If you’ve been in business more than a couple of weeks, you have undoubtedly answered the phone only to find it was “Julie, from Google, calling to give you some tips for getting more traffic to your website”. We get these calls, too, and at least can understand Julie. Worse are the calls from Hamid in Pakistan who “has a sure-fire way to get your website to the first page of Google next month”.
If this were 2005, you could almost believe him. Back then the competition for high-value keywords and internet real estate was nearly non-existent. In many cases, you could publish a website and have it on the first page of a search engine in a few weeks. Not anymore!
Consider some basic facts:
- 90% of the content on the Internet has been created since 2016.
- 3.5 billion Google searches are conducted every minute.
- There are 1.3 billion websites on the internet, and growing every day.
The process of getting found online, also called search engine optimization (SEO), has spawned a whole industry. Literally thousands of companies throughout the world offer this service exclusively. Add to that a library full of books on the subject, and it’s no wonder that as a business owner it can seem overwhelming.
It is not our intent in this article to add to that confusion. The reality is that much of what we might write could be out of date in 90 days, as the search engines surprise us with an algorithm change.
Rather, we want to arm you with enough basic information to understand how the search engines process information and display websites in the search results. This will also help you ask the right questions as you talk with possible vendors for this service.
Getting Found Online Using Technical SEO
To more quickly understand the world of getting found and displayed by the search engines, think of two trees. They are of equal height and girth, and each has an extensive root system.
One tree is the work you will do when building and maintaining your website to maximize its exposure. This is called “onsite” or “on-page” optimization and should be an ongoing process that will keep the search engine spiders crawling and updating your site.
The other tree represents the “offsite” efforts designed to accomplish the same goal. We mentioned the root system because numerous techniques and strategies are available for you to employ for both onsite and offsite optimization.
In the rest of this article, we’ll go into some detail of what the roots under each of these trees look like.
The Search Engine Crawlers
But first, you should have some understanding of how the search engines work. Google and other search engines – there are many of them – all perform the same function. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of considerations in an effort to determine which will most closely meet the needs of the person typing in the search query.
Search engines (and we’ll use “Google” as a general term to encompass all of them) accomplish this by discovering and cataloging all of the content on the internet using a process known as “crawling and indexing”. The slang expression for the “bots” that do this work is “spiders”.
Another term you might have heard and should be familiar with is “SERPs”. This stands for Search Engine Results Pages that are displayed by Google in answer to the search terms entered by the searcher.
A “paid” search result is one that you see at the top of the page. There are frequently four of these, and they are designated by the word “AD” next to them. An “organic” search result is the websites that you see further down the page in the search results.
Many searches will also have a “map pack” of three or four businesses that are featured just under the paid ads. Many times there is a dropdown menu that you can click on and see more local vendors in the category you are searching for.
How does the search engine prioritize the websites that are displayed in response to a search? That is a closely guarded secret, proprietary to each search engine. While the specifics of their algorithms might be classified, the search engines provide regular updates to agencies who are involved with optimizing web pages, giving us strong clues for the best practices they are looking for.
Those reports and conversations with our Google representatives are the basis for what we’re sharing with you about getting found online.
On-Page SEO Optimization
Whether you are building a new website or have one that is several years old, you can implement a number of actions to help the search engines present it more frequently. Here are several of the most effective:
Site Speed: There are SEO tools that you can use to check and improve your site’s speed. Google knows how impatient people are and has developed their own tool for website owners that enables them to know what the user experience is. The tool is called Page Speed Online and is available in any browser at any time. If you have a WordPress website, a simple fix to increase load speed is to delete unused plugins.
Essential Tags: You might have heard the expression “meta tags” and not been certain what it referred to. Meta tags are the snippets of content that describe your page’s content. They don’t appear on the page of your site itself, only in the page’s source code. These are important because they are how search engines like Google understand information about your webpage. There are two essential tags:
- Title Tags define the title of your webpage. The spiders read the first 60 characters only.
- Meta Description (160 characters max) is how the search engines understand what you are writing about and the audience they should send your content to.
Content to Drive Website Traffic: Most websites are written like a tri-fold brochure. That is, the content focuses on features and benefits of the product/service being offered. Customer focus groups are telling us that this is no longer enough. Instead, they want to see content that:
- Is interesting to read
- Is in-depth and well written
- Is written with the user in mind
- Solves a problem
- Is easy to share
- Is optimized for a high-volume keyword
The challenge in creating content is striking a balance between including the keywords that will bring a prospect to your website with understanding, and appealing to the searcher’s intent—the reason why the user is searching that particular keyword.
Content Quality: You might remember two of the major updates to Google’s algorithm, known as Panda and Hummingbird. The focus of both was to incentivize website owners to write and offer better-quality content. Two lessons from these updates are clear. First, avoid low-quality, generic content that doesn’t speak directly to the needs of the user. Second, write longer articles. How long? At least 1,500 words!
Let us qualify this with some “real-world” practical experience. Most business websites are updated infrequently. You might put up new images of jobs occasionally or add information on one of your products/services, but you are not writing long-form articles for publication on your site.
Once your website incorporates the best onsite practices, you should focus on offsite techniques unless you have a desire, and the time, to consistently write a blog.
Navigation: Does your site make it easy for the search engine spiders to find all your pages and content? The spiders find their way around the web by following links. If you have pages that do not link to other pages on your website, they are essentially invisible.
Remember, the spiders do not crawl forms or read text within images. A way to make things easier for the spiders is to have an XML sitemap added to your site. This is a plug-in on WordPress as well as other site-building platforms.
NAP: If you run a local business it is important to include your Name, Address, and Phone several times on your website. The easiest way to do this is having them in the footer of the site. This will be at the bottom of every page.
If your current website doesn’t have a footer section, get back with your developer and insist they add one. This is also the place to put links to your Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, two other documents important to the search engines.
Header Tags, Internal Links, Anchor Text, etc.: Now we’re getting pretty granular, beyond the scope of what we want to do in this article. These terms refer to HTML codes that are used on your website to help tell search engine spiders how to navigate your content. They are important!
HTML, CSS, JavaScript: There’s one last bit of tech-speak you should be aware of as you talk with your website developer or someone you’re interviewing to help your search engine positioning.
These three terms are related to how your site is created and made accessible. HTML stands for hypertext markup language and is the backbone of your website. Elements of your site like headings, paragraphs, lists, and content are all defined in the HTML code.
CSS defines how your website looks. It is an acronym for ‘cascading style sheets’ and is why your site has certain fonts, colors, and page appearance.
HTML was created to describe content rather than style it. With the advent of CSS, web pages could be beautified without the cumbersome process of manually coding each page.
JavaScript helps a website “behave” dynamically. That is, it helps a page become interactive. JavaScript can enable a popup to appear or reach out to a third-party resource and display an ad on your page. Occasionally JavaScript can create issues with aspects of your site not being visible to the spiders.
Schema Markup: With more and more pages being uploaded to the internet, in 2016 the primary search engines collaborated on a plan to more quickly classify the information that is on a webpage. The result of this effort was schema markup.
There are literally thousands of schema markups, but here’s the bottom line. Let’s say you’ve written an 8,000-word article on how to plant a rosebush. How does the spider identify the author, steps in the process, fertilizers you mention, different types of roses, and more that is in your article?
Answer: Schema. Schema is a way you can organize or label your content so the search engines have a better understanding of what elements on your web pages are.
If all of this sounds complicated, well, it is. If you are a growing business in a competitive market (which describes just about all of us!), then incorporating these on-site techniques is critical to your website getting found and displayed.
However, once these things have been finished, the only way to continue with online techniques is by regularly publishing content. To go beyond that you must focus on offsite work. For a newer website, it is the off-site optimization that will help your site compete against the more seasoned sites that dominate the first two pages.
Off-Site Optimization
Off-site, also known as off-page, optimization of your website is simply defined as any effort undertaken outside of your website to improve its position in search results. More than this obvious difference is the fact that the on-page strategies we just shared are totally within your control. That is not always the case with your off-site efforts.
The most recent article we can find from our Google rep indicates that their search algorithm contains more than 270 components. These reflect both on- and off-site work.
While we can’t know exactly which of their criteria is the most important, we can draw some general conclusions based on testing done by organizations like Moz and Ahrefs.
Reputation: What others say about your business as reflected in reviews is critical. We have an article devoted to this so won’t go into detail here.
Referring Domains: You might be familiar with the term “backlinks.” This refers to a link from another website back to your website. These are considered the most important asset you can build for your website and have been a key component of Google’s algorithm for years. In general, a page with more backlinks will rank higher than one with fewer backlinks. The caveat is that you want your links to come from sites with a high page authority. Low-authority links are not as valuable.
Link Juice: When a web page links to any of your articles or your website’s home page, it passes “link juice”. This link juice helps with the ranking of an article as well as improving the domain authority.
Related to this are the terms “do-follow” and “no-follow”. The link provider can indicate to the search engine spiders that this like can be “followed”, taking the spider to your website. A no-follow link does not pass link juice and has limited value.
Linking Root Domain: Google monitors how many incoming links originate from a unique domain. No matter how many times it might link to your site, it will count as only one link for ranking purposes.
Low-Quality Links: There is an open marketplace for the purchase of links. However, this is not the easy answer you might think. The search engines look carefully at the sources of your links. If they come from harvested sites or spam or porn sites they will actually count against your site. (This change was enacted with the Penguin update in 2012).
Broken Link: This is a link to a website that no longer exists. It is normally a negative to have this link; however, there is a more sophisticated optimization strategy that involves identifying these sites, buying them, and recreating links from them. That is beyond the scope of this article, but we have used this on behalf of clients with great success.
Google Business Page: While not a direct off-site optimization strategy, your GBP is the cornerstone of your business presence online. Particularly since early-2019, Google has been placing increased emphasis on the accuracy of this page.
More important is the ability to upload posts with images and links. You could load a new post every day if you want (we have done this for a brand-new website and found that it climbed in the search results far faster than we expected). Google “expires” posts after 7 days but rewards the website of companies that consistently post quality content.
Citations and Directory Sites: There are more than 3,000 of these, many of which you are probably familiar with. Sites like Yelp, Manta, and YellowPages are examples of citation and directory sites. “Claiming” your listing on these sites and making sure the information is accurate is important, since the spiders crawl these sites and link back to your website from them. These citations are also called “NAP” because they include your business name, address, and phone number.
How many to claim? This is another case where quality trumps quantity. You want to claim the dozen or so major directories, any that might be specific to your industry, as well as those in your local market. We also like to analyze a client’s competitors and see what directory sites they are registered on and make sure we claim those as well. In general, somewhere in the 50 to 80 sites range should be enough.
You can learn more about how citation sites and SEO work together in this article.
Press Release: This is a strategy for generating high-quality backlinks and might be different than you think. This is not writing an article for the local paper and asking them to print it (although that too has value).
A press release in this context is written to highlight something about you, your company, a product or service, a convention or speaking engagement – really, almost any reason. The release is then submitted to a press organization for consideration and distribution.
Since the distribution goes to print, television, and web-based news agencies, the links that can be created are excellent. We use a service with more than 5,000 outlets and find that quarterly press releases have helped our clients rank more quickly and sustain their place in the search results.
Click-Through Rate: This is simple arithmetic. How many times is your website presented in the search results and clicked on by the searcher? That’s your click-through rate.
If your site is on page six of the results, of course there is almost no chance it will be found. There are strategies to augment this result that are within Google’s terms of service, so it is still possible to overcome a lower page rank.
Dwell Time: This is an important metric in Google’s eyes. When someone comes to your website, how long do they stay there? Longer is better, because that indicates to Google that the searcher has found content that is valuable.
(Do you know how long the average person stays on a website after entering a search term? Between 10 and 12 seconds! That’s why dwell time is so important.)
Brand Mentions: Google calls these express links and refers to them in one of its patents. They recognize that frequently people mention a brand without creating a specific link to that brand’s website. These references without a specific link are called implied links; if a link is created it is an express link.
Social Signals: These are mentions of your company on social media. Google says they do not consider these, although quite a lot of anecdotal evidence is offered trying to prove that they do.
In this case we believe Google, for the simple reason that it is too easy to manipulate social media. We can go to any number of service providers (visit fiverr.com and you’ll see dozens of them) and for a few dollars buy “likes” or social media mentions. Given Google’s consistent emphasis on quality over quantity, we do not believe that social signals are valuable.
After reading through this you might be thinking that offline optimization of your website is even more difficult than the online work. That’s probably true, if for no other reason than the fact that you can’t directly control it. That is what makes it valuable: it’s hard and it takes a consistent effort over time to see results.
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention that traditional offline marketing measures can have an indirect impact on many of the factors we’ve mentioned. Consider the company that sends 10,000 postcards through the post office’s Every Door Direct Mail program. It is likely that a significant number of the recipients of this card will have some interest in the company and its products and will go to their website.
That increase in traffic from direct search, another Google metric, will enhance the site in Google’s algorithm. If those visitors stay on the site for a minute or more, that impacts the Dwell Time metric. If they click on an information form and give their email address, or a click to call button and reach out to the company, even more “juice” flows. You get the idea.
Google Analytics
When it comes to SEO, Google Analytics is a tool that you should be aware of. It provides useful insights into your website’s traffic. You can track metrics like page views, bounce rates, user demographics, and overall engagement patterns. You can see which of your pages are driving the most traffic. This data can really help you in refining your SEO strategy and optimizing your content, ultimately resulting in improving your search engine rankings.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another tool that can be helpful in improving your SEO efforts. It provides insights into how Google’s search engine interacts with your website. It’ll give you information on search performance, indexing status of each page of your website, and potential issues that it finds when crawling your pages that could affect your site’s visibility. Every time you add a new blog post to your website, you can go into Google Search Console and manually submit the post to be indexed, which helps it to get crawled and indexed faster.
Get Your Site To The First Page Of Google!
Let us say again that this article is in no way an exhaustive study of all that is necessary to manage getting found online. Honestly, we’ve barely scratched the surface. But you should now be well armed to have a conversation with someone who does website optimization, ask good questions, and understand the answers.
If you’re looking for an experienced SEO agency who can help you get your website to the first page of Google, we hope you’ll consider us here at Alchemy Consulting. With our Page One For Free service, we’ll rank your website on the first page of Google- or you don’t pay. To learn more, call us today at 877-978-2110.
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