You’ve learnt what Rocketspark can do you for your search engine optimisation (SEO) in part 2—now it’s over to you! In this final post in our three-post blog series about SEO, we’ll be showing you how to do SEO yourself. Here’s a few tricks of the trade, so that your site ranks well in Google.
Setup title and description tags
You know when you look at Google search results, there’s both blue and black text, right? Well, the blue text is your title tag and the black text is the description tag. These tags should be rich with keywords but still make grammatical sense. They should also be unique and relevant to each page of your website; don’t just copy-and-paste your homepage tags—you’ll lose brownie points with Google.
Put on each page a single “big heading” (H1) with good keywords
Google likes headings on a page to be in a tagged with invisible tags that follow the format “H[number]”—the lower the number, the more crucial the heading is on the page. At Rocketspark we call the H1 the “big heading” block, just to keep things simple. Google really likes you to use just one H1 heading per page. The H1 heading should be relevant to the content on each page and ideally include some keywords that you’d like to rank well for in Google searches. The heading for a sub-section will ordinarily be H2 (with Rocketspark, the heading is H2 by default when you add a text block). You can switch the toggle to the little ‘A’ to change to it to H3. That might sound complex, but believe us—Rocketspark’s platform makes this a cinch. See our blog post on using headings correctly on your website.
Add your website to Google Places for Business (a.k.a. Google Maps)
Having a Google Maps listing for your business can have a big impact on your ranking in Google. Best of all, it’s free! To put your business on the map—literally—you just have to sign up for Google Places for Business. It’s critical that you do two things:
Add your website address to your Places/Maps listing.
Add your business category e.g., “accountant”.
When you setup your Google Places listing, Google will send you a postcard to your physical address with a code to verify it’s actually where you’re based. Your business listing won’t appear on Google Maps until you’ve verified it and it can take a few weeks for the postcard to arrive. Check out our introduction to Google Places.
Have links to your website from other websites
Having clickable links to your website from other reputable websites is like a vote of confidence from that website to Google. Google essentially thinks, “This website is reputable and they link to this other website, so that website must be reputable too”. It’s credibility by association. The more quality links you have to your website from other websites, the more brownie points you’ll earn with Google. By the way, linking from your website to other websites only benefits them, not you (but if they like you, they might return the favour!).
Regularly produce content on your website and share it on social media
Hands-down, this is the biggest change to the way Google responds to SEO in the past few years. It’s called “content marketing” and, in a nutshell, it works like this:
You write articles/blog posts for your website which cover topics relevant to your business or industry. This is helpful, freely-available information that demonstrates your expertise.
These posts get indexed in Google so that if someone searches for something relevant to the topic of that post, the link to the post will hopefully appear. The more posts you have, the more traffic you’ll get to your website from all of the different posts—like small tentacles out into Google.
Here’s the real clincher though: Google loves quality content. If you have loads of quality content indexed in Google, it’s like a brownie point jackpot. They’ll rank your main website’s listing higher as a result.
Many businesses haven’t cottoned on to the benefit of content marketing yet. If you haven’t, you should! The cost of writing even a short 200-word blog post each week compared to the potential benefit is undeniably worthwhile. Rocketspark has a built-in blog with sharing buttons automatically placed at the bottom of every blog post. Some of our clients who are using the blog are seeing remarkably good search results and we recommend that you learn more about why you should bother blogging here.
Help—I did these things but I’m still not ranking!
If you’ve done these five things and still aren’t ranking on page one for the search terms you’re looking for, remember that it can take time to climb the rankings. Specialist SEO companies don’t just offer their SEO services once during the setup and then hope for the best—it’s an ongoing process. It can take many months to reach your goal and you may not see real progress for at least 6 months.
To get the best results with a competitive Google search takes time, effort and measurement of incremental changes. Try small changes, and check for improvements. If you’ve tried everything and nothing seems to be happening, it might be time to speak to a specialist SEO agency. You can also pay to appear in the sponsored links in Google using a service called Google AdWords.
Recap
In this three-part blog series, we’ve explored the basics of SEO. Let’s recap the main points from each blog:
SEO is about ranking highly in search engines for relevant search results.
Depending on your competition and location, you can choose to do SEO yourself, use Rocketspark’s SEO package or bring in a specialist SEO agency to do it for you.
The first step to ranking well is to ensure that your web platform has a lot of built-in SEO features.
Rocketspark has a lot of these built-in SEO features to serve as a foundation for doing SEO well.
Part 3: How you can help yourself rank higher
To take your SEO to the next level, you need to be prepared to do a lot of work yourself.
There are a few basic things you can do that will dramatically improve your SEO.
If you’d like more information about SEO, visit our SEO Guide. But the main thing is to get started. After all, SEO is less about having insider knowledge and more about being diligent and persistent. So, enough talk—let’s get to work!
