The dreaded acronym.

The ‘dark art’ that has the power to help you rank high on Google but that nearly every website owner we know seems to dread.

Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t need to be complicated. When broken down into actionable tips and steps and done right, it’s a brilliant strategy to help your ideal customers or clients find you online.

And yet, we see a lot of businesses dip their toes into the murky SEO waters and get things a bit wrong. So here are the 9 biggest SEO mistakes we see people make and how to fix them to make sure you get the results you want.

1. Not doing any keyword research

The first mistake you might not even know you’re making is not doing any keyword research.

That’s right, keyword research is a thing. And it’s definitely a step you don’t want to miss out on.

And if you have, no need to beat yourself up because you’re most definitely not alone. Most business owners do exactly the same because they assume they know exactly what people are searching for online.

And you know what they say about assumptions, don’t you?

For example, if you sell a funky pair of glasses that block blue light to help people fall asleep easier and faster at night, you might be tempted to create a lot of content around ‘blue light exposure’ or ‘blue light glasses’. And that’s great for those customers who already know about your product and its benefits.

But do you know what could also lead to your website? The search term ‘how to sleep better at night’. Because this is something people actually search for. And if you haven’t used it in your website content, you may be missing out on opportunities to be found, to receive an enquiry in your inbox or over the phone, and to make a sale!

And that’s not cool, right?

Plus, if you don’t do your keyword research, you’ll also miss out on loads of extra ideas for content.

So what should you do instead?

Learn how to do some basic keyword research

Keyword research, much like SEO in general, doesn’t need to be complicated. You can keep it super simple and use free tools to start with.

Remember – all you’re trying to do is to work out what your ideal clients actually search for when they go on Google. And once you know what those phrases are, you can create content that answers their questions.

That turns your website into something that’s relevant, useful, and interesting for your readers, but it also gives them more chances of finding your business online.

So how do you go about doing keyword research?

Here are a few tools that can help you:

• Google. Have you ever paid attention to the ‘People also ask’ and ‘Related searches’ sections on the Google results pages? They’re full of interesting terms that real people type or speak into the search engines.
• Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that gives you trend data and search volumes for the keywords you input. It helps you find out if a search term is popular. And if it isn’t, the tool gives you related keywords and ‘People also search for’ suggestions you can use instead.
• Answer the public gives you visual diagrams full of real questions that people ask when searching for a particular term. It’s really cool – you should try it out if you haven’t already!
• KWFinder is a paid-for tool that tells you exactly how many times a particular keyword is searched for every month. If your keyword is very competitive (i.e. a lot of content already exists and ranks well for that keyword) your chances of ranking aren’t the greatest. So the trick is to find keywords that lots of people search for but that not many other content creators are already using.

Do give keyword research a go. It will definitely change the way you create content!

2. Focusing on one keyword

Another mistake we see a lot of website owners make is to use the same keyword across various pages or pieces of content on your website. 

Say, for example, that you optimised your Homepage for ‘window repairs Liverpool’. You probably went for that keyword because it’s specific to what you do and it includes your location. Perfect.

But you definitely don’t want to use the exact same keyword for your About page, all your Service pages, and 5 of your blog posts. Right?

Unfortunately, putting all your eggs in one basket and trying to rank for that one keyword won’t solve all your problems. Because chances are your competitors will also try and rank for that exact keyword, so Google will have to look at other factors when deciding which results to display first.

Plus, what happens if that keyword isn’t specific enough? For example, while ‘window repairs Liverpool’ is a term people search for, if someone’s looking to have their car window fixed, your website might not be the right fit for them.

People search for specific solutions to their problems. So, depending on what types of services you offer, if you’re not optimising any of your content for ‘double glazing window repairs’ or ‘door window repairs’, for example, you might be missing out on opportunities.

So what should you do instead?

Optimise your content for a variety of relevant keywords

Mix things up and vary your keywords. If you’ve done your keyword research (see how it’s paying off already?), you’ll now have a range of keywords your ideal customers or clients search for, which means you don’t have to use the same one over and over.

If you’ve already used ‘window repairs Liverpool’, you could go with:

• UPVC window repairs Liverpool.
• Sash window repairs Liverpool near me.
• Window lock repairs Liverpool area.

D’you see where we’re going with this?

These are all real phrases people search into Google, and if they’re relevant to your business, they make great choices for your Service pages or your blog content.

By adding more related and relevant keywords into the mix, you give yourself more chances of being found for the products or services you offer.

3. Not optimising your content  

Do you optimise each piece of content you publish on your website? And by that, we mean all your web pages and all your blog posts?

If you don’t, we’ve got bad news for you.

You’re missing out!

Unfortunately, producing a huge amount of content isn’t enough. It’s a great idea and practice for sure. But you need to follow it through by optimising it all.

Why?

Because Google ranks content by using bots and algorithms, and it won’t know what your content is about unless you give it a little helping hand.

And if Google can’t find your website because you haven’t optimised your content, how do you expect your ideal customers or clients to find your business?

So what should you do instead?

Make sure your content is optimised for search

Let’s be honest. Optimisation will add some time to your content creation efforts (we’d say 20-30 minutes per piece of content).

But it’s worth doing. Because it makes the difference between your parents and best friend being the only ones reading your blog (don’t worry, we’ve all been there!) and your ideal customers finding your business on Google.

So once you’ve strategically picked your keywords (again, can you see why keyword research is so important!) include them in the following:

• Page or blog title.
• Meta description.
• URL for the page or blog post.
• Sub-headings.
• Alt-text for the images you added to that piece of content.

This gives Google better chances of understanding exactly what your content is all about and returning it to the search engine result pages. And if you want to know exactly how to do this, check out our blog post – how to optimise your blog posts for search engines.

4. Failing to niche down your content

Another mistake we see a lot of website owners make is to fall into the trap of being too generic. This is the opposite of mistake number 2, where we talked about trying to rank for just one keyword. 

As it turns out, trying to rank for too many keywords (especially if they span over a range of loosely-related topics) isn’t great either.

If you do that, you may not only confuse your audience but also dilute your main product or service. People like to work with specialists and experts. They like to know there’s one or a few core things you sell and are really really good at. 

If you’re a financial advisor specialising in mortgages, you might confuse your audience if you start comparing credit cards or giving generic advice on money-saving.

So what should you do instead?

Choose a niche or topic and go in-depth with it

Instead of focusing on too many topics, choose one topic or a few key ones that relate to your business and go to town on them.

Say, for example, that you want to be known as the local go-to person who helps people with their mortgage. ‘Help with mortgage’ is a broad topic. But when you start breaking it all down and looking at the questions your ideal clients ask, there is a lot of content you could create on this topic.

For instance:

• How to get help with mortgage payments if you’re temporarily unemployed.
• Charities that offer help with mortgage payments.
• Best resources to help with your mortgage when you’ve been made redundant.

And so on.

Once you’ve picked your topic, aim to make it the best resource on the internet for your niche, and you really can’t go wrong.

5. Not having enough website copy

Long-winded web pages full of lines and lines of text are hard and boring to read, right?

True.

But the opposite is also true.

If your core web pages (your Homepage, your About page, and Product or Service pages) don’t have enough content, that could also set you back. Having too little content means your website doesn’t provide a great deal of information to your audience. So will they feel confident enough to get in touch with an enquiry?

Also, not having enough web copy might impact your SEO efforts. Remember when we said that Google doesn’t know what your content is about unless you tell it?

Your website should act as a salesperson for your business – it’s not just the equivalent of a pretty window or a digital business card with hardly any details on it!

So what should you do instead?

Include plenty of relevant information in your content

Your website content should provide value. Its job is to answer your customers’ key questions and help them decide whether they’re ready to go ahead and buy from you.

So, instead of shying away from content, include enough information in the core pages of your website to give your readers what they’re looking for.

Pricing, for example, is one of the main questions your readers might have when browsing your website. Knowing that your product or service is within their budget (or how much it stretches it by) will help them make a decision as to whether get in touch with you or not.

We see a lot of business owners who don’t include their prices. And often that’s because they offer bespoke services and prices vary. But you could always give your ideal clients a ball-park figure. After all, someone who has no idea of how much working with you will cost may be too embarrassed to pick up the phone and ask. And you might lose them as prospective clients.

So don’t be that business! Make sure you always add enough information to your website in order for your ideal clients to make a decision. (And don’t forget to optimise those pages for SEO!) If you’re a service-based business, you can check out exactly what to put on your service page here.

6. Having a slow website 

Here’s one mistake that a lot of people don’t even know they’re making – having a slow website and not doing anything about it.

Why is a slow website even a problem?

Because us internet users expect websites to load quickly. Let’s be honest – we have little patience, and we don’t like waiting around.

But it’s not just that. It’s also a trust issue. If a website takes ages to load, we start thinking there must be something wrong with it or that it must be somehow ‘dodgy’.

And unless you’re a die-hard fan of that brand, what will you do?

Press the back button and go somewhere else.

In other words, if your website is too slow, it may be costing you clients. And to add insult to injury, Google knows if your website isn’t performing too well, which means you have fewer chances of ranking well in the search engine result pages.

So what should you do instead?

Check and improve your page load speed

You can easily check your website’s page load speed with a free tool called GTmetrix.

If you find your website is a little on the slow side, check your plugins. Are there any you no longer need or use? Make sure you deactivate and remove any plugins that aren’t necessary, as having too many will slow your website right down.

Also, don’t forget to compress and optimise all your images by using a tool like TinyPNG.

If you want to find out more about why compressing images is important for SEO, head over to our blog post SEO for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide.

7. Only focusing on on-page-SEO

Have you ever come across the phrases ‘on-page SEO’ or ‘on-site SEO’?

It’s not complicated, promise!

Chances are if you’ve been following our simple SEO advice, you’ve already been doing it. On-page SEO is about optimising your web pages and blog posts to help your website rank higher in search engine results. You do this by including the keyword you want to be found for in your headlines, meta descriptions, URLs, etc., as we already covered under mistake number 3 of this article.

On-page SEO is brilliant!

But there’s another side to the coin, and it’s called ‘off-page SEO’. Following this practice means you strategically spend time and effort to ensure that other reputable websites in your industry and niche link back to your content. Off-page SEO can be extremely helpful and boost your rankings like nothing else.

Because the truth is, there’s only so much you can do on your website alone. Google needs signals from other websites too.

So what should you do instead?

Focus on off-page SEO too

If you want your website to be found online, you need a strategy for ‘off-page SEO’ or ‘off-site SEO’ too.

To encourage other websites to link back to your own website, create helpful content like blog articles, videos, PDFs, reviews, or case studies that others will want to share on social media or link to from their own content.

Often, this isn’t something that ‘just happens’. You’d be very lucky if it does! Having an off-page SEO strategy means you might need to reach out to customers or clients, suppliers or other businesses you work with, and even online authorities or influencers whose audiences could benefit from consuming your content.

Guest posting is another great off-page SEO strategy. Have you got some wisdom to share that a fellow website owner would want to publish on their website? Perhaps you could be a guest on a podcast show? Or have you ever thought about pitching to an online magazine or publication?

There are lots of ways for other websites to link back to yours, which is why we recommend you include off-site SEO in your marketing strategy and come up with a plan to make it happen.

8. Not monitoring your analytics

Another mistake we see website owners make all the time is not monitoring their analytics. If you don’t do this, it means you don’t have a clear idea of what your audience is interested in.

And when you don’t know what content performs well on your website, you might end up creating more of the content that no one wants to read (sorry!). And surely you don’t want to spend time or money sharing something that your clients aren’t interested in, right? That’s a total waste!

Plus, the flip side is also true. If you don’t know what type of content on your website attracts your readers, you might actually miss opportunities to create more of that.

In short, not checking your analytics can really hinder your content strategy. Because unless you know what needs improving, you’ll never be able to do things differently.

So what should you do instead?

Check your analytics and act on the information

All the data you need is right there at your fingertips! All you have to do is check it instead of taking a stab in the dark when it comes to your content creation efforts.

By installing Google Analytics or the Google Search Console on your website you can get in the habit of analysing your website traffic. Check who visits your website, how they found you, what content they tend to consume the most, and how they behave when they’re on your site.

Once you have all this information, you can make better decisions around what content to create next and give yourself better chances of ranking higher in the search engine result pages.

9. Putting your head in the sand 

Completely ignoring SEO is easily done. We know a lot of business owners who’d rather do just that. Because SEO seems extremely technical and complicated to understand or too expensive to outsource. (But it really isn’t!)

You may have also heard on the grapevine (from social media, colleagues, or business associates, etc.) that SEO is dead.

It isn’t.

SEO practices have definitely changed over the last decade. Tactics that used to work 10-15 years ago don’t work anymore. And that’s simply because there’s so much more competition online and because Google keeps us online business owners on our toes by continuously refining and improving its algorithms.

SEO is definitely not dead. In fact, it’s vital for your business.

If you want to be found online, you need to stop putting your head in the sand and pay SEO the attention it deserves. Because ignoring SEO would be the equivalent of setting up a physical shop in the middle of nowhere. How do you expect your ideal customers to find your business if you don’t tell them you’re there?

So what should you do instead?

Buy our SEO Starter Pack 

Our SEO Starter Pack includes a video library that walks you through what you need to know about SEO step-by-step, with planners, checklists, and loads of other bonuses.

So here’s what you can expect when you buy the SEO Starter Pack:

• It includes everything you need to know about getting started with SEO in one place. No more scouring the internet and getting confused by conflicting information!
• It contains easy-to-follow, short lessons aimed at non-techies. We won’t bore you death with one long lesson or bamboozle you with technical jargon. That’s just not us at all!
• The pack teaches you the key parts of SEO – the ones with the biggest impact on your business to help you drive more traffic to your website.

The SEO Starter Pack is now available for $97.00+VAT. You can order it here and access everything right away. So what are you waiting for? Are you ready to use SEO to make a difference in your business?

Martin & Lyndsay

The post The Biggest SEO Mistakes You’re Making (And What to Do Instead)  appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Does the term ‘Search Engine Optimisation‘ make you break out in a sweat?

Well, we’ve got good news for you.

We can help.

SEO doesn’t need to be scary or confusing. When broken down into meaningful chunks of information and explained in plain English, SEO can be easy and accessible.

That’s how we like to see it anyway. This is why we’ve created this SEO Tips for Beginners Guide to help you optimise your own website for search.

So if you’re just getting started with SEO and don’t have loads of technical knowledge, this beginners’ guide to SEO is perfect for you. We’ve kept things simple and avoided including over-technical points that might just overwhelm you and make you want to scream. We’re nice like that.

The article is broken down into easy-to-consume sections to help you get going with optimising your website. We recommend you focus on each aspect at a time before moving on to the next, and we promise it’ll be easy enough. And worth it!

We’ve split this blog post into a few handy sections for you:

1. Tracking your website traffic.
2. Basic keyword research.
3. Main SEO considerations for your website
4. Technical SEO (don’t worry – technical doesn’t mean complicated! Not in our book anyway!)
5. Website pages.
6. Blog articles.
7. Website images.

So, are you ready to go?

1. Tracking your website traffic

How do you know if you’re doing well if you have no idea where you are right now?

Before you get going with your website SEO, you need to figure out what your starting point is. Let’s call this tracking your website traffic. And all it is is a way of monitoring the number of visitors to your website.

Why does it matter?

Because it helps you understand your existing and prospective customers and how they interact with your website. For example, what pages or blog posts are the most read on your website? Where do your visitors spend most of their time when on your website?

This is invaluable information for you because it tells you what works and what doesn’t. And once you know this, you can do more of what serves you well and tweak and change what doesn’t.

So, before you start your SEO efforts, track your traffic. Create some sort of starting point view or baseline that you can refer back to once you’ve gone through each of the sections in this beginners’ guide to SEO. By measuring your traffic before you get started and then after implementing the strategies in this blog post, you’ll be able to measure how effective your efforts have been.

So how do you measure your website traffic?

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic free web analytics tool that helps you analyse your website traffic. It lets you see who visits your website, how they found you, what content they tend to consume the most, and how they behave when they’re on your site.

Pretty handy, right?

Without getting too technical, let’s just say that the tool works by placing several lines of tracking code into your website. But there’s some good news here.

You don’t need to worry about any of that!

Once you create an account and link it to your website, you’ll be able to access easy-to-read reports that will give you great insight into how your users interact with your website.

If you want to find out more about the tool, Google has a great free course on how to get started with Google Analytics.

Google Search Console

Another similar tool is Google Search Console. It’s a free service that gives you access to information about your website performance and your users.

Compared to Google Analytics, Google Search Console gives you more internal information. For example, things like who is linking to your website, or which queries your website is appearing in the search results for. It also flags any problems with your website that might be holding you back from ranking better.

Signing up is free and easy, and you can read more information on getting started with the Google Search Console here.

Google page speed

Google page speed is another great tool to help you check how quickly your website loads, or your website load time.

This is an important metric when it comes to SEO – the quicker your website loads, the better. The recommendation is a page load time of under 2 seconds, but the faster the better.

Why does it matter?

Because as you know by being one yourself, internet users have little patience. And if a page takes around 3 or more seconds to load, chances are your visitors may start doubting the trustworthiness of your website.

And when they lose trust, they click the back button and go looking for something else.

You can easily test your page speed with a free tool called GTmetrix. It gives you a performance report for your website and highlights any issues you might have, so you know what to look into and improve.

If you want to know more about checking your rankings, you can always check out our blog post – 5 ways to check your search rankings. 

So now that you have a baseline and know exactly where you stand, it’s time to pull your sleeves up and get your teeth into the first meaty bit of SEO for beginners – keyword research.

2. Basic keyword research

Okay, we’ll admit this doesn’t sound very exciting. But actually, it’s not as bad as you think!

So what is keyword research, and why does it matter?

Keyword research is the process by which you look for terms and phrases that people search for on the internet. This exercise is an important step for SEO because once you have those terms and phrases at hand, you can strategically include them in your content.

In other words, this exercise allows you to create content around topics that interest your ideal clients. If you sell holiday packages to Iceland, you wouldn’t dream of writing about ‘how to fill in your tax return’, would you?

Hopefully not. Because that wouldn’t help your business at all.

But keyword research would tell you that people actually look for terms such as:

• Iceland holidays 2021.
• Iceland holidays Northern lights.
• Cheap holidays to Iceland.
• Best Iceland package deals.

You get the gist.

Once you know exactly what terms and phrases people search for, you can produce content around these topics and increase your chances of ranking higher in the search engine results.

Notice that although this process is called keyword research, I talked about terms and phrases. This is because when we run a search on Google we don’t just look for the word ‘Iceland’. That wouldn’t give us what we want at all! The term is too broad and generic, and the results would be useless.

Instead, we type or ask actual questions. These chunks of words are known as longtail keywords, and they help us narrow down our search results.

So how can you use this to your advantage? Where do you find the longtail keywords to include in your website content?

Here are a few tools that might come in handy…

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that helps you with keyword research, and it’s a great tool to start with. Once you install it, it shows you:

• Trend data and search volumes for that keyword.
• Related keywords to the search term you selected.
• ‘People also search for’ suggestions.

A paid-for version is also available if you want more information on monthly searches and competitor analysis, for example. But if you’re just getting started with SEO and want to keep things simple, the free version will do the trick for you.

Answer the public

Answer the public is another awesome keyword tool that helps you visualise search questions through an image called search cloud. Simply enter your topic, and the tool produces a visual diagram full of real questions that people have asked when searching for that term.

Once you decide on a topic for a blog post, for example, you can use the information from the search cloud to decide what to cover in each individual sub-sections. It’s free, easy to use, and a fantastic way to keep things super simple when it comes to SEO. Answer the public is free with an option to upgrade for businesses who need to run multiple keyword searches per month.

KWFinder

KWFinder is a paid-for tool that allows you to find the best longtail keywords to include in your content.

You can even see how competitive and profitable keywords are. What you want is to find keywords that lots of people search for but that not many other content creators are already using.

More competition means fewer chances for you to be found online. But if you do your homework and pick keywords that aren’t overused but still searched for on a regular basis, then you’re winning.

KWFinder offers affordable plans depending on the number of keyword searches per month you need and also has a FREE 10-day trial.

3. Optimising your website for SEO

Okay, so you’ve got your keywords. Now how do you go about optimising your website? Whether you’re planning or re-designing your website, here are 3 activities I’d recommend:

• Plan your website structure.
• Focus on niche topics.
• Limit the content on your Homepage.

So what does it all mean?

Plan your site structure

Have you thought about the way you plan to organise information on your website? For example, what will your users see from the main menu? Will you have sub-pages dropping down from under your main pages?

Making sure that your overall site structure is user-friendly and easy to navigate is important.

Why?

First of all, it tells your readers how and where to find information. But it also tells Google where your most important content is. Because Google isn’t a person – it crawls websites through bots, following links between various pieces of content. This is how it determines the relationship between different elements of your website.

So the way you structure your content (in pages and blog posts) can influence which content will rank highest in the search engines. If you don’t plan this through, your visitors might struggle to find what they’re looking for and leave your website too soon for your liking. This indirectly tells Google that your website isn’t user-friendly, and you don’t want that!

I recommend you take some time to plan it all out. And if you need more information on how to organise your site structure, check out our article: The Ultimate Guide to a Perfect Website.

Focus on niche topics

And no, this doesn’t mean you have to write about obscure topics no one knows anything about! Phew!

It’s quite the opposite, actually.

You want to write content that people search for.

So when researching keywords and planning content for your web pages or blog posts, narrow your topics down. Instead of being broad and generic, be specific and niche.

So in the example of our Iceland holiday provider, if you cater for family holidays, you might want to create content around:

• ‘Best family hotels in Iceland’.
• ‘How to make the most of Iceland with kids’.
• ‘Self-drive itineraries for Iceland with kids’.

People want specific answers to specific questions. And when you create specific content, you’re helping your ideal clients understand exactly what you do and how you help. This puts you in a better position to capture all those specific searches with longtail keywords.

Limit content on your Homepage

Writing content for your Homepage is a big job. And one that a lot of website owners get a bit wrong.

Why?

Because they tend to cram way too much information onto it. And that’s not what your Homepage needs to do for you.

Your Homepage isn’t the place to tell your visitors everything there is to know about you and your products or services.

Instead, think of it as the reception area of your website. Its job is to direct users where they need to go, quickly and efficiently. So don’t overload it. And don’t overwhelm your visitors with content.

You should then have dedicated pages set up for your products and services. And if you’re a service-based business – a page for each service where you go into detail.

If you want more tips on what to include in your Homepage, head over to our blog post: What You Should Put on Your Homepage to Increase Conversion.

4. Technical SEO tips for optimising your website

Although I promised this beginners’ guide to SEO didn’t need to be technical or complicated, there are a few key technical considerations that impact SEO.

And the ones I’d like to talk you through are:

• Improve your page speed.
• Ensure your website is responsive.
• Install an SSL certificate.

Improve your page speed

Did you know that your page speed affects your SEO efforts too?

But first thing first, what even is that?

Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your website takes to load. So when someone lands on your website, how long does it take for the information to appear on their screen?

You probably guessed that you want that number to be as small as possible. If the page takes too long to load, your visitors might hit the back button and leave. You don’t want that.

Plus, if your website is slow, you have less chance of ranking well in the search results.

So what can you do to improve your page speed?

• Only use plugins that are absolutely necessary. Too many plugins will slow your website down.
• Compress and optimise your images (more on that later).
• Keep redirects to a minimum. Every time you redirect your users to another page, you add to the overall waiting time.

Ensure your website is responsive

Does your website look good on mobile and tablet?

With more and more users accessing content on their smartphones or tablets, your website needs to look good no matter what device your visitors are using. And that’s exactly what a responsive website is. One where the layout is easy for your visitors to read and navigate.

This gives your readers a better user experience, and when someone finds your website easy and enjoyable to be on, naturally, they’ll want to spend more time on it. And without getting into too many details, that’s a great indicator for Google too.

So if you want to boost your chances of ranking well in the search results, think about design and user experience too.

Install an SSL certificate

Before you run for the hills at the use of yet another acronym, let us explain.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. But you don’t need to get bogged down into all that.

All you need to know is that SSL protects your website data. It turns your website into a secure environment – for you and for your prospective clients. Because without one, there’s a risk your visitors’ personal data might get stolen. Plus, an SSL certificate protects your website too – from phishing scams, data breaches, etc.

And what’s that got to do with SEO, I hear you ask?

Well, Google and other search engines tend to favour websites that they perceive as secure. And without an SSL certificate, your website will be flagged as ‘non-secure’.

If you’re not sure whether you have an SSL certificate or not, finding out is super easy. Simply check whether your website URL shows as http (no SSL) or https (that means you’ve got SSL!).

To get an SSL certificate for your website (in case you don’t have one) simply contact your host. Most reputable WordPress hosting companies offer one for free and can show you what to do to turn yours on.

5. Your website pages

So now that we’ve looked at some of the work you need to do around the structure and layout of your website, it’s time to look at your website pages.

By these I mean, your About page, your Service or Product pages, your Contact Us page, etc. So what kind of things do you need to pay attention to when it comes to optimising your website pages for search?

Title tags

A title tag (or page title or HTML title) specifies the title of your website page.

But where does that go?

When you do a search on Google, the title tag is the clickable headline that tells you what the page is all about. They help us make that initial decision as to whether we want to click on a link or not.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of business owners who forget to attach meaningful title tags for their web pages.

Please don’t be one of them!

Use the title tag to say what the page is all about and include the keywords you found during your research. Make them relevant to your niche and business, and, if applicable, to your location.

For example, if you’re an accountant in Manchester, the title tag for one of your Service pages might read, ‘Tax return for small business owners in Manchester’. Or something along those lines. It’s niche and specific. And says what it does on the tin.

Meta descriptions

The meta description is the text that displays underneath the clickable headline when you get results through Google.

Why does it matter?

Now, think about your own behaviour as a user. When you do a search, you quickly scan through the results, and if something looks interesting and relevant, you might go and read the 3-4 lines of text that sit underneath. Just to make sure you want to click on that.

That’s the meta description.

Just like with title tags, a lot of website owners forget to fill that in. So don’t make that mistake.

Use those 3-4 lines of text to tell the reader exactly what the page is about. You want to entice them to read.

If you want more detail, check out our blog post on how to optimise your blog posts.

Headings

Hopefully, your web pages aren’t just a great wall of text, right?

They have lovely sections and sub-sections that guide your readers through the content of the page.

Great.

Those sections have headings. And you probably know the drill by now – make sure you pick meaningful headings.

The headings on your pages tell your readers what each section is all about. But they help with SEO too, so make sure you include your keywords in there.

Just a quick word of advice. When you do include keywords in your headings, try and make them look organic and natural. Don’t force it. If a keyword doesn’t fit that section, it doesn’t. The last thing you want is for your page content to read a bit odd and put your prospective clients off.

For more information on how to create an awesome service page for your website, head over to our article, The 9 Essentials of a High-converting Service page.

6. Your blog articles

Everything we talked about in the context of web pages and including relevant keywords applies to blog posts too.

So, for example, if you want to optimise a blog post for ‘portrait photographer in greater Manchester’, include that long-tail keyword in:

• The blog title.
• The Alt Text of your images (more on that later).
• Your sub-headings.
• The main text of your blog article.

But when it comes to blog posts, a few other things are worth thinking about, including:

• Word count.
• Internal links.
• Sub-headings.

Word count

Now, this might not sound like great news. But it’s the truth, so here it goes.

Short 200-word articles don’t cut it with Google anymore.

This used to be the case 10-15 years ago, but not anymore.

Why?

Because Google’s job is to serve its users. When you do a search on Google, you want to see great and relevant content. You don’t want to sift through links and links just to find that none of them answer your questions. Because that’s frustrating, right?

But longer and more in-depth pieces (just like this one) probably have the answers you’re looking for.

And let’s face it – competition on the internet is huge. Lots of companies and business owners just like you produce loads of content on a daily basis. And if you want your business and your content to stand out, in-depth and detailed pieces of content are the way to do it.

HubSpot did some research around this too. Finding that 50 of their most-read blog posts in 2019…yielded an average word count of 2,330. 

So when writing blog articles, we recommend at least 1,200 words or more. This might sound hard to do, especially if you’re not too keen on writing.

So pick topics you know about and that your prospective customers want to read about. Show off your knowledge and expertise, and you’ll start to build trust with your readers while encouraging them to spend more time on your website. This tells Google that your website is worth visiting and gives you better chances of ranking higher in the search results.

If you need some inspiration around what content to create, head over to our article, How to Plan 50 Pieces of Content in 30 Minutes.

Internal links

Internal links are links that you include in your own blog post that send your users to other pages or articles on your own website.

Why do they matter?

Because they tell both Google and your readers how your content links together. Remember that Google isn’t a person! Google reads your content through bots – they don’t see your website the way we do. They read lines and lines of code. And internal links help search engines understand how various bits of information on your website relate to each other.

Plus, internal links are great for user experience. By linking to existing content you’re giving your readers more information. But you’re also inviting them to spend more time on your website. This is called dwell time, and the higher it is, the more Google sees your website as trustworthy and interesting.

So as you write your content, think about ways to organically include links to other relevant pages or articles you created before. You’ll notice that we’ve done this in this article too!

Sub-headings

When writing blog posts (and especially longer pieces), it’s always a good idea to break the information down into sections and paragraphs.

A sub-heading is the bit of text that introduces a new section of your blog post. In WordPress, you can format your sub-headings as Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, etc, depending on how many sections and sub-sections you have.

Each of your sub-headings gives you a chance to include your relevant keywords, which (you guessed!) helps your SEO efforts.

So once again, look at the list of longtail keywords you found while doing your research and include them organically in your sub-headings. Be creative but don’t force it! If you use the same exact keyword in each of your sub-headings, that might look a bit odd to your readers!

For more information on how to write killer blog posts, head over to our article, How to Write a Blog Post that People Will Actually Read.

7. Website images

And last but not least, a few words on images. Your website visitors don’t expect to come to your website and just read text. Imagine how boring that would be! Images play an important part in your website user experience and SEO efforts.

You’ll use a few on your website pages and possibly even more in your blog posts. Because remember – your readers don’t want to see walls and walls of text with no interruptions! Think about their visual experience too by leaving plenty of white space on the page (to let the text ‘breathe’) and by adding relevant pictures.

I always recommend you use plenty of photographs of yourself and your team if you have one. But if you need more images and pictures for your web pages or your blog posts, you can find plenty of free or paid-for stock pics on websites like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.

Re-sizing your images

Before adding images to your website, you should always re-size them. If your images are too big, they might slow down your website and impact your page speed.

For example, images on this blog post are no bigger than 1200px wide. There’s no reason for them to be huge (like 4000px).

You’ll also need to compress your images so they load quicker. To do that, you can use a free online tool called tinypng. This will help you compress your images without losing any quality.

Optimising your images

Whether you add images to your Homepage, your Service or Product pages, or your blog posts, don’t miss the chance to optimise them. You can do this by accessing the file properties and including your keywords in the image title and the Alt-Text of the image.

The Alt-Text is a bit of copy that’s used to improve the accessibility of your images. You can think of it as a chance to describe to someone who can’t see what’s in the image.

But this bit of text also helps Google bots ‘see’ that image. Because the only way they can do that is through text, it’s important you include your relevant keywords in there too. Doing this gives tells Google that a particular piece of content is relevant for someone searching for that term.

What Now? Grab the SEO Starter Pack!

And there you have it – the Ultimate SEO Tips for Beginners Guide.

We hope you enjoyed our SEO for beginners tips, but if you want to really invest in SEO, then check out our SEO Starter Pack. Perfect for non-techie business owners, it’s a practical, easy-to-understand bundle of resources to help you get higher search rankings and more website traffic.

The SEO Starter Pack includes:

• a video library that walks you through how to do SEO step-by-step,
• a comprehensive SEO checklist for every web page or blog post you create,
• keyword research training,
• an interactive SEO planner,
• and lots of added bonuses too!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post SEO For Beginners: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

But how do you get more people to visit your website? In this post, we share how we increased our website traffic by 10 times in 12 months in 2017 and give you some tips to help you do the same.

Using your website to sell

Before 2017, we used to get approximately 250-300 visitors to our website per month. At the time, our business was going well – we were getting plenty of referrals from our existing and previous clients, and we had enough projects to pay the bills. But while we were busy working on our clients’ websites, we were neglecting our own.

We might be professional web designers, but we were suffering from what we call ‘website shame’. Just like a lot of our clients do before they start working with us, we were using our website like an online business card – a glorified billboard for our business that we’d send people to when they wanted to get in touch with us.

But that’s now how you should use your website! Your website should act as an ‘unpaid salesperson’ for your business – it should help you generate leads and sales. Sell your products or services.

Also, because we weren’t creating any blog content for our website, we didn’t have anything to share on social media or with our email list. And as a result, we weren’t building our brand, and our business was growing excruciatingly slowly.

But in 2017, we started producing regular content for our website, and everything changed.

Publishing regular content on your website

Fast-forward to 2018, and we were regularly getting 2,500-3,000 visits to our website per month. Considering there’s a lot of competition in our market, those stats aren’t bad for a web design agency. But what’s key is that we increased our website traffic by 10 times compared to where we were a year earlier. And that’s something!

So what did we do differently?

At the start of 2017, we joined a 90-day content marketing challenge with a group of like-minded business owners through the former Content Marketing Academy (CMA) led by Chris Marr. By signing up for the challenge, we made a decision and a commitment to create a new piece of blog content every week and to practise what we preached.

We started using our website to:

• Build a personal brand.
• Get more traffic.
• Drive more enquiries.
• Make more sales.

But how did we do it? And how can you commit to creating regular content on your website?

1. Measure your benchmark

Do you know how much traffic you’re currently getting on your website every month? In our experience, most website owners don’t. So if you haven’t already, use your Google Analytics to find out.

2. Use your time efficiently

Prior to 2017, we had probably published 2 or 3 blog posts in a year. We used the excuse that we were too busy with client work to find the time to write. If you don’t make time to market your business, your business will stay still. And maybe that’s okay for now, but what about in 6 months or a year?

As a result of publishing regular content, we got more work. But more importantly, we attracted clients that were better suited to our business and who paid more. We did this and still found time to write weekly. This just goes to show that if you put your mind to it and prioritise working on your own business and website, you can make it happen. All we needed to do was to plan ahead and be more efficient with our time.

So what can you do to make better use of your time? Could you set aside a couple of hours a week to create content? Could you maybe take yourself out for half a day every fortnight to work on your website? What worked for us was planning out our content in advance, that way, we knew exactly what to write. We did this using a content planner, that we’re now giving away free to you. Just click to download below!

3. Create accountability

What worked really well for us was taking part in a content creation challenge with other business owners. This gave us the motivation and accountability we needed to keep going when the going got tough and always meet our deadlines. It wasn’t always easy, and it involved a lot of last-minute work on a Sunday night. But we had a group of people supporting us and cheering us on. And that made all the difference in helping us meet our deadlines.

Plus, we got feedback too, and this helped us get better and faster at producing content.

4. Answer your clients’ questions

During the 90-day challenge, we followed the principles from the book They Ask You Answer, by Marcus Sheridan. We learnt that when people are thinking about buying from you, they’ll do their own research first. And typically, they’ll look for information around price, read reviews and comparisons, etc.

Just ask yourself, what did you do the last time you made a purchase? Before you bought the product/service? Research, right? We can’t even buy a toaster without researching!

Using Marcus Sheridan’s method, we came up with a huge number of ideas. We wrote blog posts around our prices, we created industry-related comparisons and reviews, and we generally tried to answer any question our existing or prospective clients would ask us. Essentially, our content was a customer service tool.

Some of the blog posts we wrote back in 2017 still attract the largest number of visitors to our website. To give you an idea, here are some examples of content we wrote in answer to our clients’ questions:

• 7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Work With Us
• How to take payments online for services. PayPal vs Stripe vs SamCart vs GoCardless
• Top 10 Best Web Design Agencies in Manchester 

The last blog post, for example, is one of the many posts that has attracted paying clients into our business. So creating content that answers people’s questions isn’t only great for increasing traffic, it should be used to deliver leads and sales too.

If you want to start publishing regular content, record all the questions that your clients ask you. Whether it’s over the phone, on email, during a face-to-face conversation, a coaching call or a consultation, make a note of them. If one client (existing or prospective) asks you something, chances are that others will do too. And if you’re just starting out and don’t have many clients yet, Facebook groups and conversations on social media can be a great place to start to find ideas.

To help you plan all this content, you can download the content matrix, which is the exact framework we use to plan our content for the entire year.

5. Optimise your content for search

Once we gathered ideas for content from our clients, we then used keyword research tools to articulate those questions in a way that would help our ideal clients find our content on Google. ‘Optimising your content for search’ effectively means using words and phrases that people will use when searching for your business or for related information online.

So use keyword research tools to make intelligent decisions about the titles and the sub-headings you use in your blog posts. And once you’ve identified the relevant keywords, make sure you include them in:

• Title tags.
• Meta descriptions.
• Image names.
• And the Alt text on your images.

If you want to find out more about how to do this, head over to our blog post: 11 Reasons You’re NOT Ranking in Google & How To Fix It. (We wrote it at the back of a real question, and it’s still one of the best-performing blog posts on our website!).

You can also download our checklist of the exact ways to optimise your blog posts.

While we always recommend optimising your content for search, by creating content centered around our clients’ questions, we didn’t always target high-traffic keywords. And yet, some of the blog posts we wrote following this approach still attract the majority of the traffic to our website, like this post: Why are we so expensive?

6. Delve deep into the topic

If you look at some of the blog posts we linked to, you’ll notice that our content is always quite in-depth. Generally speaking, the higher the word count, the more traffic you can expect to receive to your blog post. There’s enough data out there to prove that the more effort you put into your writing, the more opportunities you have to include:

• additional keywords,
• internal links,
• and optimised images.

All of this encourages Google to rank you higher on the search results. So aim to create the best piece of content on a certain topic, and you’ll be rewarded by Google sending more traffic your way.

And if you’re worried about not being able to create long-form content, don’t! As a business owner, you confidently answer the questions your clients ask you day in and day out without thinking twice about it. So look at writing blog posts as an efficient way to share the knowledge that’s in your head. Focus on how you’re making life easier for your readers – you’re educating, informing, and entertaining. You’re being of service.

Be honest and transparent. Don’t be afraid of giving away your knowledge – it pays back, as you can expect an increase in traffic and in enquiries. Just be mindful of the fact that longer content doesn’t mean boring. So keep your end-users (the people consuming your content) in mind, and make your content interesting and relevant.

7. Rinse and repeat

Once you’ve followed these steps once, rinse and repeat. Do this weekly for a year, and you’ll see huge results, much like we did. It’s by creating 25-30 blog posts in 2017 that we managed to increase our website traffic by 10 times. It’s hard work, but as long as you commit to it and find a way to keep yourself accountable to the process, you can make it happen!

Sure, we found it challenging at times. When we first started, we second-guessed ourselves, and we weren’t sure anyone was even reading. But as time went on, people started noticing our content, sharing it, and giving us praise. Our audience started to see us differently because we had this wealth of knowledge that was now available on our website for the world to see.

Publishing regular content changed our positioning in the market. And it changed the type of discussions we’d have during sales calls. We found that people would read our articles before jumping on a call with us. And by the time we spoke to them, they already had trust in us. This made our sales process much quicker and easier.

In 2017, our website started doing some of the selling for us.

And if you commit to publishing regular content on your website, you can get these results for your business too. You can start this whole process by downloading the content matrix which will help you create your entire content for the year. But it’s not just any content, this content will actually help deliver you sales and leads.

Would you like to join our 90-day challenge? 

In 2020, we are running three 90-day content marketing challenges inside our membership, Make Your Mark Online. Our challenges will start on the 13th of January, the 11th of May, and the 7th of September 2020, and we’ll ask all our members taking part to produce one piece of content every week. We’ll support them with weekly calls, training videos, and a private Slack group, giving them the support, motivation, and accountability to use content to increase website traffic and make a difference to the bottom line of their business. If you’d like to find out more and join us for the next 90-day challenge, head over to Make Your Mark Online, or give us a shout if you have any questions!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post How to 10x Your Website Traffic appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

If you’ve ever said that to yourself, you’re not alone.

For most people, search engines drive a majority of the traffic to our websites. And with Google being the number one website on the internet, it’s no surprise we all obsess over our rankings.

This is why I wrote this post. I wanted to give you a few tips on how to track your keyword rankings along with a few tools to help you get started.

What do you want to rank for?

Before we start looking at tools it’s important you know what your goals are.

When I hear people saying “I want to rank on the first page of Google” my reply is always…

“For what?”

What I mean by this is, what search terms do you want to rank for?

It’s all well and good having the tools but you need to make sure you’d doing it the right way and not wasting your time.

Different Types of Keywords

There are a few different kinds of keywords and it’s best that you know the difference so you can get a more accurate picture of where you rank.

Branded keywords

Branded keywords are words and phrases that are based around your business such as:

• Your business name
• Your name
• The name of your own physical products
• The name of your online course
• The name of your membership community
• The name of your event

You should keep a close eye on your branded keywords and where you rank in search engines. You might not think it’s important but it really is. If you’re NOT ranking highly when someone types in the name of your business then it’s a sign that something could be wrong. There might be a technical reason you’re not appearing highly which is why it’s important to track your branded keywords.

This can happen a lot with a brand new website as they usually take time to get listed but if your website has been live for a few months and you still aren’t showing up for your branded keywords, there could be a problem.

Service-based keywords

Service-based keywords are the most sought after. These are words and phrases that your ideal customer might search for online such as:

• Web design companies
• Car finance deals
• Cheap flights
• Vegan recipes
• Driving instructor

These types of keywords are often the most difficult to rank for, as you’re competing with everyone who has a website in your particular industry.

For most small business owners, it’s simply not realistic to think you can rank on the first page of Google for these types of keywords without a huge budget.

It’s still a good thing however, to keep track of these phrases, but don’t be disheartened when your brand new travel blog isn’t appearing above Ryanair in Google for the keyword “cheap flights”.

Product-based keywords

If you sell products on your website, the likelihood is you won’t rank for the industry you’re in. Say for example, you sell coats, unless you’re ASOS or Debenhams, the likelihood of you coming close to page one for the word ‘coats’ without a huge budget is slim!

What you need to do is rank for your individual products. So you’d have more chance of ranking on Google for these search terms, instead:

This is actually good news, because, as research suggests, users aren’t just typing in the word coats, they’re more specific with what they need.

So, if you do sell physical products on your website then you’ll want to track where your pages are ranking for relevant keywords.

Location-specific keywords

If your business services customers in a specific location then you’ll want to track “location specific keywords” such as:

• Locksmith Manchester
• Hotels in York
• Restaurants in Edinburgh
• Funeral directors Liverpool

These types of keywords are extremely valuable to local businesses and are often the number one source of traffic.

Think about the service you offer and track [your keywords] plus [your location].

Long-tail keywords

Another option when choosing certain keywords to track is to think about any longer, more specific phrases someone might type into Google.

What would your ideal customer type into the search field that you could be ranking for?

• Best red coat for winter
• Cheap WordPress web designers
• Best locksmith in Manchester UK

As you would expect, these types of keywords are less popular when searched for individually but long tails keywords make up a majority of the overall searches on Google. i.e More people type in specific keywords (3 words or longer) rather broad (1-2 word) searches.

This is why it’s a good idea to track long-tail keywords.

Ways to check your website rankings

Now that you have a better idea of which keywords to target, you’ll need to find out where you are ranking on search engines.

I’ve put together a list of 5 different ways you can track your keyword rankings online.

1. Manually – Free (Not recommended)

The most common way for you to check your rankings is to head over to Google and type in your keyword and check the first few pages to see if you can find your website.

However, this is NOT the best solution. Searching from your own computer will show inaccurate results. Your browser will remember the websites you’ve been on before and show a different set of results to what your potential customer might see.

It’s also very time consuming, if you have 10 keywords you want to check and you have to search manually every time, it’s going to take you far too long.

2. The Hoth Rankings Checker (Free)

You can check your rankings The Hoth’s website for free. It will give you the top 100 rankings for your website.

The Hoth Rankings Checker is free to use. You just have to submit your email address and name. You’ll probably receive emails but they explain that you can unsubscribe anytime.

Check out The Hoth

3. Chrome Extension Fat Rank – 100% FREE

I’ve been using this chrome extension for about 2 years and it’s a really cool little tool.

Fatrank is a free rank tracker by Fatjoe. It works a little differently from other tools, but it’s nice to have around when checking rankings quickly.

Once you’ve installed the extension, you can click the icon on the toolbar at the top.

You then type in a keyword and hit “check”

It will show you where you’re ranked as long as you’re ranked within 100 listings (first 10 pages of Google)

It seems pretty accurate and reliable and I’d recommend you install it.

Check out FATRANK

4. Serpfox – From Free – $10 per month for a basic account

Serpfox is my go-to ranking tool. It’s clean, simple and is easy to use.

One of the features that I really like about this tool is that you can see a graph that goes up and down based on your rankings for the day. You can look back to see how your website has performed over a set period of time.

It’s really quick too. Once you add your website URL and keywords to the dashboard, you’ll see your rankings come through within seconds.

You can create a free account and add up to 10 keywords straight away. If you need more than 10, you can upgrade to the $10 per month plan and track up to 100 keywords.

Check Out Serpfox to create a free account

5. SEMRush – From FREE – $99 per month for a basic account.

SEMRush is an industry leader when it comes to SEO software. Although it’s mainly used for competitor analysis and keyword research, I still wanted to include it in the list, and for good reason.

It comes with a specific feature that allows you to discover hidden keywords that you didn’t even know you were ranking for. How cool is that?

You can input your website URL and SEMRush will automatically tell you which keywords are ranking on the first 10 pages of Google.

As you can see in the image below, they’ll show a list of keywords that have more than 20 monthly searches that ALSO rank within the first 10 pages.

You can obviously enter and track your own keywords but this feature makes it different from most of the other tools on the market and it’s the main reason I’m happy to pay the higher monthly fee.

You can test out this tool for free and get a limited list of keywords.

Check out SEMrush here

Over to you

There you have it, 5 ways to check your website rankings and what type of keywords to look for. Now that you have some tips you’ll be able to keep track of your rankings easier. I didn’t want to bombard you with tools but at least now you have some tips to keep you on the right path. And if you’re interested in blogging for SEO, check out these best blogging tools you can use in your business, which include plenty of SEO tools too.

One of the best ways to increase your rankings is by increasing backlinks to your website. And one of the most unique ways of doing this is through appearing on podcasts (when the podcaster links back to you). If you want to learn more about how to do this, check out this article on how to get on a podcast as a guest.

And if you want to learn more about SEO, then check out our SEO Starter Pack. It’s aimed at non-techie business owners, and gives you everything you need to get better search engine rankings.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post 5 FREE ways to check keyword rankings in Google appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

I totally get it…you’ve got a great-looking website, you’re proud of it, but you’re frustrated.

No one can find you on Google.

You could have the best-looking website in the world but if people can’t find you online you won’t get any enquires or sales.

As a web design agency who ALSO specialise in SEO, we get asked these questions all the time by potential clients:

– Why can’t our prospective customers find us on Google?
– What do we need to do to get our website on the 1st page of Google?

Google is the number one most visited website and it drives the majority of search traffic to websites in the world. That’s why it’s so important to have a strong presence in search results.

It’s really important that you as the business owner understand what’s wrong with your website and what you can do to fix it.

Having reviewed hundreds of websites over the past few years, I’ve found that there are 11 main reasons why your website is not ranking well in search results.

So, if you are frustrated with the performance of your website, and you want to fast track to the solutions to fix it, you’ve come to the right place.

1. Competitors

Let’s face it. Some industries are more crowded than others, and some of your competitors might have a huge marketing budget behind them. This is why you might not be ranking on the first page for your main keywords.

How can you check for competitors?

A simple Google search for your main products or services will give you some indication of the size and weight of your competition.

Take a look at the search below for “beds for sale”.

As you can see, the number of results is ridiculous (over 173 million). Although lots of these results aren’t relevant, you’re still competing with the likes of DFS, Argos and Dreams. These are all huge organisations, and the chance of you getting your small-business website on the first page is slim to none.

What can you do about your competition?

You could try to focus on a particular segment of your target market.

Rather than trying to rank nationally for the keyword “Beds for sale” you could instead focus on a local audience, such as “Beds for sale in Manchester”.

If you go after a smaller market, there’s less competition and more chance of ranking higher for that geographical location.

Another option would be to find a niche within your industry. Rather than aiming for “Beds for sale” you could go for “Children’s beds for sale”.

There is far less competition for more specific searches, and you stand a better chance of performing well in search results.

You have to be realistic, and if your competitors are all large organisations, then you may have to adjust your strategy. You’ll thank me in the long run.

2. Google has not indexed your website

If you have a brand-new website and you’re not showing up on Google, it may be because Google hasn’t listed you yet.

How to find out if your website is indexed.

So, how would you know if your website is listed on Google?

You can find out by using the following prefix in a google search.

site:yoursite.com  (without the “www.” and “/”)

If you can see your website showing in search results and you’re at the top, you have nothing to worry about. This means you are indexed. Usually, you will see a full list of all your web pages, and that’s what you’re hoping for.

On the other hand, if you’re not at the top or showing up at all then the likelihood is that Google hasn’t indexed your website yet.

How can you index your website with Google?

Google should eventually find your website anyway, but it can take a few weeks. Not only that, if something is wrong with your site you won’t know about until weeks down the line.

The best thing you can do is to add your website to Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) and provide them with your sitemap.

This will tell Google which pages you want to show up in their search results and speed the process along. It will also tell you if there are any technical errors on your website.

3. Your website is not mobile friendly

There’s no doubt about it. Mobile usage is overtaking desktop, which is why having a mobile friendly website is vital. If you don’t, it will seriously impact your rankings in mobile search results.

Ideally, your website should be “responsive”, this means when your site is viewed on a mobile phone or an iPad it will take the shape of that particular device. It shouldn’t be hard work and require any dragging and pinching. This is bad user experience, hence the reason Google will punish you.

How to find out if your website is responsive

To find out if you have a responsive website visit Google’s very own Mobile Friendly Test tool and enter your website URL.

It will show you either as a pass or a fail.

How can you make your website responsive

If a web designer created your website, speak to them about making it responsive. If you’re lucky, it won’t be too expensive!

If you use WordPress and manage your website yourself, you could install a new WordPress theme that is responsive. You may also be able to keep the same theme but buy an additional plugin to make it pass the mobile-friendly test.

Worst case scenario, you may have to have your website re-designed. It’s not always easy to convert an old website, and it might be easier to spend the money on a new design entirely.

It is extremely important to have a responsive website, for both SEO and user-experience.

4. Meta tags not optimised

Search engines use Meta data to work out what your website is about. Each one of your webpages will have its own set of meta tags and they can be optimised to describe the content on that page.

Some of this information will actually show up in search results so you need to know how to change it as it’s often the first thing your visitors will see before they click through to your site.

Your Title Tags and your Meta Descriptions

How can you check you meta-data?

You can use this tool to collect a list of your pages along with their meta tags. Simple paste your URLs into the box and click submit. You’ll be able to download the full list and see what Google can see.

Provided you are using a Content Management System such as WordPress you will have access to update your meta tags very easily using the settings for each page.

How can you improve your Title Tags

Your Title Tags are extremely important and they WILL impact your search engines rankings depending on what you include within them. Here are a few tips:

• Include the keywords you want to rank for
• Keep the length under 55 characters to avoid search engines cutting it short
• Use a sentence structure like “Bed Sales On Single & Double Beds” rather than “Beds | Single Beds | Double Beds | Cheap Beds”

How can you improve your Meta descriptions?

You meta descriptions don’t count towards your rankings but they do count towards your click through rate. This is why they are important. Here a few tips:

• Ask a question? This is a good way to entice your potential visitor e.g. Why is my website not ranking in Google?
• Keep the length under 155 characters to avoid search engines cutting it short
• Include a call to action to or phone number to make it easier for people to get in touch

WordPress SEO

If you are using the WordPress platform, then you can install the Yoast SEO plugin and make changes very easily.

For more On-page SEO tips you can read this article.

5. Poor content optimisation

Have you optimised your website content for search engines?

Believe it or not, Google does actually need your help. We’d like to think that they have all the answers, but in fact, you have some work to do yourself.

There are over 200 indicators that Google use to rank your website in search results. Most of which can be improved by adding and editing different elements on your website including your meta tags like we mentioned in step 4.

How can you find out if your on-page SEO is bad?

You can use my free tool to check your SEO Score. Input your website URL and place the keyword you want to rank highly for and hit enter.

It will give you a score out of 100 and tell you which areas need your attention.

How can you improve your on-page SEO?

I would recommend that you focus on one main topic for each page of your website. Everything from the page headings, image file names and internal links will need to be considered if you want strong search engines rankings.

6. Not enough quality content

I honestly believe that high-quality content makes the biggest difference in how well your website performs when it comes ranking highly.

Your website needs to have a good amount of content to perform well in search results. I’ve seen this time and time again. People pay £1000s for a brand-new website and then let themselves down with poor-quality content.

It’s recommended that each page on your website should have at least 300–400 words of content. This will give Google enough confidence that the information on that page is somewhat valuable. Any less than that and your website is probably not going to rank well.

How to check the word count on the page

You can use this tool to count the number of words on each web page. I would recommend that each page on your website should have at least 300–400 words of content. However, there are no hard and fast rules about this.

For instance, most of the pages on my website contain 500–1000 words, and some of my blog posts are over 2000 words long (including this one).

I personally find that the longer the content, the more helpful the information. There is an extra SEO argument for more content. The more content = more opportunity to include more keywords.

How can you fix it?

You can simply edit your existing pages to increase the number of words. You could even pay a writer to produce your content on a regular basis. Prices for a copywriter tend to be around £100–£200 per page depending on the time it takes and the research involved.

Here are my four tips to writing better content.

• Create helpful content that educates your audience.
• Direct your writing at your ideal customer
• Focus on your customers problems and help them fix them
• Stop talking about you so much

7. No high-quality backlinks

Backlinks are exactly as they sound. LINKS that point BACK to your website.

The quality and volume of your backlinks are a strong sign of how trustworthy and reliable your website is. Search engines take this into account when listing your site in search results.

Quality is far more important than quantity when it comes to gaining backlinks. A link from a relevant website in your niche is a lot more valuable than 100 links from low-quality websites.

How to check your backlink profile.

There are a few tools that will show you which websites are linking back to yours.

Free Backlink Checker is a free tool that will give you a list of websites link back to yours.

Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs are paid services that will give you a lot more in the way of metrics and will show you which links are your most powerful ones.

Usually, you can start a free trial to test out the software.

How can you build more high-quality links?

Over time you may naturally gain some links from other websites. However, you can’t rely on this.

How to earn backlinks

If you focus on providing valuable and high-quality content, you will increase your chances of exposure. Providing the on-page elements are optimised as I discussed in step 4 and 5, more people will find your website and want to link back to it.

You can also reach out to other website owners in your space and share your content with them. Hopefully they will link back to it. At the very least you could ask them if they would allow you to write a piece of content for their website and include a backlink within that.

8. No social media activity

If you have a website but don’t use social media, it could impact your search engine rankings. A lack of social media activity is another sign that your website might not be as credible as your competitors. Much like backlinks, social media engagement adds to your overall trust factor. In a nutshell, the more social, the better.

How to audit your social media activity?

Visit BuzzSumo and paste your website URL into their search field. This will show you the most shared content on your website. It is a paid service, but they will show you some information for free.

How can you improve social media engagement?

Make sure you have social media profiles for your business, and you update them regularly with links back to your website. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram are the most popular social media platforms so it would be good to start with these if you haven’t already.

Social media tips

• Focus on providing consistent, high-quality or entertaining content that will increase shares.
• Share your new AND old content across your social media accounts.
• Add social media sharing buttons to your website
• Add Tweetables within each article in order to increase engagement further.

9. Bad Website Builder

If you have built your site yourself using a DIY website builder, you may have difficulty ranking in search results.

I understand the appeal, drag and drop website builders provide an easy and cheap way to create a website within minutes. There’s one problem: I’ve rarely seen a high performing DIY website in search results.

I believe it’s because these tools create a lot of excessive code that will impact the performance of your website.

Here are a few reasons why your DIY website may not rank well.

• Your basic SEO options are limited
• Your web pages generally take longer to load because of all the extra functionality
• You get far fewer SEO plugins compared with other platforms

What can you do if you have a DIY website?

Try your best to optimise your website using the previous steps in this article and make sure your page load speed is under 5 seconds. Aside from that, there’s not a lot you can do. It’s a quick and easy way to get online but don’t expect a flood of traffic.

We recently wrote an article where we compared DIY websites vs web designers. Feel free to take a look to find out more.

If you love your DIY website but are worried about losing the style, then don’t be. Most web designers will be able to build you a website that looks the same, but it would be a lot more efficient.

10. Poor page load speed

Google expect your website to load quickly to keep their users happy. This means under 5 seconds. Any longer than that and you could risk being penalised by Google.

How can check your page load speed?

You can find out how long your website takes to load by visiting Gt Metrix and entering your URL. It will give you a time, and as long as it’s under 5 seconds you’ll be OK.

How can you speed up your website?

Along with the load speed in seconds it will also give you a score out of 100 and give you the exact issues with your website.

You can then take the relevant steps to speed up your website. This may involve,

• Leverage browser caching
• Optimising images
• Enable gzip compression

If this sounds a bit too technical, we can help. We do offer a website speed up service if you’d like us to help. Feel free to contact us to arrange this.

11. A Formal Penalty

Not to confuse you but there is a difference between “having your website penalised” and “being hit with a penalty”. Up until this point we have only discussed issues that will cause Google to devalue your site. On occasion, Google may issue a formal penalty.

Getting your website hit by a penalty is rare. But if you have performed well in search results in the past but not anymore, this may be a sign that Google has taken action against your website.

The two most common ways to get your website penalised by Google are:

Over optimisation (on-page): This usually means you’ve tried to cram your keywords into every URL, Heading, Title tags, Alt Text, etc. This kind of tactic isn’t natural, and it doesn’t work anymore. Using the same keywords robotically throughout your website will raise a red flag with search engines.

Unnatural link building (off-page): Gaining links back to your website is important, but you have to do it the right way. Buying links, swapping links, poor-quality links and unnatural anchor text is another way to get your site penalised.

How to see if your website has been hit with a penalty?

Login to your Google Search Console account. Once you’ve selected your website from the list, you can use the menu on the left-hand side to navigate to:

Search Traffic > Manual Actions

Hopefully, it will say “No manual webspam actions found,” which means you have NOT been penalised.

How to recover from a penalty by Google

If you have suffered a penalty, it is NOT the end of the world, but it will require your immediate attention.

Google will inform you why they have penalised your website. Once you have fixed the particular issue, you can then submit a “reconsideration request” to Google. Google will then check to ensure you have corrected the issue. If everything is OK, they will remove the penalty.

In Summary

There are so many things you can do to improve your visibility in search results. Most of which can be done by you without the need of an SEO company. The more you understand about your website, the easier it will be if you do decide to hire someone later on in the process.

Over to you

Are YOU finding it difficult to climb onto the first page of Google? Now that you’ve read the article, do you feel a little clearer about what you need to do? If you’d like a step-by-step action plan to rank on the first page of Google then, check out our SEO Starter Pack below.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post 11 Reasons You’re NOT Ranking in Google & How To Fix It appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of gaining higher rankings for certain targeted keywords.

SEO is not magic, it’s a well thought out, tried-and-tested method of essentially, giving Google exactly what they want, so they prioritise your site over your competitors.

Remember, the organic search results are listed just below the Google’s Ad results. It’s clear what a Google ad as it says the word ‘Ad’ next to the listing – web users have become savvy to this and often ignore these results.

Why is SEO so important for businesses?

Some facts…

Did you know that 70% of people click organic search results as opposed to paid ads?

Did you know that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine?

And did you know that 75% of people never scroll past the first page of Google?

Some pretty impressive statics and as you can see, it’s very hard to argue against the benefits of SEO, but some business owners do ask, what does all this mean?

How can SEO help you?

Well, it’s quite simple, the more relevant web visitors you gain to your site the larger your profits. Ultimately, SEO is a powerful, complex and rewarding lead generating activity.

Everyday someone searches for YOUR products and services online and, providing your website is easy-to-navigate with a clear call to action, you could easily see a massive increase in leads and sales.

If you want to find out how we can help you increase your visibility online get in touch today for a free consultation.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post What is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation Explained appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.