SEO STRATEGY

Target Long-tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are three or more keyword phrases that drive quality traffic to your site. They are not as competitive as ‘head’ keywords that have high traffic volumes individually but have many competitors too. Another benefit of long-tail keywords is that collectively, they represent about 80% of search volume on Google – so there is huge potential here.

Targeting long-tail keywords is not always easy but it’s possible to achieve if you research your keywords and their variations and then create quality content for these keywords. So, aim to have full-length content on each page that targets as many keywords as possible without keyword stuffing.

If you aim for at least 300-500 words per page that will usually suffice to target your main keywords and a host of long-tail keywords that your landing pages will rank for in the search engines.

Use Google+ to boost SEO

Google+ is Google’s social networking platform and has many benefits for your SEO

marketing plan including:

•  More exposure on search results
•  Connecting with customers and followers
•  Collecting reviews for your services
•  Boosts local search rankings

Creating your Google+ is easy and if you already have a Google account through other services like Gmail, Google Adwords, YouTube, Analytics, and others, you can use the same login details to create your Google+ account.

Use Ranking Software

Use SEO software like SERanking to check your keyword rankings on Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo – for your country and other countries. 

SERanking is affordable and has a nice interface that allows you to create PDF reports that you can share with your team or with clients. From just £5 per month, you can monitor your rankings and make changes accordingly. When you first set up a website, it prompts you to connect with your Analytics account and pick keywords from your reports that you want to rank on.

It has an easy interface too, and it will only take a few minutes to understand. One of my favorite features is how the interface lists your sites for each keyword and search engine when you click the ‘All Rankings’ report for example.

Research your Competitors

It’s easy to check who your competitors are in the organic search listings and all you have to do is search for your target keywords. However, you need a more advanced strategy to identify them to assess and monitor their search engine optimization strategy. Alexa can help you do this easily and for a low monthly fee of about £6 per month, you can compare against competitors for acquisition and engagement metrics like unique visitors, page views, country rank, etc.

Set up your Google Search Console account

In case you have not created your Google Search Console account, now is the time to do it – you will need it. This free tool from Google should be a part of every SEO marketing strategy because of the wealth of information it provides. One of its popular features is the search terms reports that show how you are ranked, and which ones are driving traffic to your website. This feature has become even more important since Google started showing ‘no results’ in 2011 for people who are logged into their Google account as they search

Bear in mind that this tool reports only Google traffic for the site you have verified and not for other traffic sources like Bing or pay-per-click traffic. For that, you, need Google Analytics.

This tool provides you with a wealth of information about your website and your rankings. You can check any website errors and see if you have suffered a manual penalty. You can also submit your sitemap to get all your pages indexed by Google.

Move your website to WordPress.org

WordPress is by far the leading content management system with a huge list of features that includes plug-ins, themes, and widgets that other platforms cannot match. It is free and many hosting providers now provide the one-click install that you can use to get your site up in minutes.

Optimize Landing Pages

Use the keyword planner tool in Google Adwords if you have an account there, to assess how optimized your pages are for your keywords. So, enter your URL in the search box and then click search. It will bring up a list of keywords that are related to your pages.

This helps you see how optimized your pages are and you can use it to research keywords that you want to rank on. If you search with your site and find that the results have many keywords that don’t reflect what you do, then it is time to change or update your website content and add your most important keywords.

Use Yoast SEO plug-in

This is one plug-in that should be part of your SEO marketing plan because of its ability to optimize your website features like title tags, content, images, indexing, and so on, for higher rankings. It is used by thousands of WordPress sites and it is one of the most popular plug-ins.

Choose your Keywords Carefully

Your SEO campaign should start with keyword research. Your keywords are what searchers use to find your website on Google and picking the right one is critical.

There are many free keyword tools to use as the Google Keyword Tool to find your keywords. The ideal combination of keywords you pick will have high traffic volumes and low competition. You will want low competition keywords because they are easier to rank and they are sometimes more profitable, especially if they are long-tail keywords. Look for trending topics around the globe on Google Trends to pick a currently popular search.

Sign up to Google My Business

One of the first steps to SEO success is getting listed on Google Maps. The benefit is that you get a free listing on Google, right at the top for local searches for your services. Your listing also includes your address which makes it easy for your customers to find your business premises and a map too with directions.

Another benefit of a Google Places listing is customers can leave reviews about your services and their positive experience can enhance your brand.

To get started with Google Places for Business, you will need to provide your Business Name, Address, Telephone Number, description of your services, and various other details like trading hours and business category.

Optimize for other Search Engines

Google’s share of Local search traffic is around 67%. That’s a big slice of the search traffic for sure, but there are other important players in this arena and they include Bing, Yahoo, Yell, and a few others. Yell, for example, is very popular with local searchers and conversion rates there are very high. Another benefit is that having a listing on local sites like Yell, Yelp and Touch Local will boost your Google rankings.

On-page Optimization

Advice from Google to website owners looking to rank high on their search engine is to optimize their websites for visitors and not the search engines. Optimizing your website for visitors or on-page optimization is about providing content that is relevant, engaging, entertaining, and keeps your visitors coming back to your site for more. It also helps improve your search engine rankings because other sites are more likely to link back to your website.

Optimizing for the search engines alone, which Google frowns upon, includes such black hat methods as keyword stuffing that ultimately will hurt your rankings.

Include keywords in your title tags, meta tags, and page content, including your images. Also, get some links that point to your site and include your keywords in the anchor text.

Target Local SEO

Local Search Engine Optimization or Local SEO presents opportunities for small businesses that include an increase in sales or leads, and greater visibility to local customers. It has become increasingly important as customers are now turning to search engines for local services. Google Stats also reveals that about 97% of consumers first search for local services online.

Local SEO is like normal SEO in many ways, but there are a few differences. The major difference is that local SEO high rankings are usually easier to achieve than a nationwide or international campaign. The traffic may be much lower in a local campaign but there are fewer competitors too and the conversion rates are even better.

If your business serves a local customer base, you will know how difficult it can be to reach your prospects with your offers. So, you must start early by optimizing your keywords with local city, county, and regional keywords that people are using to search on Google. Use the keyword planner tool to find these and incorporate them, and use them for link building too.

Aim For Top 3 Position

Always aim to be in the top 3 positions for your main keywords because anything lower may not drive sufficient traffic to your website to reach your goals. The top 3 listings get over 70% of search click-throughs and that’s for both branded and unbranded searches. Also, being in a top position boosts your credibility with target customers and prospects, and leads to greater profitability.

Why SEO?

SEO is mainly about getting your site to the top of the search engine rankings. One of its disadvantages is the length of time it takes to achieve high rankings, and a good strategy is to launch PPC campaigns while you work on your SEO to get your site to the top.

Certain important things to know as you do SEO are:

• Google has over 65% of search traffic and it uses over 200 factors in its algorithm calculations.
• You should benchmark against competitors with tools such as Alexa Rank to help you set realistic goals.
• Set up Google Analytics and Search Console tools early to understand where you are, which will also measure and report your progress.
• Hire an SEO practitioner to help you with On-page and Off-page optimization if you don’t have the skills and experience.
• Don’t buy links – it will get you penalized and the road back to recovery is long and hard.

Connect with other Bloggers

Find other bloggers in your niche who are interested in connecting with you and welcome guest posting. This will help increase your authority and brand awareness, and you will get more visitors to your website from people who trust and believe in what you have to say. It also helps to increase your backlinks and leads to higher search rankings too.

Make your Site Responsive

Your website should be optimized for mobile too, especially if your users access it via smartphones – because Google now penalizes sites that aren’t mobile responsive. WordPress, for example, has plug-ins to make your site mobile responsive and you can download these for free.

Press Releases

Press releases still work and there are free resources if you have a great story to tell about your business or a news-worthy item. Some PR sites to submit to are:

•  24-7PressRelease.com
•  PRLog.org
•  IdeaMarketers.com

You should send your press release to your local or national media outlets, and if they are interested and publish it, you will see a lot of interest from visitors and customers.

Prioritize SEO Strategy

SEO for high search engine rankings has become a priority promotional strategy for over 90% of businesses on the web. This is because of the huge volumes of traffic that can be achieved by being on the first page of Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Recent research reveals that a no. 1 listing for brand searches on Google search results receives 45% of clicks, no. 2 gets about 25%, and no. 3 gets about 13%. For non-branded searches, the results are quite similar with no. 1 receiving about 40% of clicks.

So, being in the top 3 should be a priority for your business and you should implement all SEO tactics like link building, content creation, etc. to achieve this.

Launch Alexa

Want to keep an eye on your competitors and see what they are up to? Then Alexa is the tool for you. Alexa is a competitor analysis tool that collects data on browsing behavior and transmits it to Alexa.

With Alexa, you can see the ranking of your site globally and by country and you can see your visitor demographics and then compare this with your competitors’. By signing up for an account, you can compare 3 or 4 of your competitors on many key metrics and benchmark your progress towards achieving your objectives.

Get Positive Online Reviews

Start collecting positive Google reviews to build your credibility, showcase your skills and experience. These reviews show up in search results when people search for your company and on Google Maps too.

Keyword Density

WordPress plug-ins like SEO Yoast help you maintain the ideal keyword density for your pages. The ideal density is 2-4%, so that means for every 100 words of text, your keyword should be mentioned about 3 times on average. If it’s too high, say like 10%, and then you could suffer a penalty for keyword stuffing, especially if it’s excessive throughout your website.

If it’s below 2%, you will struggle to achieve high rankings because your pages will be deemed as not being relevant to that keyword by the search engine robots.

Link Search Consoles and Google Analytics

Link your Google Analytics and Google Search Consoles accounts in the admin section of your analytics account. This helps to analyze your site improve your On-page SEO and check your site impressions.

Submit sitemaps to Bing Webmaster tools and Search Consoles

WordPress, for example, has sitemap plug-ins that you can use to create your sitemap and submit to Bing and Google. If you want to ensure that your pages are discovered and indexed by the search engines, then you need a sitemap. That’s true especially if you have a large website that has many deep page levels.

It also helps to ensure that your pages are indexed faster and appear in the search results quicker.

Optimize for Bing and Yahoo

Bing and Yahoo are high-traffic search engines. Although they are far behind Google, which has about 65% of traffic, they are still a great source for organic traffic. So, your SEO marketing strategy should include these two sites and from what I’ve discovered, their ranking algorithm is quite different from Google. Do your research according to your niche and work towards achieving page 1 listings for your keywords on these sites.

Create organic search KPIs

Create organic search objectives and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track and measure your progress towards achieving your goals. Examples of KPIs for organic traffic are:

•  Percentage increase in traffic
•  10% conversion rate for organic
•  Reduce bounce rate below 50%

Optimize your Images

Image search is big and it is one way to gain more traffic for your website. So ensure that your keywords are added as alt text and this will help to improve rankings in the Google Image search vertical. Alt-text is also important for visually impaired people who use screen readers to read your website and for search engines that currently cannot read images.

Update Title Tags

This sounds obvious, however, over 80% of sites have duplicate title tags and this could harm your search rankings. In fact, without optimized title tags, your CTR (click-through rate) in the search results will be below, and this will affect your traffic volumes. Use your Google Search Console account (formerly Webmaster Tools) to identify duplicate titles and change them as soon as you can.

You can view your organic CTR in your Search Consoles account and this reveals the number of people who’ve searched with your keywords and how many clicked through to your website.

Optimize for 2 to 3 Keywords

Optimizing your pages for 2 to 3 of your main keywords should be sufficient to help you target long-tail keywords and bring high volumes of visitors to your site. If you have a 100-page site, for example, that could easily work out at 300 keywords you are targeting and that will bring you thousands of visitors each month.

Minimum 250 words per landing page

Aim for at least 250 words for over 80% of your pages to avoid being penalized for thin content. The search engines are looking at this to rank sites that they deem valuable to their searchers and if you have few words per page for many of your pages, then you will struggle to gain high rankings. This also helps to include your main keywords in the content and target both long-tail and head keywords.

Increase Page Count

Google is now ranking sites with a high number of pages, higher than thin sites with only 10 to 12 pages for example. However, this differs from industry to industry and if you are a local service business, a 12-page website will likely be sufficient to include all the content that you need and this holds for your competitors too. However, if you are in a sector like personal health and you have a thin site, then you will struggle to gain and maintain high Google rankings over your competitors.

Make it Responsive

Mobile responsiveness is now a big factor in ranking results on mobile devices. If your site is not responsive, then it will not achieve high rankings for your keywords and competitors will always outrank you. On platforms like WordPress, all you need to make your site responsive is a plug-in and there are many free ones available to install in minutes.

Check Website Speed

Website speed is about ensuring that your site loads fast for new and returning visitors. Slow websites are a frustration for many visitors and this is a major reason people leave and never return. So, ensure that your site loads under 5 seconds and aim for 2 seconds to ensure that the user experience is great for your visitors. Use a tool like the Google Developers Page Speed Insights that’s free and shows you what is causing your page to be slow and what you can do about it. These are some of the common issues that you need to fix and it will show for both mobile and desktop versions:

•  Leverage browser caching
•  Enable compression
•  Minify CSS
•  Minify JavaScript
•  Optimize images

Meta-Analysis

This includes your title and meta description tags and they’re meant to have unique content for each page and include the keywords that you want to rank on. Your title should have up to 70 characters and your meta description between 70 – 160 characters describing what the page is all about. You can check your Google Search Console account (formerly Webmaster Tools) for any problems like duplicate meta tags or tags that are too short.

It will also notify you which pages have a missing or empty title, pages that have characters above 160 for the description, and pages with duplicate rel=” canonical” code.

Favicon

It’s important to have a favicon that is consistent with your brand and makes your site stand out from competitor sites. As prospects search and click through to your site and also competitor sites, it’s easy for them to remember your site and come back to purchase, request or quote, register, or whatever other action that is available on your site.

Although it does not help your search rankings directly, it helps to create a professional look makes it easy to identify you, and boosts your branding. All these are important factors in creating trust and relationships on the web, and search engines like Google are rewarding businesses that achieve this, with higher rankings.

Custom 404 Page

Use a custom 404 page to help people find all proper content on your website that provides them with useful information that makes them stay longer. A 404 page is an error page that a visitor sees when they try to view a page that no longer exists on your website, like when the page has been deleted or they have mistyped the URL.

The standard page usually displayed doesn’t contain helpful information and that’s why the bounce rate is often high. However, a custom 404 page can quickly reverse this and you will see more engagement from your visitors.

Safe Browsing

Create a great user experience on your site and try to avoid phishing and malware from your website. You can make your site more secure by using Google Safe Browsing to check against Google’s list of sites that are suspected of phishing scams, spam, malware, and unwanted software pages.

With the Safe Browsing service you can:

•  Warn users before they click on links on your site that may lead to malware-infected pages.
•  Prevent users from posting links to known phishing pages from your site.
•  Check a list of pages against Google’s lists of suspected phishing malware and unwanted software pages.

Information is available here: https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/ 

W3C Validation

Your site should use valid markup that contains no HTML errors. Syntax errors make it difficult for search engines to index your pages. You should check your website with the W3C validation service at http://validator.w3.org/ and make sure it meets the web standards.

The W3C CSS validation tool is also available for CSS validation, to check if your code works well or to track real errors that you have missed. It is available here-

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Google Maps Listing

A Google maps listing is a fundamental part of a local online marketing strategy. As most people are using Google to look for your services, you must launch a Google My Business account and add your business addresses. If you have multiple locations, then you can create an account for each location and with your Google+ account, you can share content, updates, pictures, contact details, and much more.

Also, customers can leave reviews about your services and these will appear alongside your Maps listings and organic listings when people search for your business.

Your maps listing is mostly beneficial to prospects that want to find your offices or shop and even to call you directly from their mobile phones.

Check your site for errors

Use Google Search Console to check if there are problems on your site that are leading to poor search rankings. Some notable errors include slow loading speeds and malware.

Carry out SEO Audit

An SEO audit is one of the most important tasks to carry out as an SEO practitioner or website owner. There are many areas to cover in an audit and because Search Engine Optimization is a relatively new marketing discipline, there is a high possibility of finding problems in a website and search optimization.

For example, some webmasters will select a Content Management System (CMS) without assessing its impact on achieving high rankings on the search engines. Some will develop their own CMS and they will reveal many issues when an SEO audit is carried out.

Some areas to consider as part of your audit include website usability, accessibility/spiderability, Keywords, geo-location, and on-page factors:

Usability

Often, Usability is not associated with SEO and organic ranking, but this is a very good place to start. The reason is that if your website visitors experience difficulties completing simple tasks like browsing, searching, navigating from page to page, downloading, and carrying out many other tasks and events, they will leave in frustration and that will affect the performance of your website.

For example, bounce rate is an important metric in Google Analytics to measure visitor engagement on your site. It represents people who enter your site and leave (bounce) without viewing other pages – regardless of how long they have been on the landing page. Google considers this in its algorithm and sites with poor bounce rates compared to competitors will have lower rankings.

Bounce rate also affects the performance of Pay Per Click campaigns in Google Adwords and a good bounce will often lead to good quality scores and eventually a high Ad Rank.

Some factors to consider when carrying out a Usability review are conventions, sections, menus, breadcrumbs, content structure, and any roadblocks that prevent people from doing what you want them to do on your website – like placing an order.

Ultimately, a site with good usability and excellent content will lead to people wanting to link to it and this will lead to higher organic rankings.

Accessibility/Spiderability

Accessibility and Spiderabiity relate to your visitors and search engine bots respectively. However, accessibility is important to search engines too because they must be able to reach your website to be able to crawl it.

This is not as easy as it sounds and many webmasters get this wrong because of the many web design and implementation constructs that search spiders have to understand. Your site should be in HTML format because while spiders do crawl Flash files and images, they are difficult to analyze.

A well-designed Information Architecture (IA) requires that you put some thought into it and this can bring many benefits to users and search engines. Search bots aren’t able to understand pages the way humans do and this presents significant limitations for accessibility and spiderability.

One important factor is flat versus deep architecture. Flat sites require fewer clicks to get to inner pages and deep pages require many clicks to get to inner and deeper pages. Flat is often better for both spiders and humans but this will depend on the number of pages and categories.

Search Engine Health Check

Sometimes, your website will not be performing well in the search engines for the

following reasons:

Many of your pages are not indexed by Google, Bing, and Yahoo and you can find out by searching for "site:yourdomain.com" to check how many of your pages appear in the index. You can compare this with the number of pages that you have on your site and if there is a big difference, you should submit a sitemap to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. This will often solve the indexing problem but you should check that your site is indexable by using the tools available in webmaster tools.

•  Brand Name Search - Search on your brand terms on Google to assess how you are ranking and to check if you have been penalized or not. If you have, then you should take corrective action by following Google guidelines to start ranking again -  because your competitors will be taking advantage of your absence.
• Ensure that the cached pages match the current pages on your site.

Keyword Health Checks

Are you targeting the right keywords? This takes time to correct if you have been optimizing your site for specific keywords and then realize that you are targeting either very competitive keywords that require a large time and money outlay or your keywords have zero or low traffic volumes and won’t bring the ROI that you require. Avoid keyword cannibalization – that is more than one page targeting the same keywords. This is a waste of resources and it’s better to have specific keywords for specific pages to gain more traffic.

Geolocation Targeting

If you are targeting a specific country, it is important to make the search engines know where your business is located. There are many ways to do this and they include using a country-specific Top Level Domain (TLD) for your domain e.g. ".co. uk" or ".co.in"

Other things you can do include:

•  Host your website on a local server and not one that is abroad. Surprisingly, many website owners get this wrong and wonder why they are getting traffic from locations that they have little interest in targeting.
•  Include your physical address on every page of your site.
•  Use Google Webmaster Tool geotargeting to your target country.
•  Setup Google Maps.
•  Get links from websites hosted in the country you are targeting.
•  Use the local language on your website.

External Links

External links pointing to your web pages are one of the biggest factors in achieving high organic rankings because they are a vote for your website. You can check these inbound links using a tool such as Majestic SEO or Alexa, which records links to your site.

You should check the quality of links compare these to your competitors’ links and check for bad patterns in the anchor text, like what keywords have been used – because these are the ones you want to rank on. A sign of link purchasing is having a high percentage of anchor text with the same keyword and this could be seen as spam by Google.

Also, check that there are links to other pages on your site and not just the homepage – for example, a more natural linking distribution is many deep links in proportion to homepage links.

On-page Review

Check your title tag, meta description tag, content, and image alt tag to ensure that they are well optimized for your keywords and there is no keyword spamming. Your title tag is very important because this is what searchers see in the Google search results; so you will want to make sure it is relevant and includes the keywords that you want to rank on. You are unlikely to rank high if you don’t include your keywords in the title.

Check for a meta robots tag and if you do find one, then you may have spotted a problem because a NoFollow or NoIndex tag could hinder your search ranking plans.

Make sure that every page has a unique meta description because this is another tag that people will see in the search results and if it’s relevant too, they are likely to click through. Although they are not a significant factor in ranking, they will likely be used in duplicate content calculations.

SEO vs. PPC

SEO and PPC are two of the most popular digital channels for online marketers and

website owners. Both pose a challenge in budget and resource allocation and how their implementation and management are undertaken.

Here are some truths you will often hear regarding SEO and PPC, which you need to take into consideration as you plan and manage your digital marketing strategy:

• SEO is for Organic listings (free) while PPC Advertising is for Paid Ads.
• Page rank for SEO and Quality Score for Adwords. You’ll often hear PPC experts talk about quality scores – and that’s because it is one of the most important metrics in your account.
• You are already doing Search Engine Optimization even without having included it in your promotional mix. By creating content, publishing blogs and articles, linking to other websites, and the mere fact of having a website means you have done or you’re doing Search Engine Optimization tasks whether you like it or not.
• A page one organic listing enhances your brand and gives your organization more credibility.
• Run PPC campaigns as you work on your SEO.
• One major disadvantage of SEO nowadays is that Google has stopped showing search queries for Organic searches because of privacy regulations.
• Timescales for SEO vary whereas, with Pay Per Click Advertising, you can know within a day what works and what doesn’t. 

So, getting a first page listing for both is desirable, but many Paid Ads will often receive substantial traffic volumes even if they are not on the first page =- especially when they seek quotes from multiple suppliers.

Organic listings on Page 2 and beyond also get clicks but this is often very low compared to page 1 listings that receive 95% of traffic. However, SEO listings receive significantly more traffic than Paid Ads at 80% and 20% respectively – and this is mainly because most searches are informational rather than transactional.
 

For SEO, you are targeting specific sites – Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whereas PPC includes a wide range of Search Partners like AOL, Ask, YouTube, and other Google sites and millions of Display Partners that are part of the Adsense program and provide an endless stream of impressions and clicks.
 

Many searchers ignore Paid listings because of:

1. Their positioning on the page
2. Searchers know that they are commercial listings 

SERPs Visibility

Affiliate marketing helps your site appear higher and more often in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in two main ways: Firstly, you get many backlinks to your website from affiliate publishers who place links on their sites to yours, and this improves your rankings in the organic natural search results. Each backlink is like a vote for your site and the more votes you have, especially if they are of higher quality, then the higher you will be listed for your keywords.

Secondly, for affiliates that use pay per click advertising to promote your business or products, you will appear for more searches, especially for searches that you haven’t identified earlier. However, you should have rules in place that prevent affiliates from bidding on your brand name, domain name, and any close variants.

Stick with it

SEO is difficult! The worst thing you could do is give up on your local SEO efforts and allow your competitors to win. Local SEO at times can be difficult and getting that Number one spot or Page one listing on Google can be an immense task for any business in a competitive niche. It requires constant optimization and providing quality content with a well-planned link-building strategy. With perseverance, your site can achieve that coveted number one spot and receive tons of traffic and sales.

I put this one at the end because many people give up when they don’t see any improvements. If you continue working on your SEO strategy and implementing the tips above, your site will achieve high rankings – guaranteed! So don’t give up.