How many emails do you receive offering to put your website on the first page of Google ?
I get several a day, even though we’re already on page one of the search results for a number of good phrases.
And we just made it to number one for online marketing setups both in Australia and the USA, which made my week.
How did we do it ?
Well the website itself has been around and doing well for a while and a lot of factors were already handled, but other than that it was totally about writing good copy.
There are A LOT of things that Google checks when working out the search results, which you can see here, but there are a few main ones.
And it’s good to apply the 80-20 rule ( that 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results ) when doing things to move a page up in search results and concern yourself mostly with the main factors.
Here’s a very short timeline of the main things to be aware of …
- At the beginning of the century, the text in the website page was probably the most noticeable influence ( including the underlying text that you see when you view source )
- The other main factor was the number of links from other sources pointing back to the site.
- And website activity later became a large factor – people visiting and staying without bouncing off and is website content staying fresh.
- Now the emphasis is more on page content again ( though which has led to a lot more work going into content marketing by people who know this ).
Content marketing
I could very well have titled this post SEO and content marketing, because of the more recent emphasis on content. The idea behind this is to consistently publish information on the website, that’s valuable to the expected website visitor. This enables a lot of things :
- It increases the number of pages on your site that have the opportunity of being found.
- Creates activity on the site, so when Google’s spiders come back they can see it’s not dead
- Allows you to send out regular emails and SMSes giving people useful stuff,
- which sends people back to the page ( also another good ranking signal ).
- It results in people linking back to the page in Facebook and elsewhere ( another good signal ).
What we did
- Wrote regular posts on similar web development and marketing subjects over several years. This meant the website was all on a similar theme and very relevant to the page we were going to write next.
- Accumulated links over the last 13 years ( but interestingly most are now pretty irrelevant since we swapped our website over to https last year ).
- Wrote a product description for online marketing setups.
- Optimised the page copy and other content with the Squirrly WordPress plugin ( though I do some things differently to the suggested things ).
What should you do ?
OK, so it was probably a bit easier for me with a 15 year old website that’s been optimised. But appling the 80/20 rule and doing the main steps done will start you getting found.
SEO is about getting exposure in search results and that doesn’t have to be only making it onto page one for ultra-competitive phrases.
Add new updates, news and info to your site regularly about things relevant to the site. Optimise the pages and promote them on Facebook and in directories to get some links and visitors. People will start finding you on page one for various subjects of your pages.
Just as important as getting a page good exposure in results, is to make it effective.
- Make sure there’s a good marketing message in the search result. Read how to put an effective message in your search results here.
- Link from that page to other relevant pages on your website and increase the chances that the visitor will see something they want.
- Add a call to action that is right on the subject of the page and encourages the visitor to contact you or leave you contact details.
Need help with any of your online marketing ?
This is what we do. You can see the main areas we can help you with in the main drop-down menu of this website, along with costs. If we haven’t provided enough info, let me know & one of us can fill you in 🙂