seo Archives - Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert

In my last post I gave a quick intro to the basics of SEO along with some practical tips you can implement on your own website to get it indexed by Google and appearing in your local search results. That might even be all you need if you’re exclusively targeting your specific local market.

But if you’re looking to be found by a larger target audience located outside of your immediate locality, then simply applying the SEO basics probably won’t help you rank on page one (or even page 2 or 3). The reason for this is a combination between competition and time.

Competition

If your business is in a competitive market, and your competitors are also investing in SEO, then how you rank in Google search is going to be directly related to what they do. Even if you try and copy exactly what it is that your top competitors are doing, you face the challenges of time and resources.

Time

Assuming that your competitors have been investing in SEO for a while now, they’ve had the opportunity to acquire links, possibly a great many. Even if they haven’t gotten much link authority, the very fact that they’ve had their website up and running could be a major advantage, especially if you are just starting up. That’s because the data shows that Google gives preference to older domains. Sort of like good wine or beef — the longer it ages the better it becomes.

All other SEO factors being equal, a new domain will have a hard time competing against one that’s a few years old. But all SEO factors are often no equal, and there are ways to beat those older domains — but it takes resources.

Resources

In order to rank higher than your competitors you need more authoritative links and better content.

You’ll notice that I said more “authoritative” links. When it comes to links, it’s not just a numbers game. Google is looking at the authority of the website that’s linking to you, because that shows Google how trustworthy and authoritative your site is. In other words, one link from the Wall Street Journal is going to be worth hundreds of links from low quality or unrelated sites. Having links from authoritative sites in your specific industry is huge, and can significantly boost your site in the rankings.

But getting those links is not easy.

It requires building relationships with reporters and influencers who might, one day down the road, consider including your company in an article or blog post, along with a link.
It requires creating content that is so informative that other writers feel compelled to link to it in their own articles. Of course, you’ll need to let those writers know about your content and persuade them to use it.
It requires building a reputation for thought leadership in your field, so that you can get other website owners to allow you to guest post on their site (thus getting a link back to your own).

Relationship building and content creation demands a significant investment in time and resources. And if your competitors are doing it too, then it’s even tougher and more resource draining.

But Wait…

All this negative talk doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in SEO. You absolutely should, because your potential customers are using Google to search for solutions every day. The chance of driving some of them to your site is worth the effort.

But if you want, or need, to see immediate results, then SEO is usually not the strategy to put all your money on because it’s a long term process. I believe that it can eventually pay off big time, but you have to be able to wait for it to happen and continue working on it until it does.

For short term results, your best option lies with paid advertising either on Google search or Linkedin or Facebook, depending on your business and target market.

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SEO is that magic term that you’ve heard will unleash the flow of traffic from Google to your website. Take the SEO pill, sit back and watch the customers roll in. Not. At least not the magic part (or the pill). But SEO is important in getting Google to give you the love I know you deserve, so let’s take a closer look at what it actually is and how you can implement it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, it is the process of optimizing your web or mobile content to allow Search Engines to find it and to convince those search engines to display it in their search results above all other relevant content.

How does SEO work?

Let’s say a person is looking to purchase custom kitchen cabinets. He types in “custom kitchen cabinets” in Google (or another search engine — the principles are pretty much the same for all, but since Google has over 90% of all searches, we’ll focus on them exclusively). Google has their minions of “spiders” crawling every corner of the web to create the most useful index of available content they can. When you type in your cabinet query, Google displays what they consider to be the most relevant answers from their index, ranked in order of relevance.

Google decides how to rank its search results based on its own proprietary algorithms, which they do not reveal. But Google has given us guidelines as to what they like (and don’t like), and lots of statistical tests have been run, which in total give us a pretty good idea of what we need to do to get Google’s positive attention. It’s called SEO.

Now back to our cabinet example. The first thing Google showed me when I typed “custom kitchen cabinets” are ads.

Yup, this is how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Each time someone clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays Google an amount of money. It’s called pay per click (PPC), and the price of a click is determined based on a competitive auction. The more competition for the particular keyword, the higher the price.

The “custom kitchen cabinets” keyword phrase happens to run around $5 per click. Some keywords can cost as much as $47 per click (mortgage, attorney). That seems a lot for a click, but it really depends on the price of the product you’re selling or even more so, on the lifetime value of a customer. We’ll talk a lot more about this in a dedicated post about PPC.

Once you get past the ads, you’ll see Google’s local listings along with a map.

This is where you’ll find results based in your local area. You’ll see the top 3 on the first page and a longer list by clicking on “More places”. If you have a company, it should show up in Google’s local listings when you search for your related keywords.

For example, when I type in “digital marketing agency” from my home (which is about 1.5 miles from my office), Onrush Digital Marketing is #1 in the organic listings (the first listing is an ad).

Now, even if you don’t do anything, Google will try it’s best to find your company and list it. You don’t even need a website. But you obviously have to be somewhere out there in the web to get found. The most direct and effective way to let Google know you exist and get included in your local listings it to create a Google Business Page. If your company has been around for a while, Google might already have created a page for you, which you’ll need to claim and update with your own copy and images.

Ideally, you’d like to see your website listed in the organic results, which appear beneath the local listings box. Here’s how those results look in our “custom kitchen cabinets” example:

You’ll notice some familiar big box names like Homedepot, Lowes, HGTV and Costco. These huge websites are usually almost impossible to beat, because they have massive “authority”, tons of inbound links and content (we’ll get into why that’s important in a minute).

But you’ll also notice that Google has thrown in a couple of local companies, because it knows where my query is coming from. For instance, suburbancabinet.com, which is second to last on the list is probably on page #1 ahead of Costco simply because it’s located close to where my computer is right now. The first organic result on the list is also located not that far away, in NY.

You can see the importance that location plays in Google’s algorithm. That’s because Google is looking to get you the most useful information relating to what you’re searching for. And if you’re searching for “custom kitchen cabinets”, Google feels it makes the most sense to show you results that are near you.

The SEO you need to do

So what SEO do you need to do to get your website listed on page #1 of Google?

If I could guarantee you a spot on page 1 every time, I’d be a very wealthy man, and probably very hated by Google. All I can do is give you the best SEO practices that you can apply to your site right now and pretty much guarantee that if you ignore them all, you probably won’t hit the top of page 1.

Here are 5 main factors that play a role in SEO:

Content
Onpage
mobile
speed
Links

Content

People search for keywords, and Google searches for content that contains and relates to those keywords. In order to rank (and get displayed) for those keywords your website content must contain them. But simply stuffing those keywords in nonsensical sentences onto your page isn’t going to do the trick (as it did in the “old days”). That’s called “keyword stuffing” and it could get you penalized by Google.

Your content must not only include the keywords you are targeting, but it must be relevant and informative. Google is looking for the most relevant content that will answer its user’s query. The better your content does that, the better chance you have of ranking highly for it.

It’s important to bear in mind that you are competing with every other website out there that is also trying to target the same keywords as you are. So even if you’re writing great content, your competition might be writing even better content (same goes for links).

Onpage SEO

When applying SEO to your webpage there are a few important items to include:

Title tag
Hover your curser over the browser tab of your page and your see words. This is your Title tag. If it says “Home” or the name of your company, you need to fix it. Your title tag should be a phrase describing what you do that includes the keywords you are targeting. It is one of the primary things that Google will look at when trying to determine what your page is about. That’s why “Home” isn’t going to help you much. And unless someone is specifically searching by typing in the name of your company, neither is your company name.The title tag is usually the first thing I look at to determine whether a website has been built by someone who has a clue about SEO. I have to admin, it makes me joyous to see “Home” because it means that I can reach out to the company and offer them my SEO services.
Header tags
There are several tags in the html code of your webpage that are called header tags. They indicate the degree of importance of the text they surround. When Google sees a line of text surrounded by an H1 tag, it assumes that the text reflects the main focus of the rest of the page.The SEO way to “mark up” a page is to wrap an H1 around a phrase containing your target keywords, and then wrap H2 tags around related keywords, and so on down the line. There should ONLY be one H1 tag on a page. No, your H1 should not be around the phrase, “Welcome to our homepage”. In our cabinets example it would ideally contain the phrase Custom Kitchen Cabinets.
Description
The description tag in the code of your webpage contains the text that Google displays in the search results for your listing. Google will often bold the keywords that are part of the user’s search query, which is why you should include your keywords in your description. The description will also play a big part in convincing the user to click on your listing, which will increase your click thru rate and make it more likely that Google will show your page again.
Image tags
Every image on your page should have an “alt” tag containing words describing the image that preferably include your keywords. Google doesn’t read images (yet), so without the “alt” tag you’re wasting an opportunity to share your content with Google.

Mobile

As we discussed in this previous post, Google judges your site based on its mobile compatibility, so you MUST make sure that your site looks awesome on mobile.

Speed

Google takes the speed of your website into account as a ranking factor. That’s because sites that load quickly provide a better user experience than the ones that make you site and wait for them. Users have little patience for slow loading sites and tend to “bounce” when they encounter one.

Links

Inbound links from authoritative websites are a primary ranking factor because they tell Google that your site has reliable information worth sharing (and trusting). Getting these links is no easy task. It requires writing amazing content and building relationships with the authoritative folks in order to get them to link to it.

At the very least, however, you should get inbound links from major directories and social media sites. There are services that can do this for you for a small fee.

Local SEO

Remember we spoke about Google’s local listings? Well, the only way Google will know that you’re local is if you tell it your location. You should have your company name along with your address and contact info in the footer of your website, so that it appears of every page of your site. It’s better if you add schema markup, but Google will find it even if you don’t.

[By the way, there’s no such thing as submitting your site to the Google directory in order to be indexed. Google does it automatically.]

Final Words

SEO contains various elements and is a process that usually takes time to show results. It’s worth getting started asap. To help you do that I created a brief tutorial showing you how to implement some of the basic SEO elements on your own website today. Click here to watch it.

Invest in SEO, But Don’t Expect Immediate Results