You know when you type in a Google search term up pops literally hundreds of thousands of pages? How many pages do you actually scroll through to find what you are looking for? Most people only take notice of the first three links; maybe if you have the time, you’ll scroll through two or three pages. So if you want people to find your business, products or services through a standard Google search, you need to be as high up on that search list as possible.
The better you have optimised your website, the more likely it will show up higher (closer to the top of the list) in the search rankings and the more discoverable you are in the world wide web. That’s what SEO means: search engine optimisation.
How does Google decide who gets to go at the top? It has an algorithm that it uses to rank pages, which contains a plethora of factors to ascertain where your site should fall and how interested people will be in reading it.
This week, Mumbrella has summed up the three things are that are vital to get in those vied after top three spots. Those three things can be summed up as:
- Content
- Backlinks
- RankBrain
Having great content on your website is absolutely vital. No longer can you pretend that it’s not compulsory. If you want to improve search results then you need great quality and consistent content writing.
Here are some really basic and practical guidelines that you can start to implement straight away:
- A blog helps! Particularly if it is part of your website. Ranking is affected by how recent the content is and with a blog you are updating your content frequently. Have you checked out my blogging tips?
- Make sure you update your other website content regularly and that it is current.
- Google now prefers longer articles of approximately one thousand words. This is where you have to decide whether you’d rather have more hits, or keep your readers interested. If you can craft an interesting, informative and entertaining post of one thousand words, go for it! But be warned, this can be challenging, especially if you’re not a professional writer. Likewise, make sure your content is unique. Don’t bother with generic or stolen content (also known as spun content) and keep your content information rich. Write for the visitor, not for the search engines.
- Write with your audience in mind. Pretend you are writing your content articles or blog posts to a specific person— not a family member or friend but a potential or existing client.
- Use language that a child would understand. For most industry and topics, you would best serve your audience (eg potential customers) by writing with simple language and clear terms. But don’t sacrifice good quality writing.
- Give your readers interesting information. People should be able to finish your blog post remembering at least one juicy bit of information that they can act upon or share with another.
Bonus tip:
Use other social media platforms to send people to your website. The more people that look at your website; the more that search engines recognise that it’s a well trafficked site and thus rank you higher.
‘B2C [business to customer] companies that blogged 11+ times per month got more than 4X as many leads than those that blog only 4-5 times per month,’ (HubSpot, 2015).
Read more helpful SEO writing posts.
