality” by a number of means, but prominent among those is still the number and quality of other websites that link to your page and your site as a whole. To put it extremely simply: If the only sites that link to your blue widget site are blogs that no one else on the Web has linked to, and my blue widget site gets links from trusted places that are linked to frequently, like CNN.com, my site will be more trusted (and assumed to be higher quality) than yours.
Increasingly, additional elements are being weighed by Google’s algorithm to determine where your site will rank, such as:
How people engage with your site (Do they find the information they need and stay on your site, or bounce back to the search page and click on another link? Or do they just ignore your listing in search results altogether and never click-through?)
Your site’s loading speed and “mobile friendliness”
How much unique content you have (versus very “thin” low-value content or duplicate content)
There are hundreds of ranking factors Google’s algorithm considers in response to searches, and they are constantly updating and refining their process.
The good news is, you don’t have to be a search engine scholar to rank for valuable terms in search results. We’ll walk through proven, repeatable best practices for optimizing websites for search that can help you drive targeted traffic through search without having to reverse-engineer the core competency of one of the world’s most valuable companies.
If you’re interested in learning more about how search engines work, there are a ton of great resources available, including:
Now, back to SEO basics! Let’s get into the actual SEO tactics and strategies that will help you get more traffic from search engines.
2. Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices
The first step in search engine optimization is really to determine what it is you’re actually optimizing for. This means identifying the terms people are searching for (also known as “keywords”) that you want your website to rank for in search engines like Google.
Sounds simple enough, right? I want my widget company to show up when people look for “widgets,” and maybe when they type in things like “buy widgets.” Onto step three!
Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. There are a few key factors to take into account when determining the keywords you want to target on your site:
Search Volume – The first factor to consider is how many people (if any) are actually searching for a given keyword. The more people there are searching for a keyword, the bigger the audience you stand to reach. Conversely, if no one is searching for a keyword, there is no audience available to find your content through search.
Relevance – If a term is frequently searched for that’s great: but what if it’s not completely relevant to your prospects? Relevance seems straight-forward at first: if you’re selling enterprise email marketing automation software you don’t want to show up for searches that don’t have anything to do with your business, like “pet supplies.” But what about terms like “email marketing software”? This might intuitively seem like a great description of what you do, but if you’re selling to Fortune 100 companies, most of the traffic for this very competitive term will be searchers who don’t have any interest in buying your software (and the folks you do want to reach might never buy your expensive, complex solution based on a simple Google search). Conversely, you might think a tangential keyword like “best enterprise PPC marketing solutions” is totally irrelevant to your business since you don’t sell PPC marketing software. But if your prospect is a CMO or marketing director, getting in front of them with a helpful resource on evaluating pay-per-click tools could be a great “first touch” and an excellent way to start a relationship with a prospective buyer.
Competition – As with any business opportunity, in SEO you want to consider the potential costs and likelihood of success. For SEO, this means understanding the relative competition (and likelihood to rank) for specific terms.
First you need to understand who your prospective customers are and what they’re likely to search for. If you don’t already understand who your prospects are, thinking about that is a good place to start, for your business in general but also for SEO.
From there you want to understand:
What types of things are they interested in?
What problems do they have?
What type of language do they use to describe the things that they do, the tools that they use, etc.?
Who else are they buying things from (this means your competitors, but also could mean tangential, related tools – for the email marketing company, think other enterprise marketing tools)?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have an initial “seed list” of possible keywords and domains to help you get additional keyword ideas and to put some search volume and competition metrics around.
Take the list of core ways that your prospects and customers describe what you do, and start to input those into keyword tools like Google’s own keyword tool or tools like Uber Suggest or WordStream’s keyword tool:
You can find a more comprehensive list of keyword tools below, but the main idea is that in this initial step, you’ll want to run a number of searches with a variety of different keyword tools. You can also use competitive keyword tools like SEM Rushto see what terms your competitors are ranking for. These tools look at thousands of different search results, and will show you each search term they’ve seen your competitor ranking in Google for lately. Here’s what SEM Rush shows for marketing automation provider Marketo:
Again: this doesn’t just have to be something you look at for competitors. You could look at related tools that are selling to the same market for content ideas, and even look at the major niche publishers who talk about your topic (and that your prospects are reading) and see what kinds of keywords those sites are driving traffic for.
Additionally, if you have an existing site, you’re likely getting some traffic from search engines already. If that’s the case, you can use some of your own keyword data to help you understand which terms are driving traffic (and which you might be able to rank a bit better for).
Unfortunately, Google has stopped delivering a lot of the information about what people are searching for to analytics providers, but you can use SEM Rush (or similar tools, such as SpyFu) on your own site to get a sense of the terms you’re ranking for and their estimated search volume. Google also makes a bit more of this data available in their free Webmaster Tools interface (if you haven’t set up an account, this is a very valuable SEO tool both for unearthing search query data and for diagnosing various technical SEO issues – more on Webmaster Tools set up here).
Once Webmaster Tools is set up, you can navigate to this link when logged in and see the search queries that are driving traffic to your site:
These could be good terms to focus additional content promotion and internal linking around (more on each of those topics later), and could also be great “seed keywords” to help you get more great ideas about what to target.
Once you’ve taken the time to understand how your prospects talk and what they search for, have looked at the keywords driving traffic to your competitors and related sites, and have looked at the terms driving traffic to your own site, you need to work to understand which terms you can conceivably rank for and where the best opportunities actually lie.
Determining the relative competition of a keyword can be a fairly complex task. At a very high level, you need to understand:
How trusted and authoritative (in other words: how many links does the whole site get, and how high quality, trusted, and relevant are those linking sites?) other entire sites that will be competing to rank for the same term are
How well aligned they are with the keyword itself (do they offer a great answer to that searcher’s question)
How popular and authoritative each individual page in that search result is (in other words: how many links does the page itself have, and how high quality, trusted, and relevant are those linking sites?)
And while it’s more advanced in nature, Nick Eubanks’ post about understanding rank potential offers a great in-depth look at not only understanding but creating an actionable formula for determining keyword competition and your own site’s actual likelihood of ranking for a term.
If you’re looking to dive even deeper into the topic of keyword research and keyword targeting, there are several great resources on the topic:
Once you have your keyword list, the next step is actually implementing your targeted keywords into your site’s content. Each page on your site should be targeting a core term, and a “basket” of related terms. In his overview of the perfectly optimized page Rand Fishkin offers a nice visual of what a well (or perfectly) optimized page looks like:
Let’s look at a few critical, basic on-page elements you’ll want to understand as you think about how to drive search engine traffic to your website:
Title Tags
While Google is working to better understand the actual meaning of a page and de-emphasizing (and even punishing) aggressive and manipulative use of keywords, including the term (and related terms) that you want to rank for in your pages is still valuable. And the single most impactful place you can put your keyword is your page’s title tag.
The title tag is not your page’s primary headline. The headline you see on the page is typically an H1 (or possibly an H2) HTML element. The title tag is what you can see at the very top of your browser, and is populated by your page’s source code in a meta tag:
The length of a title tag that Google will show will vary (it’s based on pixels, not character counts) but in general 55-60 characters is a good rule of thumb here. If possible you want to work in your core keyword, and if you can do it in a natural and compelling way, add some related modifiers around that term as well. Keep in mind though: the title tag will frequently be what a searcher sees in search results for your page. It’s the “headline” in organic search results, so you also want to take how clickable your title tag is into account.
Meta Descriptions
While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another meta HTML element that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description may not always show, but if you have a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can greatly increase traffic. (Remember: showing up in search results is just the first step! You still need to get searchers to come to your site, and then actually take the action you want.)
Here’s an example of a real world meta description showing in search results:
Body Content
The actual content of your page itself is, of course, very important. Different types of pages will have different “jobs” – your cornerstone content asset that you want lots of folks to link to needs to be very different than your support content that you want to make sure your users find and get an answer from quickly. That said, Google has been increasingly favoring certain types of content, and as you build out any of the pages on your site, there are a few things to keep in mind:
Thick & Unique Content – There is no magic number in terms of word count, and if you have a few pages of content on your site with a handful to a couple hundred words you won’t be falling out of Google’s good graces, but in general recent Panda updates in particular favor longer, unique content. If you have a large number (think thousands) of extremely short (50-200 words of content) pages or lots of duplicated content where nothing changes but the page’s title tag and say a line of text, that could get you in trouble. Look at the entirety of your site: are a large percentage of your pages thin, duplicated and low value? If so, try to identify a way to “thicken” those pages, or check your analytics to see how much traffic they’re getting, and simply exclude them (using a noindex meta tag) from search results to keep from having it appear to Google that you’re trying to flood their index with lots of low value pages in an attempt to have them rank.
Engagement – Google is increasingly weighting engagement and user experience metrics more heavily. You can impact this by making sure your content answers the questions searchers are asking so that they’re likely to stay on your page and engage with your content. Make sure your pages load quickly and don’t have design elements (such as overly aggressive ads above the content) that would be likely to turn searchers off and send them away.
“Sharability” – Not every single piece of content on your site will be linked to and shared hundreds of times. But in the same way you want to be careful of not rolling out large quantities of pages that have thin content, you want to consider who would be likely to share and link to new pages you’re creating on your site before you roll them out. Having large quantities of pages that aren’t likely to be shared or linked to doesn’t position those pages to rank well in search results, and doesn’t help to create a good picture of your site as a whole for search engines, either.
Alt Attributes
How you mark up your images can impact not only the way that search engines perceive your page, but also how much search traffic from image search your site generates. An alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if a user can’t view it. Your images may break over time (files get deleted, users have difficulty connecting to your site, etc.) so having a useful description of the image can be helpful from an overall usability perspective. This also gives you another opportunity – outside of your content – to help search engines understand what your page is about.
You don’t want to “keyword stuff” and cram your core keyword and every possible variation of it into your alt attribute. In fact, if it doesn’t fit naturally into the description, don’t include your target keyword here at all. Just be sure not to skip the alt attribute, and try to give a thorough, accurate description of the image (imagine you’re describing it to someone who can’t see it – that’s what it’s there for!).
By writing naturally about your topic, you’re avoiding “over-optimization” filters (in other words: it doesn’t make it look like you’re trying to trick Google into ranking your page for your target keyword) and you give yourself a better chance to rank for valuable modified “long tail” variations of your core topic.
URL Structure
Your site’s URL structure can be important both from a tracking perspective (you can more easily segment data in reports using a segmented, logical URL structure), and a shareability standpoint (shorter, descriptive URLs are easier to copy and paste and tend to get mistakenly cut off less frequently). Again: don’t work to cram in as many keywords as possible; create a short, descriptive URL.
Moreover: if you don’t have to, don’t change your URLs. Even if your URLs aren’t “pretty,” if you don’t feel as though they’re negatively impacting users and your business in general, don’t change them to be more keyword focused for “better SEO.” If you do have to change your URL structure, make sure to use the proper (301 permanent) type of redirect. This is a common mistake businesses make when they redesign their websites.
Finally, once you have all of the standard on-page elements taken care of, you can consider going a step further and better helping Google (and other search engines, which also recognize schema) to understand your page.
Schema markup does not make your page show up higher in search results (it’s not a ranking factor, currently). It does give your listing some additional “real estate” in the search results, the way ad extensions do for your Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) ads.
In some search results, if no one else is using schema, you can get a nice advantage in click-through rate by virtue of the fact that your site is showing things like ratings while others don’t. In other search results, where everyone is using schema, having reviews may be “table stakes” and you might be hurting your Google CTR by omitting them:
There are a variety of different types of markup you can include on your site – most probably won’t apply to your business, but it’s likely that at least one form of markup will apply to at least some of your site’s pages.
You can learn more about schema & markup with any of these resources:
Also check out our walkthrough on off-page SEO (the factors on other sites that can affect your own site’s rankings).
4. Information Architecture & Internal Linking
Information architecture refers to how you organize the pages on your website. The way that you organize your website and interlink between your pages can impact how various content on your site ranks in response to searches.
The reason for this is that search engines largely perceive links as “votes of confidence” and a means to help understand both what a page is about, and how important it is (and how trusted it should be).
Search engines also look at the actual text you use to link to pages, called anchor text – using descriptive text to link to a page on your site helps Google understand what that page is about (but in a post-Penguin world especially, be sure not to be overly aggressive in cramming your keywords into linking text).
In the same way that a link from CNN is an indication that your site could be important, if you are linking to a specific page aggressively from various areas on your site, that’s an indication to search engines that that specific page is very important to your site. Additionally: the pages on your site that have the most external votes (links from other, trusted sites) have the most power to help the other pages on your site rank in search results.
This relates back to a concept called “PageRank.” PageRank is no longer used in the same way it was when initially implemented, but if you’re looking to understand the topic more deeply here are some good resources:
Let’s walk through a quick example to help you understand the concept of how link equity (or the number and quality of links pointed to a page) impacts site architecture and how you link internally. Let’s imagine we have a snow removal site:
We publish an amazing study on the impact of snow on construction in the winter in cold weather climates. It gets linked to from all over the web.
The study is published on our main snow removal site. All of the other pages are simple sales-oriented pages explaining various aspects of our company’s snow removal offerings. No external site has linked to any of these pages.
The study itself may be well-positioned to rank well in search results for various phrases. The sales-oriented pages much less so. By linking from our study to our most important sales-oriented pages, however, we can pass some of the trust and authority of our guide onto those pages. They won’t be as well positioned to rank in search results as our study, but they’ll be much better positioned than when they had no authoritative documents (on our site or on other sites) pointing to them. An important additional note here: in this example our most-linked to page is our fictitious study. In many cases, your most linked to page will be your home page (the page that people link to when they talk about you, when you get press, etc.) so being sure to link strategically to the most important pages on your site from your home page is very important.
Information architecture can be an extremely complex topic – particularly for larger sites – and there are a number of great additional resources below with more specific answers listed at the end of this section, but at a high level the most important things to keep in mind are:
You want to understandyour most linked-to pages (use tools like Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, or Moz and look at “top pages” reports to determine these).
Keep your most important search pages (the pages you are using to target your most valuable keywords) “high up” in your information architecture: this means linking to them often in navigation elements and linking to them whenever possible from your most linked-to pages (e.g., make sure your home page and your site’s version of our hit snow study are linking to the most valuable pages on your site from a search perspective – your “money pages”).
In general you want to have a “flat information architecture” for your site – meaning that you keep any pages that you want to have rank in search engines as few clicks as possible from your home page and most linked-to pages. See this older video for a more in-depth explanation of how to flatten your site’s structure
Below are a number of additional resources around information architecture (many of these are older resources, but the principles outlined in them still largely hold true):
Since Google’s algorithm is still largely based on links, having a number of high-quality links to your site is obviously incredibly important in driving search traffic: you can do all the work you want on on-page and technical SEO, if you don’t have links to your site, you won’t show up in search results listings.
There are a number of ways to get links to your site, but as Google and other search engines become more and more sophisticated, many of them have become extremely risky (even if they may still work in the short-term). If you are new to SEO and are looking to leverage the channel, these riskier and more aggressive means of trying to get links likely aren’t a good fit for your business, as you won’t know how to properly navigate the pitfalls and evaluate the risks. Furthermore, trying to create links specifically to manipulate Google rankings doesn’t create any other value for your business in the event that the search engine algorithms shift and your rankings disappear.
A more sustainable approach to developing links is to focus on more general, sustainable marketing approaches such as creating and promoting useful content that also includes specific terms you’d want to rank for and engaging in traditional PR for your business.
The process of creating and promoting content that will get you links and social shares is a labor-intensive one. Once again you’ll find more detailed step-by-step guides to various aspects of content marketing below, and there are a lot of different ways to effectively create content, help it to get discovered, and rank well in search results. Most approaches, however, will require you to walk through some variation of the following three core steps:
1. Identify & Understand Your Linking & Sharing Audience
The first thing you need to do in working to get traction for your content, is understand who is likely to link to and share your content. There are several tools to help you identify influencers within your niche who might share your content, but probably the most powerful is BuzzSumo:
Similar tools include FollowerWonk, Little Bird and Ahrefs. More detailed tutorials on using these tools to better understand your niche are included below.
The idea in leveraging these tools is to first identify the thought leaders and potential linkers in your space, and then understand what they share and link to. Find out what their problems are, what types of content they typically share, and start to think about how you can create something they would find valuable and want to share with their audience (who would also find it valuable).
As you work through this process, start to think about what you can do for these influencers. How could you help them with their own projects? What can you do (unsolicited) that would help them achieve their own goals or what could you create or offer that would be of value to the audience they are creating content for and trying to help? Do you have access to unique data or knowledge that would help them do their jobs better? If you can consistently be of use to smart content creators in your niche, you’ll start to build powerful relationships that will pay dividends as you’re creating content.
Before you create a major piece of content, you should have already thought about how that content will get shared: who will share it, and why would they?
2. Determining What Content You Can Create & How You Can Promote It
Next you have to try to understand what your own capabilities are, and what kind of content you can create that will be likely to be shared and promoted by others.
A number of different types of content assets will be shareable:
Create something that solves your prospects’ and your customers’ problems. In his post on how he built a top 100 blog, Matthew Woodward outlines a good process for listening in on social media and forums to help find great blog topics.
Reverse engineer what already works. By looking at what already works and creating something that’s a level or two better in some way, you can help mitigate risk and make your content as fail-proof as possible.
Focus on creating different content assets that will be of real value, have a plan for promoting those assets, and don’t be shy about letting people who you’ve featured or whose audience would benefit from your resource know that it exists.
3. Map Your Assets to Specific Keywords
Finally, don’t forget about your keywords! This doesn’t mean that every time you create a great resource you need to cram in a keyword that doesn’t fit: it means that you can use keyword research as a means for discovering pain points (if people are turning to search engines to look for things, they want content that provides a great answer to their question!), and that as you create new assets you want to look for the different ways you can incorporate the language your prospects and customers are using into your assets: particularly those that will actually get linked to and shared (as you will increasingly need to get some sort of distribution for pages where you want them to rank for valuable keywords).
While basics of SEO like the most efficient ways to build links to drive search engine rankings have changed in recent years (and content marketing has become increasingly important) what many people would think of as more “traditional SEO” is still incredibly valuable in generating traffic from search engines. As we’ve already discussed, keyword research is still valuable, and technical SEO issues that keep Google and other search engines from understanding and ranking sites’ content are still prevalent.
Technical SEO for larger, more complicated sites is really its own discipline, but there are some common mistakes and issues that most sites face that even smaller to mid-sized businesses can benefit from being aware of:
Page Speed
Search engines are placing an increasing emphasis on having fast-loading sites – the good news is this is not only beneficial for search engines, but also for your users and your site’s conversion rates. Google has actually created a useful toolhere to give you some specific suggestions on what to change on your site to address page speed issues.
Mobile Friendliness
If your site is driving (or could be driving) significant search engine traffic from mobile searches, how “mobile friendly” your site is will impact your rankings on mobile devices, which is a fast-growing segment. In some niches, mobile traffic already outweighs desktop traffic.
Header response codes are an important technical SEO issue. If you’re not particularly technical, this can be a complex topic (and again more thorough resources are listed below) but you want to make sure that working pages are returning the correct code to search engines (200), and that pages that are not found are also returning a code to represent that they are no longer present (a 404). Getting these codes wrong can indicate to Google and other search engines that a “Page Not Found” page is in fact a functioning page, which makes it look like a thin or duplicated page, or even worse: you can indicate to Google that all of your site’s content is actually 404s (so that none of your pages are indexed and eligible to rank). You can use a server header checker to see the status codes that your pages are returning when search engines crawl them.
Redirects
Improperly implementing redirects on your site can have a serious impact on search results. Whenever you can avoid it, you want to keep from moving your site’s content from one URL to another; in other words: if your content is on example.com/page, and that page is getting search engine traffic, you want to avoid moving all of the content to example.com/different-url/newpage.html, unless there is an extremely strong business reason that would outweigh a possible short-term or even long-term loss in search engine traffic. If you do need to move content, you want to make sure that you implement permanent (or 301) redirects for content that is moving permanently, as temporary (or 302) redirects (which are frequently used by developers) indicate to Google that the move may not be permanent, and that they shouldn’t move all of the link equity and ranking power to the new URL. (Further, changing your URL structure could create broken links, hurting your referral traffic streams and making it difficult for visitors to navigate your site.)
Duplicate Content
Thin and duplicated content is another area of emphasis with Google’s recent Panda updates. By duplicating content (putting the same or near-identical content on multiple pages), you’re diluting link equity between two pages instead of concentrating it on one page, giving you less of a chance of ranking for competitive phrases with sites that are consolidating their link equity into a single document. Having large quantities of duplicated content makes your site look like it is cluttered with lower-quality (and possibly manipulative) content in the eyes of search engines.
There are a number of things that can cause duplicate or thin content. These problems can be difficult to diagnose, but you can look at Webmaster Tools under Search Appearance > HTML Improvements to get a quick diagnosis.
XML sitemaps can help Google and Bing understand your site and find all of its content. Just be sure not to include pages that aren’t useful, and know that submitting a page to a search engine in a sitemap doesn’t insure that the page will actually rank for anything. There are a number of free tools to generate XML sitemaps.
Robots.txt, Meta NoIndex, & Meta NoFollow
Finally, you can indicate to search engines how you want them to handle certain content on your site (for instance if you’d like them not to crawl a specific section of your site) in a robots.txt file. This file likely already exists for your site at yoursite.com/robots.txt. You want to make sure this file isn’t currently blocking anything you’d want a search engine to find from being added to their index, and you also can use the robots file to keep things like staging servers or swaths of thin or duplicate content that are valuable for internal use or customers from being indexed by search engines. You can use the meta noindex and meta nofollow tags for similar purposes, though each functions differently from one another.
So once you start putting all of this SEO activity into motion, how do you actually track whether and how well it’s working?
On its face this question has a fairly straightforward answer, with some key metrics to focus on, but with each metric there are some key factors to consider as you measure your site’s SEO performance.
Keyword Rankings
Looking at where your site ranks for a list of keywords certainly isn’t a final destination – you can’t pay your staff in rankings, things like personalization in search results have made them variable across different locations, and therefore hard to track, and of course all they indicate is where you show up in search results. Some would even go so far as to declare them dead. But getting a rough idea of where your site ranks for core terms can be a useful leading indicator of your site’s health. This doesn’t mean you should get overly obsessed with rankings for any one term. Remember: your ultimate goal is to drive more relevant traffic that drives more business – if you sell blue widgets, is it more important that you rank for “blue widgets” or that you outline and execute an SEO strategy that helps you sell more blue widgets in the most cost-efficient way possible? Use rankings as a general health check, not a course-charting KPI.
A number of tools can help you check your rankings. Most offer fairly similar functionality but features like local or mobile rankings are sometimes unique in some of the tools. If you’re a small business or just getting started with SEO, I’d recommend picking a free and easy-to-use tool and just keeping an eye on a handful of the core terms you want to track to help you gauge progress.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is a much better leading indicator of the health of your SEO efforts. By looking at the organic traffic to your site, you can get a gauge for the actual volume of visitors coming to your site, and where they’re going.
You can measure your organic traffic easily with most analytics tools – since it’s free and the most-used, we’ll look at how to get this information in Google Analytics.
For a quick check, you can simply look at your site’s main reporting page and click on “All Sessions” to filter for organic traffic (traffic from search engines that excludes paid search traffic):
You can also drill down to look at the specific pages driving traffic and goals by creating a custom report and designating users and goal completions as your metrics, and landing pages as your dimension:
Note: Make sure once you view this report that you’re selecting the organic traffic segment again, or you’ll be looking at all of your traffic by page rather than just unpaid traffic driven by search engines.
This can be powerful for sites just getting started with SEO, because frequently most of your site’s traffic will be driven by what’s known as “branded queries,” or searches that contain your company’s brand name (for instance a branded search for WordStream might be “WordStream PPC” versus a non-branded search term, which might be “pay-per-click software”). You clearly want to have people searching for your brand, and of course you want them to find you when they do, but unless your site has been penalized by Google, you will almost certainly rank for your brand and have that branded traffic come to your site’s home page. What most of your ongoing SEO efforts should be centered around is driving incremental traffic to the site (people who might not have found and engaged with you otherwise).
As I mentioned in the keyword section of the guide, unfortunately Google has made it difficult to get data around the actual keywords people are searching for, but by looking at page-level traffic (outside of your site’s home page) you can start to glean insight into your overall SEO progress. Looking at rank data and using the tactics mentioned in the keyword section of this guide will also help you to get more insight into the actual terms that are driving traffic (and whether your SEO growth is being driven by optimization efforts rather than off-line marketing).
Organic Leads & Sales
Obviously the primary way to measure your search engine optimization results should be actual leads, sales, revenue and profit. Like with any business activity you need to answer: how does the activity help to move your bottom line?
The simplest path here is to set up goals or e-commerce tracking in a tool like Google Analytics. You can use the above report to look at organic traffic and goals (or different e-commerce metrics) by landing page, which means that you are specifically looking at who converts among the people who are landing on your site from an organic search (versus people who may have come to your site from PPC or another channel within the window that your analytics tracking can track, then searched for you, then converted).
This seems pretty straightforward, and generally for most businesses is a good initial way to measure the success of your SEO efforts, but again there are a few caveats and things to keep in mind with this data:
Web-based analytics is always imperfect. If you’re transitioning from billboards or newspaper ads to online marketing, you’ll likely be impressed by the volume and precision of the data available, but there can frequently be a variety of different tracking issues that can make the data you’re seeing anywhere from slightly to wildly off – always have a degree of skepticism about data that doesn’t seem to add up, and do what you can to have some checks in place to make sure that your analytics information is synced to your actual revenue and spend data.
Your system might create gaps in tracking. If you have a back-end system that you can’t quite tie to analytics for some reason, you might have some gaps between what you can track as goals and actual sales.
Attribution and life-time value metrics can be tricky. This is more of a business and web metrics problem than something specific to SEO, but figuring out how you attribute sales to different channels and factoring in life-time value to your site’s traffic can be tricky. Make sure you’re applying the same types of tough questions and attempting to measure SEO the same way you would with any other marketing endeavor.
Omniture is a popular paid web analytics platform that can have a steep learning curve – these tworesources offer some good tips to creating useful SEO reports
Omniture is a popular paid web analytics platform that can have a steep learning curve – these tworesources offer some good tips to creating useful SEO reports
8. Additional SEO Considerations
For many businesses, getting the technical aspects of SEO right, understanding the keywords you want to target, and having a strategy for getting your site’s pages linked to and shared is really all you need to know about SEO. There are, however, some specific cases and business types that need to be concerned with specific types of search. A few types of search environments that require unique approaches include:
International SEO – There are a number of benefits and trade-offs to different approaches to ranking sites in different countries and in different languages. Aleyda Solis has an outstanding guide to international SEO best practices if you’re trying to reach customers in a variety of international markets, and Google also offers some recommendations and best practices in their own guide.
Local SEO – For small businesses and franchisees, getting local rankings for different variations of {your location} + {your service} (e.g. “Boston pizza shops”) is really the most valuable organic search traffic available. While getting links and shares, doing keyword research, and ensuring your site doesn’t have technical issues helps with localized rankings, there is a separate set of ranking factors local businesses should be aware of. Matthew Barby has an excellent guide on the topic.
App Store Search Engines – If you have an app – either as the core product offering for your company, or as a means for enabling mobile users to be able to interact with your business – having your app show up in searches on various app stores can be extremely valuable. Justin Briggs and Stephanie Beadell have writtenmultipleoutstandingposts on the topic.
So What Now?
So if you’ve gotten this far, you should know a lot of information about how search engines rank websites and about how you can position your own site and business to generate more search traffic from search engines like Google. What should you do next?
Prioritize. No site does a perfect job of executing against every single aspect of search engine optimization. Think about the things you do well, have budget and resources for, and that will give your business the best return for your investment – this will be at least slightly different for every business and site.
If you’re great at creating and promoting content, determine which keywords to go after and focus your efforts there.
If you have a large and complex site, focus on getting the technical SEO right (or hire someone who can).
If need SEO for small business that would benefit from ranking for very specific geo-focused terms but not much else, shore up your local SEO efforts (and then maybe focus on other marketing efforts once you start to see diminishing returns from your efforts there).
Always remember that the ultimate objective with any search engine optimization efforts is to get more exposure and traffic for your business or your site’s content.
Look for ways that search engine traffic can help your business and site: don’t just chase after the latest SEO buzzwords or jump every time Google makes a recommendation that might improve your search rankings while hurting your overall business.
The term white hat SEO refers to SEO tactics that are in line with the terms and conditions of the major search engines, including Google.
What Is White Hat Search Engine Optimisation?
White hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, white hat SEO refers to any practice that improves your search rankings on a search engine results page (SERP) while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines’ terms of service. These tactics stay within the bounds as defined by Google. Examples of white hat SEO include:
Offering quality content and services
Fast site loading times and mobile-friendliness
Using descriptive, keyword-rich meta tags
Making your site easy to navigate
Examples of black hat SEO, by contrast, include purchasing links or using deceptive cloaking techniques. Any tactics that are considered deceitful or harmful for consumers would qualify as black hat. Black hat tactics are extremely risky and, as Google’s algorithms evolve, less and less likely to work.
Why Are White Hat SEO Techniques Important?
Failure to engage only in White Hat SEO practices can get your site banned from Google and other search engines.
As the number one search engine, Google is visited by billions of people per day, and each visit presents the potential for your site to be discovered by a new user.
Google is an undeniably powerful source of traffic to your website, and being banned can result in a drastic drop in website traffic and even business.
Consider all the work that goes into your website and then think about what it would be like to be banned from the internet’s most commonly used search engine.
What’s worse, once you’re banned from Google, there is no guarantee that they will ever re-list you. A lifetime ban from Google would have tremendous consequences.
Why risk it? Check out a complete description of Google-approved SEO techniques at Webmaster Guidelines. Google’s Webmaster resources are the go-to place to learn Google white hat SEO practices.
Should You Implement White Hat SEO Methods?
Definitely! Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the best way to create an ethical, sustainably successful website and business.
Here are some of the steps you should follow to make sure your SEO methods are strictly white hat.
Offer Quality Content and Services
Create high-quality content that meets your visitors’ needs and helps solve their problems. Use SEO keyword research tools to discover the most relevant keywords that your site content should be optimized for.
Then focus on using those keywords in great content, such as how-to articles and videos, that match the intent of the keyword and your end user.
Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags
Follow best practices when creating meta descriptions for each page on your website to help search engines and users discover your content.
Make Your Site Easy to Navigate
Be mindful when organizing your site’s Information Architecture. Sites that are easy for users to get around tend to perform better in organic search results too.
It’s a well-known fact that there are over 200 ranking signals used by Google. And every year it keeps on tweaking and refining its algorithm introducing new ranking signals and changing priorities.
I know that the idea of having to optimize for all of them will probably make you shiver with horror. The good news is there are not so many ranking signals optimizing for which is simply a must.
Please note: in the light of mobile-first indexing, according to which mobile websites are being indexed in the first place, it’s most important that mobile sites are optimized for the below listed ranking signals.
So, without further ado, here is the list of the most important ranking factors for you to dominate search in 2019.
Relevance
I guess it’s more than obvious for any SEOs out there that Google is going nuts about getting into people’s heads and providing them with the most relevant search results. Now that we live in the age of semantic search, Google aims to figure out the meaning behind a certain search query to provide the most precise search results. Besides, Google also considers such factors as users‘ search patterns, search history, location, and time.
Accordance to search intent
Of course, when searching for something, users have certain intents in mind. And Google’s ultimate task is trying to figure them out in order to supply users with the most relevant search results on the top positions. Ranking-wise, the more relevant your page is to a certain query, the higher position it gets in the SERPs. What’s more, satisfying search intent almost always results in high CTR.
CTR
If you want to understand what search intents hide behind your keywords, consider experimenting with various queries. After typing them in the search box, have a look at the first result pages and try to figure out their search intent. If you see that some of your pages don’t really match the designed search intent, it may signify that these are not the right pages to be optimized for such keywords. So, if that’s the case, consider finding corresponding pages and adding more relevant content to them or creating some new ones that would be relevant to the implied search intent.
If you want to get an idea of what people tend to click on the SERPs to reach your site, you can use Google Search Console’s Search Analytics report. Pay your special attention to pages that rank high but have low CTR. It may be a flagger that your title tags or meta descriptions are not relevant enough and need to be worked on. To understand where you stand with your CTR, have a look at this summary of CTR data sorted by position in Google search.
Content
If there’s anything I know for sure, rankings and content have always belonged together. Basically, your content is the very reason for people visiting your site. What’s more, Google has rolled out Panda and Fred updates aiming to make the web more helpful and beneficial content-wise. However, even well-written content pages are not always enough. With Google constantly raising its standards, your piece of content should also satisfy the below listed ranking factors.
Keywords on your page
In 2019 keywords in the title tag still remain a powerful ranking signal as this is one of the ways Google decides whether your page is relevant to a given query or not. What’s more, the closer your keywords are to the beginning of the title, the better. And of course, your most important keywords should be present in the page’s body, alt texts, and H1 tag. But please make sure that you’re not overusing them because you don’t want to be penalized for keyword stuffing, do you?
Of course, except from your main keywords, you need to be optimized for some related terms that would accompany them. Just in case you still haven’t collected such keywords, here are some advice on how to nail keyword research these days.
Comprehensiveness
As I’ve mentioned before, Google is going nuts about improving the quality of search. With Hummingbird, Google now prioritizes pages that match the meaning of the query rather than separate keywords. That is why you need to aim not for just filling your piece of content with keywords but for making it as comprehensive as you can.
In order to optimize your content for comprehensiveness, consider using TF-IDF analysis, which can help to calculate how frequent certain keywords are used on your competitors’ pages. By doing this, you can get lots of relevant terms and concepts used by your top-ranking competitors. Luckily, there are now plenty of tools that have TF-IDF analysis in them. By the way, here is a nice guide for you on how to improve your content’s comprehensiveness with the help of TF-IDF.
Grammar
Publishing mistake-free content is yet another signal to Google that content is of good quality. There’s not much to say there. Just make sure you proofread your piece of content before publishing it or use online grammar checkers like Grammarly.
Well-structured HTML
By organizing your HTML markup in a clear way, you make it much easier for the search engines to understand what your content is actually about. Yes, search engines still rely on HTML structure and its semantic markup. So, no matter how cool your content is, if your page has messy HTML, peaky search engine spiders may think it’s of bad quality and down-rank it. Luckily, there is now a whole variety of plugins (including WordPress’ ones) that can help with cleaning and optimizing your HTML.
Content uniqueness
To make your HTML even more structured, consider implementing schema markup. Structured Data Markup Helper can offer you a helping hand with that. Doing this will help search engines to understand your content better, identify the most important information on your site, as well as make your snippets look more attractive. You can also preview your snippets with the help of Google’s Testing Tool to make sure everything is displayed correctly.
Just as much as Google appreciates uniqueness it also penalizes sites with duplicate content. So, in order to improve your rankings and get Panda off your site, make sure it has no duplication issues. By the way, here’s a nice guide on how to spot and deal with various types of duplicate content. What’s more, you should also watch out for external duplication. So, if you suspect some pages on your site may have it, go ahead and check them with Copyscape.
If you work for one of those industries that simply cannot publish unique content every time (like online stores with many product pages), try to make your product descriptions as diverse as you can. Another good way to solve the problem is by utilizing user-generated content.
Backlinks
I guess it’s of no surprise to you that backlinks have been ruling ranking for ages. The reality is they still remain the strongest indication of authority to Google. And it’s safe to say that it’s hardly going to change in 2019. That is why quality link building should be your primary concern if you want to make it to the top. By the way, here are some powerful link building strategies for you to get some inspiration from.
Of course, one of the coolest tactics is to spy on your competitors’ linking profiles. One of my favorite tools for this kind of activity is SEO SpyGlass. With its help you can compare your linking profile with the ones of your competitors as well as see where your links intersect. By doing so, you will get priceless insights of new link building strategies that you can arm yourself with.
Although Google definitely appreciates quality more than quantity, the total number of backlinks still remains a powerful ranking signal. Please note that links coming from a single domain carry much less weight comparing to those that come from various domains. So, just have a look at the total number of backlinks and total linking domains parameters in whatever SEO tool you are using and see if your linking profile is in need of some improvement quantity-wise.
Link anchor text
Link authority
No matter how many links you have, they need to be of good quality. Otherwise, they’ll most probably get you in trouble (Penguin is watching you) rather than bring you good rankings. That is why in order to maintain quality of your links, you need to carry out regular backlink audits. Fortunately, there is a huge number of tools that help with identifying links’ harmfulness. So, if you’ve spotted some spammy links, make sure to contact the website owners who linked to you asking politely for removing them. If it didn’t work out, just disavow these reputation damagers and forget about it. What is more, if you spot some sudden spikes of links, make sure to check them as there is always a chance that your competitors could be pointing spammy links to you.
Although nowadays link anchor text is a bit less important than the two above mentioned link parameters, keyword-rich anchor text still firmly stays an important relevance signal for Google.
To be on the safe side, your links’ anchor texts need to be semantically relevant to the topic of your content and also maintain diversity. On top of that, don’t over-optimize your anchor texts with keywords, especially with the ones that are somehow connected with monetization, as this will definitely get you under Google’s Penguin penalty.
User experience
With Google now being obsessed with user experience more than ever, the pressure on website owners and search optimisation agency is really high. You are supposed to have super fast and uber convenient website to make your visitors stay and compete for high positions in the SERPs. So, here are three major user experience ranking signals for Google that I want to drive your attention to specifically.
Page speed
Of course, the very first thing that comes to your mind when you think of user experience is page speed. And I’m sure you’re aware of Google’s Speed Update that has officially made page speed a ranking factor for mobile.
So, in order to get yourself an idea of how your websites is performing speed-wise, go ahead and test it with PageSpeed Insights. Pay your special attention to the Optimization parameter and fix technical issues (if you have any). If you’re not sure how to do it, please consult this guide on Optimization score improvement.
In case your Optimization score is perfectly fine but the Speed parameter leaves much to be desired, the only thing you can do is to make it less “heavy” and sophisticated by minimizing the amount of images and scripts. You can also consider implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for your mobile pages as it will make them load almost instantly.
Dwell time and bounce rate
Another two ranking signals that are closely connected with user experience are dwell time and bounce rate. To be completely honest with you, both of these metrics depend massively on the type of query. When it comes to bounce rate, for instance, a user may receive an immediate answer by visiting only one page of your site. This will still be considered a bounce, although it doesn’t mean that your page is not good enough. But as a rule, researching something takes a user more than just one page to open.
Speaking of dwell time, the longer a certain user stays on your page, the more relevant it seems for Google. Just like with bounce rate, a user can spend only 5 seconds on your site and be fully satisfied with the answer at the same time.
So, although both of these parameters depend on what exactly users type in the search box, the combination of these two parameters allows Google to evaluate pages’ relevance pretty accurately.
Page authority within your website
So, to make your visitors stay for longer, try to engage them as much as you can. Think of providing your users with some additional content links so that they are sent to some related posts on your site, for instance. Another good idea is to implement so-called “breadcrumbs”. These are small text paths at the top of the page that improve website navigation and help users to understand where they are on you site. What’s more, you can add comment sections under your posts, that may win you another couple of minutes.
I guess it goes without saying that PageRank is one of the strongest authority signals for Google. The thing is, except for external PageRank, your page is also influenced by the internal one. So, if you want to improve rankings of some pages that are performing not so well, it’s better not to hide them deep in your site structure. The best practice is for every single page of your website to be not more than 3 clicks away from your homepage.
However, if you need to boost rankings of a page that is buried in your site structure, the best thing you can do is to point some internal links to it. But just before doing that, look at your site structure with the help of WebSite Auditor’s Visualization feature to see how internal link juice is distributed within your site and what pages need to be worked on in the first place.
HTTPS sites
Caring about user’s safety is yet another Google’s concern these days. Back in 2014, Google has made HTTPS a ranking signal. Since that having an HTTPS site is not a recommendation but a must as Chrome browser now marks sites as “not secure” in case they are not HTTPS. For you to be safe and provide your users with safe experience, learn how to migrate your site from HTTP to HTTPS.
Conclusion
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, there is an enormous amount of ranking factors that directly or indirectly influence your position on SERPs. But in 2019 I would definitely suggest setting a course for creating great content, quality link building, and improving user experience. Besides this, it’s always nice to carry out competition research to see how your top competitors optimize for the following ranking signals to borrow their tactics and reinforce your weak spots (if there are any).
Thanks to Search Engine Watch for this blog post, for more articles like this visit their website.
Local search is powerful for small businesses: four out of five consumers use search to find local information, which means if your business isn’t optimized for local search, you could be missing out on 80% of your potential customers. In short, local SEO is critical if you want your business to stay relevant.
To help you optimize your business for local SEO, we’ve created a comprehensive guide, which will cover local SEO tools, local search best practices, how to optimize for Google My Business, and more.
By the end of the guide, you’ll have a firm understanding on how to optimize your business to reach potential consumers who use local search to choose which products or services they’re going to buy.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and customers.
To gather information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.
Best Practice Local SEO Tactics
To thrive in local search, you need to do three things: optimize your Google My Business account, improve your on-page SEO by updating your website, and excel on the Wild Wild Web. You can hire a local SEO agency to help with that or if you follow this guide you may be able to do it yourself.
While it might sound overwhelming, it’s entirely feasible to succeed in all three with some patience and perseverance. Stick with us, and we’ll explore each one in-depth.
Optimize for Google My Business
Google My Business has become the creme de la creme of local search — since Google understandably feels most comfortable sharing content it can support and verify, Google My Business is their tool to help your business meet Google’s needs. If Google can verify your business as authentic, it will potentially reward your business with a coveted sidebar space in Google local search.
To ensure you’re optimized for Google My Business, you’ll want to create and verify a Google My Business page, use Google Posts within your account, encourage your customers to share reviews online, and respond authentically to reviews, specifying location. For example, “We appreciate your feedback on [product/service] in [city, state]. We value your input and look forward to working with you again. Thank you from the [full company name] team.”
Website Updates
Now that we’ve discussed optimizing your business for Google My Business, let’s take a look at five simple website updates to improve your local SEO.
1. Improve Internal Linking Structure
Although external links pointing to your site are ideal (which I’ll discuss soon), adjusting your internal linking structure will also boost your SEO rankings.
Why does internal linking matter? It does the following:
Supports website navigation
Assists with information architecture and website hierarchy
Distributes page authority and ranking power among pages
2. Optimize URL, Title Tags, Headers, Meta Description, and Content
When it comes to content, every new blog post is a new indexed page for your site, a new page on which to target a geographic search phrase, and a new opportunity to get found in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Every time you write a piece of content, you need to optimize the content for search engines by using high-volume keywords in the URL, title, header, meta description, and body. If you’re having trouble coming up with geo-targeted content, consider highlighting customer success stories and case studies.
3. Add Location Pages to your Website
If you have more than one brick and mortar location, create location pages. Location pages provide readers with your NAP, store hours, unique store descriptions, parking/transit information, promotions, testimonials from happy customers, and more. It’s also important you avoid duplicating content across multiple location pages. For single location businesses, create a locally descriptive About Us page. You’ll get big time bonus points if you add a Google Map to your website on your respective location page(s).
4. Create Local Content
Google continues to get smarter, which means content creators are now able to truly write for users, not search engines. But while writing about general topics will attract a wide crowd, sometimes it’s more important to hone your focus and write about local or industry news to attract a local audience. Be the local authority for your industry by promoting local industry gatherings, news, employees, and other educational content on your blog. Think of top-of-the-funnel content that goes beyond what your business sells.
For example, if you’re a local security company and you’re trying to attract businesses that are new to the area, create a helpful resource to get these businesses well-acquainted with your city. A map of local service providers or a calendar of city-wide events could both provide value for your persona and contain highly relevant on-page local signals.
5. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
Local search and mobile search go hand in hand (nine out of ten smartphone users conduct local searches on their devices!). Some of the most common ways people will use your site in a mobile environment is to look up reviews, find directions to your location, and search for contact information. Make it easy for your prospects and customers by making your site mobile-friendly.
Engage with Directories and the Wild Wild Web
You’ve learned how to optimize your business for Google My Business and how to update your website for an internal SEO boost — now, let’s take a look at how you can use NAP consistency, directories, and inbound links to take your business one step closer to that number one spot on local search.
Name, Address, Phone Consistency
You’ve got to make it easy for people and search engines to find you. To do this, set up your NAP, which stands for name, address, and phone number (with area code). This should be included as crawlable HTML text on your site. Avoid the common mistake of only including the NAP within an image — images can’t be crawled from search engines like HTML text. The most common location for the NAP is in the footer or header of the site.
Consistency is key: verify that your citations are consistent and complete across these four data aggregators. Discrepancies like misspellings, abbreviations, lack of suite number or wrong phone number can be problematic. If Google can’t determine which information about your business is correct, it may not show your business at all in search results. Additionally, be sure to remove any duplicate listings you find. Bonus points for emphasizing a Chambers of Commerce membership in your community, which will garner you an external inbound link.
Get Inbound Links with Relevance and Authority
Inbound links are incredibly powerful opportunities to boost your local SEO — every inbound link tells Google you’re a legitimate company, and inbound links can also raise your domain authority. Here are a few ways to get inbound links:
Sponsorships or Partnerships
Guest Blog Posting
Scholarships
Start with your own personal network, which may include the Chamber of Commerce, business improvement districts, licensing bureaus, trade associations, resellers, vendors, and/or manufacturers and other affiliates. Consider sponsoring a webinar or meet-up, hosting a community event, promoting something local you love, and building relationships with prominent people and influencers. Additionally, learn to feel comfortable reaching out to partners to see if they can feature you on their partner directory.
Be a guest blogger, talk to and about (positively, of course!) other people in your industry, and act as a resource provider for the community. If you’re an active participant in community conversations, the buzz around you grows in the form of inbound links, social media growth, and media coverage.
Given that .edu links are the bee’s knees for domain authority, why not earn some links by featuring a scholarship in your geographic region? It should be relevant to your industry, send the right signals to your domain (given the backlinks from schools) … and make you feel good, too! Moz built up a solid guide on the steps to success for effective scholarship outreach.
Engage with Social Media and Add Posts to Google My Business
Google considers content shared on social media more important now than ever before. Now that you’ve carved out a beautiful Google My Business page, share the page on social media, further aligning social and search.
Local SEO Tools
Now that we’ve covered how to optimize your business for local SEO, let’s explore some useful tools you can leverage to improve your ranking in the areas where it matters most.
1. Whitespark Local Citation Finder. A local citation is any online mention of the name, address, and phone number for a local business. Citations matter because they help surface local businesses in online search, and when local businesses actively manage their citations to ensure data accuracy, it promotes trust of these online listings. Whitespark knows this realm well — really well. With a free starter version and a popular $24/month option, Whitespark offers local listing management, recommends where to list your business, examines your competition, and robustly builds and monitors your citation growth for better local search rankings.
2. Screaming Frog. This desktop program crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. Curious if you have any 404’s? Wondering about missing meta descriptions or H1’s? Screaming Frog will analyze up to 500 URLs for free and offers an unlimited paid version for $200/year.
2. Moz Local. Less expensive than most of its counterparts (starting at $99/year with a professional level of the service at $179/year), Moz Local will ensure your business listing has been verified on Google and Facebook, and distribute your listing across the search ecosystem. Additionally, Moz Local will collaborate with data aggregators to help push listings, ensuring your business gains visibility.
4. Ahrefs. Ahrefs helps with backlink checking, which is important as these links (which are directed toward your website) serve as an indicator of website authority. Ahrefs also offers competitor analysis, keyword research, and insight into the anchor text other websites use when backlinking to your site. This tool has a starter version at $99/month and a standard option at $179/month for more extensive tracking.
5. Buzzstream. Starting at $24/month with professional functionality at $299/month, BuzzStream facilitates earning local backlinks, which helps you identify and build relationships with local influencers by researching influencers, tracking conversations, and providing reporting insights into your outreach campaigns, team performance, and link placements.
What’s Next?
This Comprehensive Guide to Local SEO in 2018 is intended to drive your local success.
While some of the tips are one-off activities where you can set it and forget it (e.g. making sure your NAP is clearly written on your site).
Other tasks, such as building reviews and publishing locally relevant content, is an activity your organization needs to do on an ongoing basis for long-term local SEO success.
Keep both in mind as you work toward better online visibility and we look forward to seeing you on the first page of Google!
Thanks to Kelsey Smith for this local SEO guide, visit her author page to see more articles like this.
SEO moved beyond exact keyword matching long ago. These days, in order to rank, we need to create content that includes related concepts, satisfies intent and provides value.
With such an important and complicated task in front of us, there’s never such a thing as too many tools.
Every top SEO keyword tool below has something new to bring to the table when it comes to helping you understand the topic better, expand your keyword list and diversify your organic rankings:
1. TextOptimizer
TextOptimizer is probably the most interesting tool on the list. For any term you put it, it will look at Google search result page, extract search snippets and apply semantic analysis to generate the list of all related topics, terms and concepts that form your topic cluster.
For example, for [grow tomatoes] it will generate the list of the following terms:
If you already have a page that you want to rank for that query, the tool will compare your existing text to the snippets Google returns for that query. It will then score your text and recommend expanding your content to include some of those suggested terms:
The thing is, Google generates its search snippets based on which sentences from the ranked pages do the best job satisfying the query. This means that Google search snippets represent the best (in Google’s opinion) summary of the query topic.
By semantically analyzing those snippets and extracting related terms and topics from them, you will get a better understanding of what you need to include in your content.
It also shows subtopics and related questions (i.e. niche questions for each query you run) which helps you structure and format your content better.
Overall I have found the tool extremely helpful for creating more indepth content as it does a good job urging the writer to include the variety of related and neighboring terms (in order to increase your score)
Serpstat Clustering Tool is another innovative tool that uses Google to better understand and analyze relevancy.
This tool should be used to make sense of your long keyword lists. Instead of simply word-matching, the tool analyzes Google SERPs for every single term in your list and groups them based on how many overlapping URLs each query triggers in Google.
The logic is simple: The more identical results two SERPs have, the more related the search queries are.
This way, instead of creating a group based on a common modifier, the tool will form groups based on each keyword meaning and let you discover keywords which have no words in common, yet can (and should) be used within one copy:
Spyfu has a separate tab listing related keywords to the one you put in. The nice thing about the tool is that it excludes phrases that contain your core term.
You can play with helpful filters to see more popular or less competitive keywords.
Read more about Spyfu related keyword analysis here.
4. Google: Related Searches, Google Trends, Google Correlate
Google is kind enough to provide us with lots of useful data that can be used for content planning and optimization. Here are three Google tools that are useful for discovering related terms:
Google Correlate is like Google Trends in reverse. With Google Trends, you type in a query and get back a series of its frequency (over time, or in each US state). With Google Correlate, you enter a data series (the target) and get back queries whose frequency follows a similar pattern.
In our case, we don’t have the data series, but the tool can also work with keywords: Simply put in your search term, and Google will calculate the trending pattern and show matching patterns.
Mind that correlation does not necessarily equal causation, so you may come across some funny terms. Don’t be discouraged! Keep running the tool and put together a list of related terms that do match your topic.
My favorite thing about the tool (and why I do use it) is that you can exclude your initial search term from the returned list which means you can prevent the tool from phrase-matching (which you already did when doing your traditional keyword research) and force it to come up with related phrases instead:
Google Trends
Google Trends is a more straightforward tool: Simply type in your core term and scroll down to “Related queries”, i.e. “Users searching for your term also searched for these queries”.
The nicest thing about this tool is that it shows “Breakout” queries, i.e. queries that “had a tremendous increase, probably because these queries are new and had few (if any) prior searches.” These could be an opportunity for trending content!
Google’s “Searches related to”
Finally Google’s “Searches related to” can give you some ideas where to expand your core terms. Notice how Google is helpfully showing new terms it’s suggesting in bold:
IMN Featured Snippet Tool collects those results and organizes them by (1) query they are triggered by and (2) popularity (i.e. based on how many queries trigger them):
Expand your keyword lists! This will help you create more in-depth content, diversify your rankings and generate exposure from other Google search result sections, like featured snippets and “People Also Ask.”
Thanks to Search Engine Watch for this great article, for more articles like this visit their website.
Danny Sullivan of Google has confirmed that Google is updating its algorithm. He called it another broad core update.
How Big Is This Google Update?
Based on what I have been told, this update is important. The information that I was given is that this update is one of the biggest updates in years.
In the past, when a big Google update has happened, it usually has meant the incorporation of something that profoundly changed how sites are ranked. Last year’s update incorporated what Google called Neural Matching.
So it may be reasonable to assume something on this scale may have been implemented, judging from the credible inside information I received.
What’s the Goal of This Broad Core Update?
A broad core update means that Google is not targeting any niche or any particular signals, like quality. In a broad core algorithm update, Google is not targeting anything.
Some in the SEO industry theorize that Google “targets” specific industries. But Google’s John Mueller has consistently denied that broad core updates target specific niches.
Broad core updates do not target websites, niches, or qualities. That is why Google has said that in broad core updates, there is nothing to fix.
The best approach to understanding a broad core update is to set aside preconceptions that Google is targeting low page quality or niches. Then focus on relevance related factors.
How to Respond to a Broad Core Update
I have analysed many websites that have been affected by broad core updates.
One common issue I have discovered is what looks to me like a change in how Google interprets a search query. This can affect how a page is ranked.
Many other factors can affect a web page’s ranking as well, such as links. Linksremain a highly important ranking factor.
What Is a Broad Core Update?
Broad core updates are improvements to Google’s overall algorithm for the purpose of better understanding of search queries and webpages.
These improvements help Google to more accurately match search queries to webpages and improve user satisfaction.
It can be said that the underlying goal of all broad core updates has been to improve user satisfaction.
Neural matching was not targeting anything. It was simply a way for improving the relevance of the web pages in the search results so that they more adequately answered a search query.
Why Was the Update Called Florida 2?
Google’s Florida Update was an important one in the early 2000s. It was so named because the algorithm change coincided with the Pubcon Florida SEO conference. Where SEO Consultants from around the world all joined together and shared their latest search engine optimisation tips and tricks.
The whispers about this update also coincides with the 2019 Pubcon Florida conference, so it was decided by Brett Tabke, founder of Pubcon and WebmasterWorld that this update will be named, Google Florida Update 2. WebmasterWorld has traditionally named the Google Updates.
As we noted earlier, Google is now officially calling this the March 2019 Core Update.
There is Nothing to Fix?
Sullivan offered the previous guidance from March 12, 2018 on broad core updates. That guidance was a statement made in a tweet that there is nothing to fix.
Here’s what that tweet said:
“There’s no ‘fix’ for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.”
In my opinion, what this may mean is that this may be about relevance of content and/or links to search queries. It’s a change on Google’s side.
That makes it challenging to identify why a page is no longer ranking. But from my analyses of sites that lost rankings, those clues are there.
By 2020, 30% of all website sessions will be conducted without a screen.
Now, you may be asking yourself, how is that possible?
It turns out that voice-only search allows users to browse the web the Internet and consumer information without actually having to scroll through sites on desktops and mobile devices. And this new technology may be the key to successful brands in the future.
What Is Voice Search?
Voice search essentially allows users to speak into a device as opposed to typing keywords into a search query to generate results.
Audio technology uses speech recognition to understand what users are saying with extreme precision. It then delivers results orally to the user.
Although it seems like a brand-new concept, voice search technology has been around for a while. Programs such as speech-to-text and voice dialing are great examples of voice search.
In addition, programs such as Google Assistant, Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa all utilize voice search capabilities.
Although specific devices can be optimized for voice search, brands, platforms and websites can be optimized for it as well.
For example, Amazon Alexa can seamlessly search through Spotify’s musical inventory, scan Wikipedia or shop on Amazon quickly at a user’s command. That demonstrates how certain brands chose to optimize their interfaces to be compatible with voice search.
How Voice Search Impacts SEO Rankings
Voice search drastically improves user experience – and because of that, by the year 2020, half of all online searches will be made through voice search.
Due to its prolific use, search engines such as Google are placing a higher emphasis on voice search optimization.
After all, the point of SEO is to rank websites accurately so users can find the best information for their search query as quickly as possible. User experience is, ultimately, at the forefront of search engine optimization.
By January 2018, there was an average of one billion voice searches every month, proving that voice search is on the rise.
But it is important to remember that voice search SEO and traditional website SEO are different. Therefore, some factors that affect website rankings may or may not have the same effect on voice search – and vice versa.
Luckily, there are some tips that can help you balance the two SEO strategies and rank your website for search listings and voice search.
4 Tips To Optimize For Voice Search
When users use voice search, they are typically hoping to complete an action – such as playing a song or purchasing a product – or information on a subject.
But despite the two different intentions, Google uses the same algorithm to rank sites. Below are 5 simple steps to improve voice search rankings, no matter your goal.
1. Ensure Your Website Loads Quickly
Just like traditional search engine optimization, Google voice search favors websites that load quickly. Ensure that:
Your site is responsive and works well on mobile devices.
Images are optimized.
Files are compressed.
You utilize website caching to improve page speed.
Your server’s response time is reduced.
And other tasks that speed up traditional websites.
2. Write The Way That You Speak
When users search for content on desktop or mobile, they tend to write in short, almost bullet-pointed phrases. For example, if a user wanted to find a great web designer, they could type “top web design companies” into Google.
But if they used voice search, a user might say “Who are the top web design companies in the world?”
To ensure your content is optimized for voice search as well, include those long-tail keywords that sound more natural as opposed to shorter, snappier keywords that perform well in desktop SEO.
Plus, keep phrases short and simple. Voice search results are typically written at a 9th-grade reading levelat most. So, although your information may be high-level, break it down in a way that is easy for anyone to comprehend.
Pro tip: Although phrases should be short, long-form content still ranks better on both voice search and traditional search listings. Aim for web page content that lands between 1850 and 2500 words.
3. Include Featured Blocks Of Content
The average voice search result is about 29 words long. But although we know that shorter answers perform better, how can we guarantee the content Google will identify and read to users?
Create a featured snippet, of course!
A featured snippet – also called position zero, answer box, or quick answers – is essentially a summary answer from a web page. In desktop search listings, these snippets appear just after the paid ads but before the regular search listings.
To optimize your content for an identifiable featured snippet, include a concise summary of your main content above the fold under 29 words.
Sections that use H-tags, lists, and bullet points are easily readable by Google and thus perform well. Plus, be sure to include your long-tail keywords within the featured snippet.
4. Concentrate On Local Searches
22% of voice search queries are looking for location-based content. Therefore, brands have a higher chance of producing voice search content if they invest in local content.
Try using phrases like “near me”
Does Voice Search Drive Website Traffic To My Website?
Although it doesn’t appear that voice search results directly contribute to an uptick in your Google Analytics reports, it does drive traffic to your website!
Firstly, when Google reads results from voice search listings, it gives sites a shout out through a simple “According to ___”. This, of course, increases brand awareness.
In addition, users can scroll through written dictations of search results, which include links to the websites used as resources. This enables them to navigate to the site traditionally and increases organic traffic when they do so.
Finally, voice search can improve other important metrics, such as online sales or media plays on websites like Pandora and Spotify.
Can I View My Voice Search Ranking?
Voice search is important to increasing brand awareness and conversions. So, can you view your voice search rankings to see where you’re at and make improvements?
Well, the long story short is, probably not… yet.
In January 2018, it was reported that a digital agency called Roast built an automation software that enabled them to run various queries and report on results for their clients. Although this report isn’t perfect and a little rough around the edges, it will likely pave the way for more accurate voice search ranking reports in the future.
Until then, my best advice is to keep optimizing for SEO and voice search SEO best practices. Eventually, you’ll be able to view concrete reports showing the fruits of your labor and make more specific improvements.
Conclusion
Investing in voice search optimization is proven to improve brand awareness, online purchases and revenue.
In fact, one study found that voice search eCommerce resulted in $1.8 billion in Amazon revenue. That figure alone is expected to increase to $40 billion by the year 2022.
But despite the ever-growing prominence of voice search, its popularity and professional use are still on the rise. But if you optimize your site for voice search now, you’ll likely be ahead of the competition and see strong voice search rankings that will effectively grow your brand long-term.
Thanks to Forbes for this great article, for more like this visit their website.
For any business to succeed in today’s competitive market, it is essential to make use of online marketing.
Only companies that have their presence online can reach a more comprehensive set of customers.
Not every online site will be able to attract a good number of users.
The chances of any Viewer to navigate to a particular location will very much depend on the website ranking on the search engine results.
To be able to rank high, the website must be optimized as per the requirement and rules set by the search engines.
Creating a site is one thing but optimizing it in a way that meets the elements is a job that requires skills and effort.
The market is flooded with many SEO companies who claim to create a website and optimize it however not every SEO Agency will be able to provide you with the best and guaranteed results.
The challenge is that most of the website owners and even the service provider are not aware of the methods to optimize a particular site.
The algorithm that most of the search engine platform uses also keep changing.
Below we have listed down 4 of the various methods by which you can optimize your website and improve its ranking in the search engine results.
1. Include video content on your site. Most of the online users of today prefer a website that has video content that is informative and as per their requirement. The increasing number of daily users on YouTube is a reason enough to make you include videos on your website.
2. Include informative content that is unique and free from any plagiarism. If you are copying from another website then the search engine will lower your ranking and hence by adding only genuine content on your site is very much required.
3.Select proper keywords that are trending currently online. Adding the right kind of keyword in your website can help you except to increase your website ranking as well as the chances of a user navigating directly to your site.
4. Make sure that you update your website and its content on a regular basis. Websites that are not used on a regular basis are automatically lowered in the search results ranking. Even if you make small changes to make them so that you’re listing continuously to improve.
Thanks to Tech Avy for this article, for more like this visit their website.
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