SEO… just those three little letters can leave most of us tearing our hair out. I think these days, pretty much everyone that has a business with an online presence understands that SEO is important, they probably have even identified their business’s keywords and have started using them throughout their website. Yet they’re still nowhere to be found in Google!
As the saying goes, the best place to hide a dead body is on page 3 of Google!
So, how do you fix that? If you’re using Squarespace already, then before you go any further, check out my blog post that goes through all the basics of getting the settings right on your site to make sure it’s optimised to the best of its abilities. If you’re not using Squarespace, then I hope whatever platform you are currently on has already got you covered for the basics like having a secure site, page titles, meta descriptions and making sure it’s responsive etc. I’m not going to delve into those things here as every platform will want these things done differently.
I want to concentrate on the other things you can do, outside of the technical features.
Keywords
You know you need them, but there are good keywords and not-so-good keywords. If you use Chrome or Firefox to browse then you have to download Keywords Everywhere. It is a game-changer! Once installed when you search for something in Google it will tell you:
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The monthly search volume
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The cost per click
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The Adwords competition
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Related Keywords
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Other phrases people searched for
Once you are armed with this kind of knowledge you can really drill down on how you include your keywords or phrases into your copy, see what will give you the best results and discover other phrases people are searching that may not have ever even occurred to you.
Register your site
Register your site with Google Search Console and depending on where you are located, also with Bing Webmaster Tools. You need to let them know you exist! And this is the first, and most important step, in making sure that happens.
Once you’ve registered it, submit a sitemap to them. If you’re using Squarespace this is super simple as Squarespace creates the site map for you. You literally just have to login into your Google Search Console, click on sitemaps in the navigation on the left-hand side and type sitemap.xml in the space next to your URL! It’s literally that easy!
If you’re using another platform then just google “How to submit your (platform-used) sitemap to Google Search Console” and you will be sure to find loads of tutorials.
Set up your Google my Business account
And get posting! I read a stat recently that said that 56% of businesses have NOT set up their Google My Business account yet. That’s a staggering amount of businesses missing out on a truly powerful tool, one that will immediately help your search engine ranking, is easy to set up and use and allows you to post your business’s offerings to a huge audience.
Add rich snippets
Once Google has crawled your site and has cached the pages, you can use Google’s Open Data Highlighter to literally highlight information on your page and tell Google what it is. The more conventional way to do this is to add “Schema Markup” code to your site, however, if you’re not a webmaster, then this Data Highlighter tool by Google is the next best thing. Super easy to use and you have complete control.
This is great if you sell products, run events, are a local business and want to be found, review books, restaurants, TV shows etc or write articles.
Check your speed
Another super important thing for your site’s SEO will be the time it takes to load. You can easily check this by entering your URL into a website like Pingdom. It will quickly test the speed for you and give you some pretty detailed feedback on how it performs.
Become a voice in your chosen field
By this, I mean create relevant, keyword-rich content and acquire backlinks through other people referring to your website. You may not want to start a blog, but honestly, writing regular (I’m talking weekly) blog posts about your area of expertise, including your keywords and phrases, is the best thing you can do to improve your rating in Search Engines.
Then share that content everywhere!
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Create a Google My Business Post
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Share it on LinkedIn
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Write a post on Facebook
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Create that perfect square and caption for Instagram
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Pin it on Pinterest
You will truly be amazed at how quickly regularly doing this process will improve your business’s search engine position.
Then what?
I recently stumbled across this service by Hubspot though, it’s called Website Grader and I’ve got to tell you, I loved all the insights it gave me into my website and how it performed!
It grades your website’s overall performance, optimisation for tablets and mobile devices, it’s SEO, it’s security, and gives you advice on where there’s room for improvement.
I really hope this has given you some tips on how to improve your website’s SEO. Being discovered by an organic search by someone is literally GOLD when it comes to new leads, and I hope this has helped you with your quest for PAGE 1 OF GOOGLE!!!!
