WordPress remains one of the most popular platforms to use to create stunning and effective websites, no matter what the niche. It’s used by businesses and personal bloggers and everyone in between.
It’s popular because it’s relatively simple to use and there are so many plugins, themes and other options available to spruce up your site’s appearance and to expand your website’s functionality.
Let’s take a look at some ways you can optimise your WordPress theme and get the most out of the platform. Optimising your theme will also help increase the overall performance of your website.
#1 – Choose the Right Web Hosting
You site’s hosting can really play a significant role in how well your WordPress website performs on a consistent basis. For example, shared hosting on a cheap hosting plan is not going to be as good as a more expensive dedicated hosting package.
Shared hosting might be fine for the personal blogger, but businesses will want to consider upgrading to dedicated WordPress hosting to make the most of their website’s performance. Dedicated hosting is more stable and secure and generally faster than generic shared hosting.
Not only is the right package important, but so is choosing the best company to host your website with. Opt for a hosting company that has a positive track record, particularly when it comes to hosting WordPress websites.
#2 – Be Sure To Optimise Your Images
Images are one area that can really affect your site speed. A fast loading website is vital in the modern world, as it’s one of the key things Google looks for when ranking websites. Slow websites don’t rank very well. That’s just a fact.
A site filled with large images will be exceptionally slow to load. Every image needs to be optimised for the web, and there are plugins you can install and use that will optimise your images for you. Many of these plugins are free.
A better practice is to ensure images are small files to begin with, as the more plugins you add to your WordPress theme, the more they can slow down your site or even cause glitches and conflicts.
#3 – Add a WordPress Cache Plugin To Your Theme
This particular type of plugin has been designed to boost the overall speed of your WordPress website. It achieves this by caching information, which then allows your website to load pages by skipping some steps in the process. The result is a faster loading website that pleases both visitors and the search engines.
There are quite a few caching plugins available for WordPress and many of them are free. Be sure to check compatibility with your current them and also take note of how many downloads and positive reviews the caching plugin has received before downloading and installing it on your website.
#4 – Keep the Number Of Plugins To a Minimum
The real beauty of WordPress is that there are so many plugins available to build out your website and add functionality to it. While this is indeed a good thing, it’s also common knowledge that too many plugins can have a negative impact on your site’s overall performance, as hinted at earlier.
It can really depend on the type of plugins that you have installed, what the optimum amount is. As a general rule though, try and keep your plugins to a maximum of 5 to be sure of consistent site speed and to reduce the chance of glitches and conflicts.
#5 – Don’t Embed Too Many Videos
While videos are one of the most consumed types of media on the internet today, embedding too many within your website can once again affect your site’s performance, most notably page loading speed.
If you have videos uploaded to a platform such as YouTube, or you want to reference the videos of others, rather than embed them, simply take a screenshot of the video thumbnail and link out to it. This saves using up your own website’s resources and your page loading speed won’t be affected.
This is not to say that you can’t embed any videos at all, but strive to keep those to a minimum and mostly link out to videos instead.
#6 – Eliminate Spam From Your Site Comments
All websites are going to be prone to receiving loads of spam comments, usually from bots. Too many spam comments, even if they haven’t been approved to show on your posts, can consume site resources.
The best way to combat this is to install a plugin that fights spam, such as the Akismet plugin, for example. There are actually quite a few spam buster plugins out there and, once again, many are free to download and use.
#7 – Give Some Thought To The WordPress Theme You Choose
You want a theme that’s light and well-optimised for a user-friendly experience and a theme that the SERPs will favour.
Some themes are so full of extraneous options and plugins, that they really are sluggish to load once your website is live on the web.
Less is more, or simple is best when it comes to choosing a WordPress theme.
Often it’s in your best interests to go for the paid version of a theme rather than the free version, as you get support with these themes and they are usually more highly optimised for functionality, speed and stability.
#8 – Pay Close Attention To Your Homepage
Your website’s homepage is going to be the first port of call for many of your website’s visitors. It’s also going to be the most linked to page on your site.
Your homepage not only needs to look good, be informative and easy to navigate, it also needs to load quickly. If it takes forever to load when a visitor lands on it, say goodbye to that visitor in most instances.
The Wrap
A well-optimised WordPress theme and website leads to both a fantastic experience for your visitors and will also find favour with the search engines. Be sure to always be optimising your theme for best results.
There are many facets that make up effective SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Without implementing best SEO practices, your business website will find itself in the search engine wilderness.
One area of SEO that’s important is links. This can include internal linking within your website’s content and pages, as well as external links that point back to your website.
If you’re wondering why links are important for SEO, then you’ll discover why in this post.
Why Links Are a Vital Component of Good SEO
Some people wonder if link building and internal linking is still even relevant to SEO. The answer is that it will likely always be highly relevant. In fact, Google still places huge emphasis on backlinks, as links that point back to your website indicate to Google and the other SERPs that your content is valuable enough to link to and reference.
PageRank is a major cog in Google’s algorithm these days, and what PageRank does is count the number of quality backlinks to a website, or a content page on that website. This gives PageRank a good estimate regarding how valuable that website it and will rank it higher in search results if PageRank deems it worthy of a promotion.
What PageRank is assuming, is that a website or web page with lots of backlinks must be important, and will therefore rank it higher than other content that is similar, but with less backlinks.
One way to get backlinks is to write guest posts for other sites in a similar niche to yours. You give that site free content and in return they give you a link back to your site.
Backlinks are not the only links of importance though, when it comes to good SEO. Two other types of links are:
Linking out
Internal links
It’s always a good idea to link out to another site at least once in your content. The link has to be relevant, and the more authoritative the site you link to (for example Wikipedia), the better. This helps Google understand how relevant your content is when it comes to serving up search results for a query. It also demonstrates that you are being fair with your linking and that your content has some quality to it.
Internal links are handy for navigational purposes when users are on your site, as you can link to other relevant content you’ve written about. Internal linking is also helpful for SEO purposes, too. These links help the SERPs crawl your website more efficiently, and also gives search engines a far better understanding of how all your content links together and is relevant. Internal linking is good for your visitors as well as search engines.
In Conclusion
Inbound, outbound and internal links will always be important for good SEO, as they are a vital cog in the wheel on so many levels. If you’re not sure about linking, how to add links or how to get backlinks, you would be well served to consult with a specialist in SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is designed to achieve higher rankings for your site’s web pages when someone does a search in Google or one of the other search engines. Higher rankings mean more visibility, which in turn leads to more traffic to your business website.
But how does SEO help drive traffic? What does it actually do that increases a website’s search engine rankings and does it really work?
Let’s take a look at a few key areas where SEO can give your website and its content a boost in the rankings so you receive more organic visitors to your site.
Create Content Around Popular and Relevant Topics
Any content you post on your website should have relevance to your brand and the industry you are in. Regularly adding new blog posts is a proven method of drawing in more traffic.
The trick here is to target topics that are popular in your niche, themes or questions that people are already searching for. Once you have some ideas for popular topics, you’ll then want to target some keyword phrases that get good searches every month, but ones that also don’t have a lot of competition.
Google Trends is a handy tool to discover whether a topic is popular or not. For keyword research tools, you could use the Google Keyword Planner or one of a number of other free keyword research tools you can access online.
The more relevant and popular keyword phrases you can target in your content, the more chance you have of that content ranking high in a search and getting traffic.
Guest Posts and Backlinks
Writing guest posts for other blogs and websites is the most popular way of getting a link back to your own website. Backlinks themselves can help bring in traffic from the guest post, but most importantly, backlinks indicate to Google’s algorithms that your content is popular and of a high enough quality that people are willing to link to it.
This results in your content ranking higher in the SERPs and thus leads to more traffic to your site.
Off-Site SEO
Creating a Facebook page for your business and adding short posts regularly with links back to your site is one example of off-site SEO. Also, the more engagement your social media posts get is an indicator to the SERPs, once again, that your content is popular. Increased search engine rankings is the result.
What’s known as social signals is now an integral part of Google’s algorithms and the better the social signals are for your site, the better your website will rank.
Have Your Site Audited By A SEO Expert
The most effective way to implement SEO into your website and for it to produce effective results is to consult with a professional in the field of search engine optimisation.
They will perform a professional SEO audit of your website using the latest SEO tools. Once this is done, your consultant will then be able to determine where your SEO efforts can be improved so your website starts to receive the organic traffic it deserves.
Knowing just how important SEO is to the success of an online business, it’s interesting that most people are quite clueless about how to find and choose the right types of keywords. Yes, they know how to choose and target a few generic keywords, and they probably stalk a competitors website from time to time, but the sad news is that none of this works effectively. Why?
To start with, they’re not taking into account just how competitive their target keywords are;
They’re not considering the ROI they could be getting by targeting specific keywords; and
They’re not correctly assessing the resources they’ll need to be able to compete and win.
Imagine the results if you had full knowledge of the keywords users search for during their online journey! Every single aspect of your sales funnel would be strengthened.
Your message would be clear and more powerful;
There would be a huge increase in your click-through rate, simply because your content would match the search intentions of your potential customers; and
There would be a massive increase in your conversion rates, delivering a huge competitor edge and increased ROI.
So now you know the results you could be achieving, let’s dive in and get started. We’ll start with what’s required to match your keywords to a customer’s buying cycle.
A potential customer’s journey;
The keywords that relate to every stage of that journey;
The competitive performance of each keyword at each stage; and
How to compete by determining what these keywords are.
Explaining SEO Competitive Analysis
All site owners should be doing competitive analysis, yet many are not doing it and some are not doing it very well. Well-executed competitive analysis can become your roadmap for what needs to be done to improve your website, to be as good if not better than your competitors.
Competitive analysis is the ideal tool for identifying the weaknesses and strengths of both your site and your competitors’ sites. With this information you can quickly determine areas of your site that need improvement, as well as identifying areas where your competitors are weak – these are the areas you can capitalise on.
Why SEO Competitive Analysis Is so Important
it’s not good enough to simply guess which content to create, keywords to target, or links to build. You need to see what’s working for others, then build on their success. Therefore, “SEO competitive analysis is the researching of keywords, links, content, and so on, of your SEO competitors with a view to reverse-engineering the more profitable elements into your own SEO strategy”.
Imagine you’re the owner-operator of a small supermarket, just one of three supermarkets in town. You know your customers are happy because they tell you so, but you also know that, because they’re not able to purchase everything in your store, they also visit the other supermarkets. So what do you do? It’s obvious, isn’t it! You visit the other stores to gather competitive intelligence, to discover the popular items they’re offering to your customers. Now you can offer these products, or even superior products, in your own store, thus gaining more business for you and helping your customers make fewer trips by doing all their shopping in your store. A win-win situation for both you and your customers!
What SEO Competitive Analysis Involves
Neil Patel says that ‘your competitors can become your greatest allies if you allow them’. Imagine this: take someone else’s success, reverse engineer it and identify their weaknesses. You now have the knowledge to win more often, and win bigger. After all, that’s what competition is all about.
SEO is simply following best practices. There’s a right and wrong way of doing everything, whether it be keyword research or building internal links. However, we often see webmasters declaring that they’re using best practices and implementing every aspect of Google’s SEO guide, yet still failing to achieve top-3 results. As we can see from the results, some best practices simply don’t work, while others only exist within a certain niche. That’s why we have competition research.
What we know for certain, though, is that websites that rank higher than you are doing something more effectively than you, and we’re about to find out what that is. When you perform an SEO Competitor Analysis, you’ll discover –
What your competitors’ weaknesses are – which will allow you to capitalise on them;
What does and doesn’t work in your industry;
How to find, then replicate your competitors strengths;
What SEO tasks you need to prioritise; and
How difficult it can be to outperform competitors in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
Uncovering SEO Opportunities
SEO Competitive Analysis is a powerful research strategy designed to help you get more traffic, earn more conversions, and ultimately rank higher. This happens when you uncover SEO possibilities not previously recognised.
Now you’ll have answers to questions like these –
Who are my SEO competitors?
What keyword should I be targeting?
What topics should I be covering?
Where do I find links?
What must I do in order to beat the competition?
While there are a number of ways to carry out SEO Competitive Analysis, what’s basically required is this: you need to analyse the keywords, links, content, and so on that works for your competition, then use this information to improve your own SEO endeavours.
Comparing SEO Competition to Business Competition
The first thing you need to determine is who your SEO competitors are. Interestingly, your business rivals are not necessarily your SEO competitors, and your SEO competitors are not necessarily your business rivals. You need to understand that when we say SEO competitors, we’re only talking about those you’re competing with for a high ranking in the search engine results pages.
If your business competitor is not ranking in the SERPS you’re targeting, then as far as SEO competition is concerned, they’re not a threat to you.
User Intent and Google SERPS
If you want to win web traffic, knowing the right keywords to target is not enough; what you need is to understand ‘searcher intent’ for your specific keywords. What does this mean? It means you need to get inside the mind of the web searcher to discover what they’re really looking for. Yes, we know this doesn’t sound feasible, but luckily Google has already done most of the work for us. Start by Googling your target keyword.
How to Identify Your SEO Competitors
The two types of SEO competitors are domain competitors and topic competitors. Both of these are crucial for SEO strategy.
Domain Competitors: These websites are the ones that are targeting the same keywords that you are. They’re over all their webpages. To locate your domain competitors, start with your domain and all keywords applicable to your niche. Make a list of domains that rank for the specific keywords.
Topic Competitors: These are not entire websites; they are specific webpages that rank for your chosen topics. To locate your topic competitors, start with a specific group of keywords, then find all the ranking webpages that target them.
Once you start identifying and tracking your domain competitors you’ll notice huge ranking variations across your niche. This will be your opportunity to monitor how successful domains develop their content strategy.
At the same time, it’s vital that you know your topic competitors when creating new webpages. Before you create your page, make a list of the most-clicked, highest-ranking webpages on your topic. This is a way to discover what both search engines and users expect to see on popular pages that cover your topic.
How to Find Your Domain Competitors
In order to determine who the kingpins of your industry are, you need to learn (and then help yourself to!) the marketing strategies and SEO that keeps them on top of the pile. It won’t be necessary to search the top one-hundred.
How to Find Your Topic Competitors
To determine what works on your target SERPS right now, you need to analyse your topic competitors. It’s highly likely that the way webpages have been set up by your ranking competitors will be what search engines are looking for in a relevant page.
To check the results, get the highest positions and see how their content is structured, how they present their titles, and how they write their URLs. Many webmasters do this manually; one-by-one they Google the keywords they want to target; they study the SERP, then enter the data into a huge Excel spreadsheet.
Let’s say your topic competitors have many backlinks. We can assume, then, that it’s a very competitive vertical you’re targeting, so you’re going to need a heavy link-building campaign if your aim is to make it to the top three.
On the other hand, some results will show more backlinks than others on the SERP, which will automatically affect its ranking position. However, if you’re not trying to rank your homepage for nonbranded keywords, and the rest of the SERP is okay, you can then exclude that specific result from your competitive SEO analysis.
Once you’ve located your topic competitors, go ahead and click on any of them to find their ranking keywords.
Analysing Your Competitors’ Content
Copying Ideas for Great Content from Your Competitors: One of the best and easiest ways of finding the right direction for your website content is to look for published inspiration on your competitors pages.
Your Competitors’ Best Website Content: One way of developing ideas for your content is by using keywords, while another is to check out the top performing content on your competitors’ website.
For the purpose of this exercise, we’re trying to determine which content scored the most links for our competitors. We know that links are one of the biggest ranking factors, so we know we need to focus on topics that others are happy to link to.
Set out below is one of most effective and reliable ways of creating content in SEO –
Find your competitions’ top content;
Create new content that dramatically improves upon it in as many ways as possible;
Now start promoting your own content to a similar group of people.
Note that we said to ‘Dramatically Improve upon’ your competitors’ content, not just recreate it, because that would have little or no chance of success. Try adding more data, additional features, amazing visuals, anything at all that will make your content more useful and/or more appealing.
We’ll now look at how your competitors create their content. Once you have analysed their high-ranking content strategies, you’ll be able to –
Consider new ideas for your own content; and
Improve your rankings on your own pages.
Closing the Keyword Gaps
What are keyword gaps? These are the keywords that your competitors are already ranking highly for, however your own website is not ranking at all for these keywords, or perhaps it’s ranking low.
What Does the Term ‘Competitive Keyword Analysis ‘ Mean?
Competitive keyword analysis, also referred to as keyword gap analysis, is a process whereby valuable keywords that your competitors are ranking highly for are identified. These are keywords for which you’re not ranking highly.
Consider the following important points –
These keywords are ones that you should rank for, or words you could be ranking for better;
These are keywords that should be valuable. By this we mean related to your business, high-volume, or likely to convert; and
In order to get a more accurate analysis, we suggest you compare two or more competitors.
Obviously, both you and your competitors could theoretically rank for any number of keywords (perhaps thousands) so this can be a difficult type of analysis to do manually. So, what are we looking for? We’re aiming to find –
High-volume keywords; one’s where you’re ranking in positions 4 to 15, words that could use a boost; and
Valuable keywords that you’re currently not ranking for at all.
It could be that ‘lack of relevance’ is the reason your page is not ranking as well as it should be. By ‘relevance’ we mean certain keyword clusters that are covered by your competition, but are not being covered by you. The result is that the search engines consider you to be a less-relevant source when compared to other pages. You need to add more relevant keywords, and even entire topics, in order to –
Provide a much-needed boost to the relevance of your pages now that you’re totally covering the chosen topic; and
Increase your search traffic because, thanks to the added keywords, you’ll start moving into new SERPS.
Find New Prospects by Analysing Competitors’ Backlinks
Explaining SEO Link Gap Analysis
Link Gap Analysis works very similar to our keywords process, whereby we identify links earned by your competitors, ones that you might also be able to obtain.
When it comes to ranking, links are very important. In fact, without links it’s very difficult to rank at all. On the other hand, it’s not easy to obtain good links. So, in order to determine where good links might be, links that may be easier to obtain, we use data and intelligence. We’re going to look for sites that are already linked to your competitors, but not linked to you.
The reason this works is because the sites already linked to your competitors have already shown they have an interest in the topic. What you need to do is prove that your resource is much better than your competitors. If you can do this, it’s highly likely you’ll earn a link as well. The added bonus with this process is that you’ll discover the highly-relevant pages you need to get links from.
One of the most powerful indicators of any site’s authority to search engines is backlinks, specifically referring domains. This explains why link building is an absolute necessity for long-term ranking success. Perhaps the major component of any link-building campaign is to find new, high-quality backlink possibilities by analysing the backlinks profiles of your competitors.
How do you do this? Locate all websites that link to at least two of your domain competitors. If you see that a website has already linked back to a number of websites in your niche, then you know there’s a good chance they’ll be happy to link to you as well. In particular, look at websites that provide “dofollow” links if you’re trying to improve your rankings. Speaking of “dofollow” links, you’ll notice that some websites randomly mark all their outgoing links as “nofollow”. This is not something you should be doing. Backlinks from those will not help your ranking; however, they may bring some users to your pages.
Now that you have located websites that link to at least two of your competitors, you need to see the context for those backlinks by going to the pages that link to your competition. Let’s say they’ve linked to your competitors in connection to a listicle on your industry: now you can make contact with them and submit your own product for their review. Once you have a number of potentially good-quality backlinks you can commence your reach-out campaign.
In order to achieve higher rankings, you need to focus on the overall number of linking domains and backlinks, specifically dofollow links, and the range of C-blocks and IPs in your link profile. With these metrics increasing, you’re basically telling the search engine that your website is trusted and authoritative. Keep in mind that it takes time to build links; it takes even longer for a search engine to start weighing them into your rankings. Also note that, if your website receives a heap of low-quality backlinks in one hit, it could be assumed that you bought them which would result in a ranking penalty.
Continue Tracking Competitors’ Backlinks and Rankings
The process of keeping track of your competition is not a one-off thing. You may have obtained all the information you needed from their backlink profiles and from their content, but remember that SEO is always changing, so you still need to monitor them closely.
Continue Monitoring Your Competitors’ Rankings
Continuously monitoring your competitors rankings is important for a couple of reasons –
If any major algorithms shake up your industry, you’ll be the first to notice. Every year we see thousands of minor updates, but we also see some major algorithm updates. There are always going to be fluctuations, what with Google upgrading their calculations and different factors gaining and losing weight. You need to keep a close eye on these movements; this way you’re fully informed and can make an accurate diagnosis of your own changes in rankings.
You will have immediate knowledge of your competitions’ optimisation efforts. You’ll know it’s time to start investigating if you refresh your competition’s rankings and notice that their visibility and rankings have increased.
Let’s say you notice that one of your competitors’ pages suddenly shoots up in ranking for a certain keyword. When this occurs, it’s time to run a full-scale analysis. Start with their backlinks, and you might want to try using something like Internet Archive Way-Back Machine. Here you’ll discover billions of cached webpages, so you’ll be able to see straight away if your competition has done a major content overhaul.
Check to See Changes in Your Competitors’ Backlinks Profiles
It may be that your competitors’ rankings have dramatically improved not because of their content, but because of their backlink profiles. You’ll need to analyse both the new backlinks and the new referring domains they’ve located for their content.
In Conclusion
Competition is normal; it exists in every profession and in every industry. However, competition in SEO can be extremely beneficial, far more-so than the phrase ‘Competition spurs innovation’.
As optimisation specialists and webmasters, we can determine what actually works by using our competitors’ rise and fall in rankings. By checking out their backlink profiles and web content, we have easy access to information on what search engines really value and what they expect to see on webpages they are already ranking highly.
What is search intent and how does it affect the search engine rankings of your website?
Free traffic is the very best traffic you can get. Rather than paying big dollars on advertising to get exposure for your site, if you can rank well in Google and the other SERPs, you’ll receive a steady, increasing flow of organic traffic that doesn’t cost a cent.
Let’s take a closer look at search intent and what it means for your website rankings.
What Is Search Intent?
Also known as user intent, searcher intent and audience intent, search intent is a term used to describe the purpose behind an online search. People search online looking for specific information, or a product or service.
As a website owner, you want to know how to tap into search intent and use keywords, phrases and methods that captures search intent and impresses Google, so the SERP ranks your website higher. What Google is aiming to do is rank the most relevant sites or content the highest so it accurately matches the search intent of the user.
A search term typed into Google might be specific, but Google’s algorithm is also striving to understand the actual intent behind the search term that’s been input.
If you can understand the intent of your target audience and create content around that intent, you’ll have a far better chance of achieving first page rankings when someone does a relevant search.
The different types of search intent can basically be broken down into 4 categories:
Information – The user is searching for specific information or is looking for the solution to a problem or the answer to a question.
Navigational – In this instance, the user is looking for a specific website.
Transactional – Someone might be looking to buy an item online and is browsing around for the best deal.
Commercial Investigation – This is more about researching a product someone wishes to buy soon, but they haven’t yet made up their mind. As an example, what’s the best camera for a beginner?
Optimising Content For Search Intent
Whatever landing page you want to attract visitors to, it needs to be relevant to the search intent of the visitor. Subheadings that are questions are an effective way of drawing in traffic from people looking for an answer to a question. This why having sections for FAQ on your site is always a good idea, along with answering questions in your site’s content.
If the search intent of the user is based on finding information, you won’t want them landing on a product page that’s trying to directly sell them something. Likely this will scare the visitor off, or at the least make them feel somewhat duped.
For product pages, more commercial keyword phrases that are directed at potential buyers is the best way to attract your target audience.
In Conclusion
If you can understand the search intent of the users you want to attract to your site and create content around that intent, you’ll be able to boost your website rankings and increase the traffic to your site.
To a beginner, the concept of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can seem like complex wizardry that mere mortals could never begin to comprehend. This guide aims to demystify SEO by taking you through a quick crash course on the basics – including what it is, why you need it and the factors that determine success. At the end of it, you should have a good enough foundation to get you started.
Because Google takes up more than 90% of all online searches globally (excluding China), other search engines like Bing and Yahoo generally follow the giant’s lead.
So, although we’ll single out Google a lot in this book, the information presented is relevant for all popular search engines.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (or simply SEO) refers to a set of techniques that online marketers employ to get their website, or certain pages of their website, to gain more “organic” or “free” visibility in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). A search engine results page is the list of web pages returned to you by the search engine as a response to your search query:
All popular search engines provide search results ranked in order of their relevance to the user as determined by the engine’s algorithm. These are what we refer to as organic search results because they’re free and not influenced by paid advertisements. The higher your website appears on the search results pages of the common search queries (words and phrases) used by your potential customers, the more organic traffic you will get from search engines.
Local vs National SEO
There’re two main types of Geographic SEO: Local SEO and National SEO. In Local SEO, the focus is on promoting your business online within a specific geographic area such as town, city or state. Optimising for local SEO ensures your site ranks highly for “local” searches – where searchers are looking for nearby businesses that offer the product or service they need. Local search is ideal for when you’re targeting customers in a specific area.
In contrast, national SEO is much wider and targets potential customers from the entire nation. National SEO is ideal for businesses that offer their products or services across the country or internationally. Because of the increased number of competitors, national SEO is naturally more difficult and costlier than Local SEO. As you can imagine, International SEO is harder again.
Why do you need SEO?
A common misconception about SEO for people new to this type of digital marketing is that it only benefits online businesses. The truth is that any business, online-based or the traditional brick and mortar operation with a simple website, can benefit greatly from SEO. That’s because ranking highly in SERPs brings qualified potential customers, who are searching for your products or services, to your website resulting in increased sales for your business.
Your business will gain the following benefits when you undertake search engine optimisation:
Increase in traffic (visitors to your website). Unlike paid advertisements that people can choose to ignore, organic results are user-intent-driven which means that if your website ranks highly, traffic to your website will almost certainly increase. While not immediate, traffic to your site will increase steadily as soon as you start implementing SEO strategies.
Quality organic traffic. Think of your website as your online virtual store or office. Ranking highly in the search results puts your store first in a long line of businesses offering similar products or services. Potential customers who are looking for information related to what you offer will, therefore, find your website and possibly convert to customers. In addition to being organic or “free,” leads generated by SEO are of higher quality as these people are actively searching with the intent to engage.
Increased brand credibility. People trust Google, a lot. By extension, people will be more trusting of your brand and the credibility of your business when you are among the first listings in Google Search Results Pages.
Better Return On Investment (ROI) than traditional Ads. While Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements appear above (and below) organic search rankings, 71% of searchers will ignore the Ad and click on the organic results listed on the first SERP1. Additionally, 14% of SEO traffic will convert to sales2 as compared to 2-4% of the traffic from paid ads.
Edge out your competition. SEO has grown to become a core component of any marketing strategy. This means that it’s almost certain that your competitors are already taking measures to improve their visibility in search results. Implementing your own SEO strategy helps you keep up and compete favourably in your industry.
What are the factors that influence SEO success?
No one outside Google knows the exact formula that is used in determining search results rankings. SEO practitioners – through experience and lots of experimenting – have, however, identified several key ranking factors used by Google and other popular search engines. The key factors that influence search results rankings, and hence SEO success, include:
Quality content. Search engines only want to point their users to the highest quality, unique, content that will answer their search query. As such, you will need to ensure that you have high-quality content covering topics that are relevant to your business’ potential customers. Your content should be long enough, contain relevant keywords (these are words people use in search that relate to your business, product or service) and should provide value to your visitors.
Links to your website. Google takes it as a vote of confidence when other trusted websites link to your site. It’s like getting a recommendation from a trusted third party. The more links you have from high-quality websites, the better your website will rank.
On-page optimisation. This involves taking steps to make it easier for search engines to understand what each page on your website is talking about. It includes optimising each webpage’s URL structure, title tags, meta descriptions as well as alt attributes. Structured markup such as Schema markup will also help engines understand and display your site’s content better for the best SEO results.
Mobile-friendliness. More than 50% of all Google searches come from mobile devices3. As such, Google places a lot of weight on your site’s compatibility with mobile devices and uses this as a key ranking factor for its search results. It’s therefore critical that your visitors get a similar experience when they visit your site from a mobile device as they would from a desktop device.
User experience. A poor user experience leads to unhappy searchers. Search engines know this and use user experience as a key ranking factor. It’s, therefore, critical that your website offers visitors an optimal experience when they visit. Some of the factors that you need to address to improve user experience include page load times, navigability of your site and your site’s overall appearance/ aesthetic.
Experts put the exact number of ranking factors used by search engines at more than 200, so this list is far from exhaustive. However these five are the factors that carry the most weight and the ones you should focus on when you’re starting out.
To conclude
Search engine optimisation is the best way for businesses to improve their online visibility while reaching potential customers who are actively searching for information relating to their product or service offerings.
For SEO success, make sure your website meets the following requirements: great content with the relevant keywords, high-quality backlinks from other websites, is optimised for SEO on each page, is mobile friendly and has a great user experience.
As they say, good things come to those who wait; and patience is key for SEO. While achieving high search rankings will take time and effort, the benefits are worthwhile and will include improved online visibility for your business, more high-quality traffic to your site, and ultimately, increased sales and profits with no expenditure on paid advertisements.
Hey, good day folks. Ashley here from WebStrategies. So, I just want to talk today about Google My Business posts, which appear at the bottom of your knowledge panel. If you do a search for your brand on Google or some other phrases, it will bring up the knowledge panel.
So do a search for your brand and it shows your knowledge panel on the right here:
and part of that if you scroll down, are these posts, and they are like social media posts:
They’re a bit like Facebook. So you can add these posts and they appear right here, and that’s good for your brand because this is all about your brand and strong brands rank well on Google. So it’s a good thing to be doing this.
These posts last for seven days and then you must do a new post. They last seven days. You can put multiple in and people can scroll through them.
I’ll show you how to do one. You go to your Google My Business account, which is under business.google.com , and on the left here you’ll see posts and that gives this page here:
Now your standard post is just this one here called “Add Updates”. So you add that there and it pops up a page much like this, and you basically just fill in the form:
So this is your standard post. So we’re going to add a photo or an image. I’ll just do one to practise here, I prepared one in advance.
I want to talk about this new article I just wrote here. I’ll just copy that text for now. Just put this in the latest post under “Write Your post”. Okay, so you put an intro, you give it an introduction or write your post. In this case, I want to link to this page I’ve created, so just copy that URL and paste it in. Now there’s a number of options here. Depending on what your post is about, you can send people straight to a booking page or this post is about something you want them to book for. You can link straight to that booking form on your website or you can get people to click on a button here that goes to an order page to buy something. In this case I want them to learn more and I’ll put a link to the page, my page and I’ll publish that and it shows here. Now within a few minutes that post will appear here.
While that is updating, we will just run through these other topics. So this is your standard update. Google recently added the facility you to add posts that are specific to COVID-19 – anything you want to announce about your response to COVID-19; closures, change of hours, anything like that, your policy, what have you… You can add that in here. Very much the same sort of thing as add your post, there’s no facility for an image with this one. Or you can add a button and send people to more information on your website. So, you might have a full COVID-19 statement on your website, do a little introduction there, add a button, learn more, and send them off to that page. You can also add posts that relate to an offer or event you might have, you add a video, give the offer a title, a start and end dates, add some times and post them. Give all the details, add a coupon code, send them off to a link to redeem this offer and link to your terms and conditions pages.
You can add a what’s new top posts or they all work pretty much the same. So write your posts, add a link, put the address with the link in there. And you can also add events. So same thing, add an image for your event. Your event’s title, times, dates, details etc. So that’s a great idea to do these on a regular basis.
Now onto my Google, my business knowledge panel. Someone does a search for my business name or some relevant phrases that triggers this to appear, my posts appear here and people can click on that and you can see the image and click on there, learn more, go to the page I link to. So this is a good idea. It makes you look active, or it helps you look active as well. Obviously, if people are looking at researching your brand or your business, they’re looking around here and they see this and it’s all up to date, then that helps reinforce the brand, helps you rank on Google as well. So I recommend you keep those posts going up every seven days. Do at least one or as many as you like.
“Crisis SEO”, who would have thought that this would even be a consideration even just a month or two ago with the start of 2020 looking so positive for businesses and the economy, but here we are in dark days with businesses around the globe under stress, forced to close or move online and to adapt rapidly to ever an evolving situation, the likes of which have never been seen before. This is uncharted territory and we’re all hurting. Businesses that were already heavily or totally based online are perhaps in a better position, than wholly “bricks and mortar” businesses, to weather the storm, and this is becoming evident as stores big and small close their physical doors1 and refer customers to their websites for online ordering. But even those agile enough to move online quickly face issues such as skeleton staffing, supply chain delays and problems with delivery of their products as borders close and the country moves toward lockdown. All businesses face tough decisions and hard work ahead; we must be responsive, look for opportunities and try to stay afloat.
So, it’s quite natural in this environment, if we start to talk about SEO, that the response might be to ask why would we bother with SEO when there is so much else to worry about? It’s true that many people have a lot more serious issues than how they rank on Google, but for many businesses the answer is that absolutely SEO has its place in the current climate and beyond. The search engines are unchanged in terms of their core ranking algorithms, people are still searching online and one day business will resume so we don’t want to be starting our SEO all over again.
There are 3 key areas that businesses should be thinking about right now in terms of their SEO: 1) Adapt to the current situation (and quickly), 2) Maintain ongoing, core, SEO basics and 3) Plan for the new business environment once the crisis is over. Let’s look at each of those:
Adapt quickly
There several situations that businesses are finding themselves in right now;
Your business is finished
In this case I’m so sorry.
You are still in business but need to suspend online activity
For some businesses things are dire and you may have been, or will be, forced to stop trading. If you have to do that, then you should put your website into a hibernation mode and Google has produced some great advice around this6. In short you may pause your online sales activities as follows:
Post a message on your website and Google My Business page declaring you are suspending online sales or enquiries until whatever date
Disable your shopping cart functionality
Pause Google Ads campaigns and other online marketing
Update your social media with the same information
What you do not want to do, unless you’re closing your business for good, is to disable your website entirely (ie turn it off), because then you will lose all your hard-earned rankings quickly, or worse, Google may deem your business to be ended, making rankings recoveries very difficult.
You need to transition more so, or fully, online
Google has been quite responsive in regards to the Covid-19 crisis in some aspects; they have made changes to prioritise search results for mainstream publications2, reducing fake news, and have provided advice on how to update Google My Business (GMB) in general and for specific industries (for instance for Medical Practices3). However, Google has said in regards to Google algorithm updates and SEO activities that “we should continue to do that”4. This means its business as usual for the search results in termsof what Google values for rankings. In other words, we have to keep doing what we have been doing in terms of the SEO basics: technical robustness, quality content, onsite optimisation, link acquisition and social media. If your SEO stops, then you risk your rankings dropping over time as they would any other time, or faster if your competitors are still actively undertaking SEO.
Despite this underlying “normal SEO” requirement (see below) we have to adapt, and quickly, in order to survive. But we know that SEO traditionally is a slow mover, with weeks or months required for Google to reflect the efforts we undertake to make our websites more successful in the search results. So, how do we adapt quickly to something that doesn’t respond quickly? By looking for new opportunities is how, and here are some ideas.
Update your website to include information about delivery (or takeaway) and other pertinent info
Cafes and restaurants that are no longer able to offer a dine-in service are currently still able to deliver or offer takeaways. If so, then get that information featured on your website prominently so that Google can find it and display it in the search results for your listing. People are now looking for business that deliver. Here is Google Trend data for searches for “delivery” in Australia, it has risen recently (as we’d expect):
If you aren’t already, then add shopping facilities (ecommerce) to your website. This isn’t as scary as it sounds. You can either add an ecommerce system into your existing website, in which case you should talk to your web developer who will advise on what you need to do and they’ll quote you for that. Or, you can create a separate ecommerce system and link to it from your website and there are some great options for this including:
If you already sell online or are going to start, then consider these changes to your website:
Adjust delivery time information on your website as appropriate, and be open and transparent about delays – keep people informed!
Label products on the website as out of stock as appropriate but with an opportunity for customers to be alerted by email when stocks are back in.
Don’t remove out of stock products entirely or you’ll lose your rankings for those pages over time.
Feature products that DO sell, or that you have stock of, higher on the website ie on home page, category pages etc make them more prominent.
Offer free shipping or a discount – this is always a sales booster.
What can you offer instead of your standard products?
If you manufacture your products, but are unable to sell them at this time, then what can you manufacture instead and are you able to change quickly to produce those items? Look at the distilleries that quickly changed to manufacture hand sanitiser5. That’s a well-known example but think about what people quarantined at home, or in isolation, may need or the medical industry needs. Even deeper, think about what other companies may need in terms of materials for what they are selling.
Update your Google My Business (GMB) page
Modify your business name
Google now allows you to change the name of your business on GMB to include that you offer delivery or takeaway, so that this appears in your Knowledge Panel:
and in the Google Maps:
I’m not seeing many businesses doing this which is surprising.
Modify your hours of operation
Ensure your hours are reflecting the new normal. Or you can mark your business as “temporarily closed” if that is appropriate.
Also, remember this:
If you are a café or restaurant, mark your GMP page as providing delivery/take out/dining in etc.
Add Covid19 posts. Google has provided the facility in the GMB posts section to add a Covid-19 related post and it seems at this time that they are the only posts that Google is putting live.
Stay ethical and don’t offend. It’s important during this time to promote our business, products or services online without seeming flippant or worse, exploitative, during the crisis.
Maintain core SEO
One day this will be over and business life will resume and we’ll want to hit the ground running. But where will our rankings be then? We know where we want them to be: right at the top of the Google search results where we’ll have great visibility on Google. In terms of the search results, Google has said that they are carrying on as usual with their algorithm updates and ranking signals, which makes sense as they can’t change things that quickly. This means that they will be valuing the same things they always did when ranking websites: quality content, technical robustness, authority, links and social signals. In other words, we still need to do SEO or we risk losing ground over time and having to recover this loss, once things improve (which is the time when we’ll need top rankings the most). This is “Retention SEO”; keep doing what you have been doing regarding your SEO – keep improving your content, keep building links and stay active.
This could also be a good time to actually pay attention to your website and prepare for the emergence of your business from “hibernation”, especially if you are in lockdown and can’t actually get out. Why not stay busy during this time!
Test your website. Give the site a good test, submit all your forms and make sure everything works.
Review and upgrade your content. Check the content on all of your pages and improve or expand it where necessary.
Write some blog posts. Add some new blog posts of relevance now and pre-write blog posts for when the crisis is over.
Post updates about your business and industry to your social media and prepare social media posts in advance for when the crisis is over.
Check your business’s presence in relevant local business directories. Update your listings and submit your website to any directories where you are not already listed.
Pre-plan specials, offers and discounts in advance for when business starts back up.
Plan for the New Economy SEO
Once the current crisis has passed things will settle back down, but into a new normal. The movement of the economy, industries and businesses into a higher level of online activity during the crisis will surely be retained to a large extent afterwards, meaning our business’ online activities will need to be more significant than they were pre-crisis. Competition for places in search engine results will increase, driving an increase in the need for competitive SEO, website marketing and paid ads. More businesses will be selling online or will be making online sales a larger part of their marketing and sales channels, so websites will need to be highly optimised: faster load times, more efficient checkouts and generally greater ease of use. Customer service will be more online- focussed and online tracking of orders, deliveries and support will be increased.
What this means for businesses is an increased requirement to understand what is required for online business and then to implement it. – those that don’t will surely fall behind. I already see the more agile businesses adapting to the current crisis and finding ways to survive by thinking outside the box, eeking business out of a dire situation now but also setting themselves up for greater success afterwards, once the smoke has cleared.
So, if possible and you can survive at all, and I know many businesses can’t, then don’t stop! Use this time to set yourself up to survived now and get ready for success afterwards.
Hi, g’day folk. Ashley from Website Strategies here. This one is for café or restaurant owners who provide a delivery or takeaway service.
So, you can’t have diners in anymore but if you do provide a delivery or takeaway service then you can make this information, the fact that you provide that delivery or takeaway service, more prominent on Google, on your Google My Business Knowledge Panel.
Now, what your Google My Business Knowledge Panel is, is the large “brand feature” that appears when people search for your name, or for your type of service.
So, if we do a search for, say I want “Greek food”, I know I can’t go sit in your restaurant but if you delivered then we want to make that obvious right here:
So, if I’m looking for Greek food … Now, I don’t know these restaurants, I’ve just done a search. So this restaurant Spero here, if they were to provide a delivery service, (and I don’t know if they do or they don’t) but if they did, then Google will now allow you to add that information to your name right here.
So, you would have Spero “delivery available” or “takeaway available” after your name. Now, Google doesn’t usually allow this because under normal circumstances Google sees this as adding keywords into your name, and they don’t really allow it because it sort of affects their results, but these aren’t normal circumstances, and it has been confirmed that Google will allow you now to put that useful information right here in your Google My Business name, and that will appear in your Knowledge Panel.
Now, your Google Knowledge Panel is this large feature that appears if you do a search for your name. So if you look up Spero for instance here it is here. You get this large Knowledge Panel appear right here. This is exactly the same information that just appeared in the map here. It’s all linked. It’s all together. It all comes from the same source. It comes from your Google My Business page, or GMB account, and you can manage all of this information yourself. So ideally, you’d know how to access all this, and change your name.
So effectively, what you’re going to do is go into your Google My Business and change your name, and put after your name delivery available, or takeaway available, or curbside delivery, or whatever it might be that you’re doing in order to survive in these grim times. So if you can access your Google My Business panel you should be able to log in there, go to Google My Business, once you’re in Google My Business, so it’s Business.Google.com … This is mine:
I don’t own a restaurant but I’ll show you how to do it. Once you have logged into your Google My Business you have all of this information here.
And one of these panels here is info. Once you go in there you’ve got your business name here, which you can edit. You go in there and whatever your name will be there, and you can add in there afterwards “delivery available” or “takeaway available”, and apply that. That will update and what that will then do is for some period of time, minutes, or hours, hopefully that will appear here. Now, that will help you if you are a Greek restaurant and I’m looking for Greek food for instance.
I can’t go out and dine, but who delivers it in my area? These guys, if they had delivery available, that would make this stand out, so immediately you’d see which ones deliver, and then you’d go in there and you’d contact them, contact your business. So there’s a tip for just getting a bit more exposure around the fact that you deliver, and what you would also want to do of course if you do deliver is make sure this is really obvious on your website now as well.
So, if it says delivery there, people are going to go to your website. Sorry Spero to make an example of you here, but this is just for demonstration purposes. Once again, I don’t know these guys or anything. I’ve never even dined there. They look really good, but if these guys were to deliver I’d be putting that all over your website really prominent and really obvious, delivery’s available and whatever that involves, whatever area you may cover, and get that all updated as quickly as possible.
So update your website with the fact that you deliver now, or provide takeaway service, and get your Google My Business page modified as well so that becomes obvious when someone does a search for your type of food, that you appear, and it doesn’t matter what it might be. I might want Indian food, here they go. So these people need to start saying delivery available, if that’s what they do. Google will allow it I’d gather while the crisis is on and then it’ll change. You’ll have to take it off but they definitely stated at this point that you can do that, and it’ll make that obvious there.
If you’ve updated your website with delivery available of course, you may start to appear in here with delivery available as well if you update some of this information. That’s another story, but there it is. I hope that helps. Cheers. Bye.
Check out my latest video on Meta descriptions – why we have them and how to write them:
Modified transcript:
Oh, G’day there, Ashley from WebStrategies here. I just want to talk briefly about the importance of meta descriptions, what they are, and what they are used for. Meta descriptions are unique to each page on your website and you can usually manage these in your website admin or CMS. Google does use them in the Search Result Pages (SERPs) but they don’t appear in the page anywhere visually that you can see.
I’ll just give you an example. When someone does a search for my target phrase which is “SEO Sunshine Coast,” then we get search results in which I, or my website, appears. Now, the meta description, which I can control on that page, will appear in the results as the little descriptor underneath the title in the search results.
The search phrase is often obolded by Google within the title and the metadescription which gives it relevance obviously, and when people scroll down, if they see the phrase bolded, then this helps to draw their attention to your result.
Now I choose not to put the exact phrase in my metadescription like some people do. It’s not really required nowadays because Google has stated that how you write your meta description does not directly affect your rankings. It should really be written to help sell the click on your result in the SERRPs. So, if someone does a search for “SEO Sunshine Coast,” my result appears. It is important to get your keywords in this title tag, but the meta description tag helps sell the click on that title.
Usually the meta description tag should be around 150 characters, but Google on occasion can use a longer one. If it’s longer and Google doesn’t want to use it, you’ll get these ellipses at the end and your description will just disappear off the end. We don’t really want that so better to aim for the 150-character limit.
When writing your meta description think about people doing the search. Think about them scrolling down the results and finding your result, reading it, and then clicking on it. That’s what you’re thinking about when you write this meta description.
In order to actually manage the meta description on your page, if you’re using WordPress, it’s easy enough. Go into Edit for the page, scroll down, and ideally you’d have the Yoast SEO plugin installed, which makes it all a lot easier. Find the Yoast SEO plugin section for the page, and edit the snippet. You can write your meta description in there, and it gives you the green bar to indicate your length is about right. If you keep going longer, it will turn red because you’re too long, and if you go too short, it’ll do the same thing.
When you’re on a mobile, it’ll preview how your meta title and your meta description reads. For mobile it’ll pull up a little preview of the image so you can make sure you’ve got the right one showing. Usually that’ll be the feature image for the page, and if you’re on desktop, it’ll show you how that appears as well so that you can get it right.
Its a good idea to put a bit of thought into these meta descriptions to make sure they read well so that when someone does a search, they click on your result rather than someone else’s.
Get a snapshot of the current status of your online reputation. I’ll look at, and comment on the aspects of your business or personal brand and online presence. Includes inspection of: Your Google My Business information Presence on Google: General …
