SEO isn’t rocket science.
It’s just one of those things that you either have the time to learn and implement properly, or you don’t.
The below tactics are ways for you to safely attempt to DIY organic growth in Google for your website!
1. META TITLES/DESCRIPTION
Don’t be scared off by the terminology – this is simple.
Meta titles are just the titles of a web page that you see in the tab of your browser when you’re surfing online.
But it also helps tell Google what you are.
So much so, that it’s the information that they display you when appear in a Google search.
For this example page, I’m targeting the keywords “AdWords Management Perth” and “AdWords Perth” which is why you see both of them in my meta title, with my business name bolted on afterwards.
The little description below the meta title is the meta description. This does not directly impact your rankings in Google but it’s a good way to elaborate on your title and encourage people to click through to your website.
How do you edit them? In most CMS’ (Content Management Systems), there is usually a field to change the Meta Title or SEO Title.
In WordPress, for example, you would download a plugin such as SEO Yoast or All-In-One SEO.
2. HEADING TAGS
Heading tags are the big headlines where you tell the viewer what this content is going to be about and helps break up paragraphs and give the user the ability to skim down the page and know what’s what.
Along with your meta title, a heading tag helps clarify to Google what your page is about.
If we use Mad Cow Entertainment as an example, you can see that on their homepage they have used the term “Amusement Hire Perth”.
3. BODY COPY
The body copy is the normal paragraph text that you would see flow underneath heading tags.
In the eyes of Google, this is all extra evidence to back up your meta titles and heading tags.
To an extent, the more of it you have, the better.
Google ranks not just pages with more words better, but websites as a whole.
So fill up every page that you can with lengthy (but quality) body copy, even if you’re not targeting anything on those other pages.
Google looks at a website as a whole, so thin content on your non-keyword target pages will pull down on your pages that you are targeting for keywords.
4. ASSIGNING KEYWORDS TO PAGES
You can use data straight from Google to see how many people are searching for keywords per month in your area.
Once you know what you want to target, you want to tailor each page for that keyword.
This is normally common-sense stuff.
If we just take a look at the meta titles alone on the Absolute Cosmetic Medicine website, we can see how they’ve targeted their pages for keywords:
- Home page:
- Cosmetic Surgery Perth
- Cosmetic Surgeons
- Cosmetic Clinic
- Breast Augmentation page:
- Breast Augmentation Perth
- Breast Implants Perth
- Liposuction page:
- Liposuction Perth
- Lipo
- Get Rid Of Fat
As you can see, all the keywords are just stating the obvious, but in a “keyword friendly” manner.
Always take the common-sense approach and keep it to one type of keyword per page.
5. INCREASING PAGE RELEVANCY TOWARDS KEYWORDS
Your keywords go deeper than just your meta titles, heading tags and peppering your keywords evenly throughout the body copy.
You want plenty of evidence throughout the content that supports your keywords.
Let’s say you’re a florist. You’ll want to have lots of proof words throughout your content such as:
- Flowers
- Vases
- Bouquet
- Arrangements
- Fresh
- Water
- Bloom
- Picked
- Pruned
- Thorns
- Displays
Using these proof words helps increase your overall topical relevancy throughout the page, giving clearer indication to Google on what your webpage is about, allowing it to rank your webpage more confidently.
6. TARGETING DIFFERENT AREAS
A common tactic to use for mobile services in a metropolitan area, particularly tradesmen, is to utilise suburb pages.
That is because there is typically a higher presence of service + suburb keywords in these industries.
Just have a look at the monthly search volumes for a handful of suburbs in Perth for plumbing services (correct as of January 2018):
- Plumber Joondalup: 320 searches
- Plumber Hillarys: 70 searches
- Plumber Padbury: 40 searches
- Plumber Ocean Reef: 30 searches
- Plumber Edgewater: 20 searches
So, as you can imagine, there is a lot of opportunity for extra work if you can appear for a few extra suburbs here and there.
Let’s take a look at how PWA Electrical Services, a group of Perth electricians, have built out some of their suburb pages.
Each of these suburb pages have around 500 words of uniquely written content.
The biggest mistake website owners make when crafting suburb pages is copying content over and just replacing the mention of Suburb A with Suburb B.
Content on any page has to be unique – coping and pasting will harm your chances to rank well in Google.
Going back to point 4, in regard to proof words, PWA Electrical Services have to make sure that they’re not just proving to Google that this page is about electricians but it’s also highly relevant to the suburb too.
In the example below of PWA Electrical Services page targeting the Ballajura area, they have even gone to the effort to mention landmarks and street names to help improve local relevance.
7. BLOGGING
Many business owners are unsure of how to use their blog.
For SEO purposes, we want to use it to target keywords that we normally wouldn’t on our other pages.
A blog is best served answering questions that people are actually asking in Google.
If we look at Visa Solutions Australia, this is something that they’ve done exceptionally well.
Some visa/migration related questions that Google searchers ask are:
Child born in Australia to foreign parents: 170 searches per month.
First.
Google is even pulling a rich snippet from Visa Solutions Australia here.
Okay, another one.
Consequences of fake marriage in Australia: 110 searches per month.
Boom. First again.
These posts are about 500-600 words long, are helpful answers to questions that are actually asked in Google and they rank well because of it.
Easy traffic that you can capitalise on!
Plus, if your content is REALLY helpful, there’s always the chance of other websites linking to your resources which is AWESOME for the backlink component of SEO.
8. THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR: NOFOLLOW/NOINDEX
There are a couple of things that could stop your website being indexed or read by Google.
These would be tags on the website called “noindex” and/or “nofollow”.
To see whether or not any of your pages has this tag, view the Source Code of your page.
You can do this on Google Chrome by right clicking anywhere on your page and the clicking “Page Source”.
Then, hold Ctrl and press F if you’re on PC or hold Command and press F on a Mac to bring up a search box.
Start typing noindex and/or nofollow into the search box.
If you have this annoying little code, you’ll see it like this:
In the event that you do have this code you will have to remove it from a file called robots.txt which normally sits on your server.
However, a lot of CMS’ (Content Management Systems) such as WordPress have many ways that a tag like this can appear on the website – form a box that has been ticked on the Edit page or in a Plugin that has been downloaded.
So, in the interest of trying to keep this guide compact, you’ll have to do a bit of research based on how your website.
Fortunately, there are plenty of resources online to counter just about any scenario J
9. THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR: CANONICAL TAGS
A canonical tag is basically just a declaration of where the original source of the content on a webpage.
This reason why this exists is so that content can be reproduced on other websites and give credit back to the original source.
Because if you don’t credit the original source and you’ve copied someone’s content, Google are going to hit you hard for that.
The reason why you want to watch out for this tag is because CMS’ or web developers can sometimes make mistakes with this tag.
You realistically want every page of your website to credit itself for its own content.
Below is the source code for my blog post on Telephone Link Tracking and you can see that the canonical tag (highlighted) states that the Telephone Link Tracking page is the original source for the content.
Perfect!
If the canonical tag is crediting another page as the original source of the content (even if it’s another page on your website), it needs to be fixed.
I’ve seen some WordPress themes or CMS’ slap a canonical tag on every page that credits the homepage for all content which confused the hell out of Google and basically stopped it from indexing or giving good rankings to all internal pages.