Of all the many different aspects of digital marketing which entrepreneurs and small business owners must wrangle, SEO is widely regarded as the most complex and frustrating.
Mumbo jumbo. The Dark Arts. Techy stuff best left to an expert.
These are usually the responses I get when I say I’m an SEO expert. In reality, search engine optimisation is no more mysterious than any other digital marketing projects.
To go right back to basics, the term SEO simply means to build or adjust your website in such a way that search engines – in 90% of cases, Google – can easily understand what the site is about. Google doesn’t play favourites; it simply seeks to offer correct, high quality results to people using its search tool. The faster, more easily and more accurately you can allow it to check the pages of your website and match the content against search queries, the better your website will rank in results. This is what’s called ‘on-page’ SEO, in that it concerns things you do ON each page, to improve your rankings. There is also ‘off-page’ SEO, but that’s a topic for another article…
So. It all sounds straight-forward, right? It (mostly) is! One major fact to wrap your head around, though, is that Google ‘bots’ don’t read websites in the same way that people do…
For starters, these bots (also known as spiders or crawlers) view each page of your website independently of the other pages, as well as considering the site as a whole. This means each page of your website is a new opportunity for you to target a different, relevant keyword. Also – crucially – search bots crawl your website at incredible speeds, hunting for the keywords they’re after (for example, ‘Sydney vegan desserts’) in several specific locations on each page. Knowing what these locations are, and how to edit the data they contain, is the key to optimising your website.
But first, consider what keywords you would like to be ‘findable’ for. Ensuring that those keywords are right where they need to be – i.e. where Google is looking – is the most important step to enabling your page to be ranked well on search engines.
So, where do Google bots check for keywords? Here are our Top 5 locations to check that your keywords on each page are present and accounted for…
- Copy. Google loves words (over 300 of them on each page is its preference!) and it wants to find the keyword it’s hunting for several times throughout the copy. About 2-3 is right for a 300-word page and have them in the first sentence for bonus points.
- Meta description. This is the sentence or two which appears (along with your business name, and the title of the website page) in a Google search result.
- Photo information. Your title and the alternate text of your photos should contain your keyword for that page.
- Heading and subheadings. This can be tricky, which is why it’s important your focus keyword for each page isn’t too big a ‘reach’ but instead reflects the purpose of the page realistically.
- Your ‘slug’ – the extra bit added to your URL after the ‘slash’ at the end!
Over the years, Google has gotten cleverer at spotting when website owners are trying to ‘game’ the system. The bots which determine which results we see when we search a phrase rely on sensitive algorithms to determine which pages are a good, natural result, versus those which are trying to illegitimately rank for that search query. They increasingly detect and punish sites like this with poor search rankings.
There’s no need to ‘fake’ it, however, if you follow a sound SEO strategy and slowly but surely improve your site over time. The above tactics, combined with solid off-page work, will see websites in most categories improve within weeks, with page one rankings within 3-4 months an achievable goal for websites in niche or low-competition categories!
