‘3 Months to No.1 – The No Nonsense SEO Playbook for Getting Your
Website Found on Google’
By Will Coombe
Copyright © 2019 by Will Coombe
All rights reserved.
Published in the United Kingdom
3 Months to No.1
is a trademark of Will Coombe and is used under licence.
ISBN: 978-1546370673
V1.
2nd Edition
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
All information given in this book ‘3 Months to No.1 – The No Nonsense
SEO Playbook for Getting Your Website Found on Google’ is based on
individual research and does not constitute financial advice. William
Coombe and the author are a registered trademark and cannot be held
responsible for the consequences of actions taken, or any consequences
through inaction, as a direct or indirect result of the information in this
book. All information is used at your own risk. SEO results can go up as
well as down. Whilst all content is checked for accuracy, no information
contained within this book or in any of its links is to be used without
taking professional business and marketing advice first. Anyone seeking
advice should consult an Independent Advisor. The author of this book is
not liable or responsible for any other websites or services linked to or
from it. It is forbidden to reproduce any part of this book in any form or
medium. Reselling is prohibited.
To my first ever SEO client...
KATE RIDGWAY
...who was willing to take a chance on me.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
i. About the Author
ii. Read This – It’s About You!
iii. Sections of the Book Explained
iv. How to Access the Free Accompanying Video Series
PART I – GETTING RICH FROM SEO: A GUIDE TO BUSINESS
Chapter 1 | SEO’s Not for Everyone
Chapter 2 | My Journey’s Not a Blueprint, But Here it is
Chapter 3 | Will SEO Make Me Attractive, Rich, & Wildly Successful?
Chapter 4 | The Marketing Treasure Map
Chapter 5 | Let’s Talk Time
Chapter 6 | How Google Works
Chapter 7 | Become a Pro SEO in 5 Minutes – The Common Sense
Check
Chapter 8 | The Magic Bullet Fallacy
PART II – PREPARING FOR SEO
Chapter 9 | The 3 Types of SEO Business Model
Chapter 10 | Anatomy of an SEO Campaign
Chapter 11 | How to Use This Book to its Best
Chapter 12 | Keywords
Chapter 13 | Choosing Domains
PART III – GETTING YOUR HANDS DIRTY
Chapter 14 | The Four Pillars of SEO
Chapter 15 | On-Page Optimisation – Page Relevance
Chapter 16 | On-Page Optimisation – Crawlability
Chapter 17 | On-Page Optimisation – User Engagement
Chapter 18 | Links
Chapter 19 | Content Marketing
Chapter 20 | Using Social Media for SEO
Chapter 21 | Local Area SEO
Chapter 22 | eCommerce SEO
Chapter 23 | How to Stop Google Penalties Wrecking Your Livelihood
PART IV – THE 3 MONTH SEO BLUEPRINT
Chapter 24 | Accessing the Free Video Accompaniment Series
Chapter 25 | How to Use the Week-By-Week SEO Blueprint
Chapter 26 | 3 Months to No.1 Blueprint
Chapter 27 | You Just Gave to Charity – Thank You!
Chapter 28 | A Fond Farewell
PREFACE
About the Author
William Coombe is an ex-airline pilot who quit his high-flying day job to
become one of the UK's leading SEO Consultants, before going on to cofound the London SEO Agency, Sharpe Digital.
With over 9 years’ experience in online marketing – and having now
helped in excess of 500 clients realise their financial goals – Will is
addicted to the fast pace of online marketing. And having gone from
nothing, to an airline pilot in 3 years, only to then hang up his wings 2
years later to pursue the freedoms of an entrepreneur, Will's life is
anything but ordinary.
Join him as he shares the techniques he's refined over the last 9 years,
and piggyback off his unique vantage point of having worked with over
500 websites.
With an emphasis on fast results, sustainability, and techniques carefully
curated within Google's guidelines, Will reveals everything you need to
know about Search Engine Optimisation – and he does it all in plain
English.
Read This – It’s About You!
Whether you’re a complete beginner or a seasoned pro at SEO, this book
will guide you through it all. That being said, it’s unlikely all readers will
come to the table with the same level of pre-existing knowledge, and
that’s a problem for an exhaustive guide like this one.
I can tell you from experience right now; when reading about SEO, it’s
very easy to flitter between two opposing emotions and attitudes when
digesting the content.
The first is one of feeling patronised; or its far more destructive cousin –
having your time wasted. If you start to find yourself digesting ideas and
concepts you already know well, it doesn’t matter how valid the
methods are, you’ll get impatient very quickly. If at any point you sense
this happening I would implore you to be patient and stick with it. There
may be a different take on an established process you weren’t aware of.
Sometimes reading just one sentence can totally change the way you do
things.
The second opposing emotion is that of feeling overwhelmed by the
complexity of the subject matter. If I’ve done my job correctly this
shouldn’t ever be a problem. I’ve deliberately tried to write this book as
if I was chatting to a friend in a coffee shop who has no technical
background. However, I’ve been involved in the SEO industry for almost
10 years now, so occasionally I can forget myself and use terms I haven’t
previously explained.
If I do, firstly you’d be a total hero if you emailed me at
will@willcoombe.com and told me off (feedback is not just welcome, but
craved). But secondly, if you come across a term or phrase you’re unsure
of, just Google it and you’ll be up to speed in 30 seconds flat. The
Internet is rich in quick SEO term and technique explanations, but
severely lacking in any sort of unified or curated text that brings them all
together in any meaningful way.
And so, enter stage left, ‘Three Months to No.1’. I wrote this book simply
because it needed to be written.
Before I talk about the book itself, I feel I should directly address my
American and British readers quickly. SEO doesn’t change if you live in
the UK or the States. The only difference is whether the word
‘Optimisation’ is spelt with a ‘z’ or not! You’ll no doubt find however,
that I regularly switch between UK and US references in the book. It’s of
no special relevance that one minute I talk in Dollars and the next in
Pounds. Or that one example location is Manchester and the next
Massachusetts. Sometimes It will be a thought out conscious decision
one way or the other, but mostly It’s just the result of a Brit talking
about an industry which is so prevalent in both countries.
Sections of The Book Explained
It’s my recommendation that you read this book from start to finish, no
matter how proficient you are in SEO, because there’s a great deal of
information on how to improve your business as a whole.
However, if you’re just looking for the meat of the book and how to rank
No.1 on Google, I appreciate you might want to skip to the main event.
Therefore, this book is broken down into 4 distinct sections. Where you
begin will depend on your online literacy and current level of technical
SEO knowledge.
PART I – GETTING RICH FROM SEO: A GUIDE TO BUSINESS
This is a holistic guide to search engine optimisation and its broader
place within marketing and business. If you’re a straight up affiliate
marketer who just needs traffic and doesn’t care about building a
business, you can probably skip this section, but please make sure you
read Chapter 7 | Become a Pro SEO in 5 Minutes – The Common Sense
Check.
PART II – PREPARING FOR SEO
This section provides the ultimate guide to picking keywords to target, as
well as answering questions like what Domain Name to choose for your
business. If you’ve already got an established website then at least make
sure you read Chapter 12 | Keywords.
PART III – GETTING YOUR HANDS DIRTY
Like it says on the tin, this part is all about getting stuck in and actually
doing SEO. If you already know a thing or two about optimising websites,
this section is where you need to start.
PART IV – THE 3 MONTH SEO BLUEPRINT
All readers will end up at here, but if, and only ‘if’, you’re already at an
extremely high level of knowledge about SEO, you can jump straight to
the 3 Month SEO Blueprint and its accompanying online video series. I
don’t recommend skipping straight to this even if you are already a pro,
but if you have to, I’m officially giving you the ‘nod’ to do so here.
How to Access the Free Accompanying Video Series
SEO and many aspects of online marketing can be taught so much more
efficiently by showing you how to do something. This means we avoid
relying on screenshots and descriptions of what I’m doing on my
computer to rank websites high up in Google. That’s why I decided to
make this more than just a book.
Whenever you see this..
‘Example’ Video Tutorial (02:34 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
...that means there’s an accompanying tutorial video to what I’m
discussing, and you should grab your computer or tablet for a more
detailed run through.
There are many SEO tutorial videos across my website, but the ones in
this book point you to productions which have been exclusively created
for this book.
Just visit…
www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources
…and you’ll be taken to a page which houses every single accompanying
video to this book, as well as some other useful resources.
Please note, to access the videos you’ll be asked for your book receipt
number, so be sure to have it handy.
To Unlock the Video Series
You’ll need your receipt number to access the video series. If you purchased the book from
Amazon, your receipt number will be the order number you were emailed when you
purchased it.
Right – now that all the housekeeping is done and dusted, are you ready
to get stuck in?
Poured yourself a coffee?
Okay let’s do this.
‘3 Months to No.1 – The No-Nonsense SEO Playbook
for Getting Your Website Found on Google’
By Will Coombe
PART I –
GETTING RICH FROM SEO: A
GUIDE TO BUSINESS
Chapter 1
“SEO’s Not for Everyone”
A very warm welcome to search engine optimisation (SEO). Whether
you've bought the print edition of this book or downloaded the kindle
version, one thing is for sure – you're on the right track to kick starting
your affiliate website, SEO career, marketing role, or business.
Make no mistake. If you get SEO right, there is a lot of gold at the end of
the rainbow.
Even a sub-standard business, offering a mediocre product, built around
rickety business systems can be wildly successful if it ranks at the top of
Google. Because at the end of the day, no matter how fancy your
offering is or how innovative your service, if your website isn’t highly
visible in search engines, you might as well give up and go home.
Seriously, don't bother. In fact, I'll go one step further and tell you this
right now – your business will fail. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not in
the next six months. But it will fail. And if it doesn’t fail, you can be
absolutely sure I’ll hit a natural ceiling you won’t get beyond. Eventually
you’ll lose heart at the lack of growth, and before you know it, you’ve
created yourself a mundane job you hate but can’t quit.
How do I know this? Because I've tracked and witnessed the ‘before’ and
‘after’ of almost 1000 UK businesses and affiliate websites in the last 9
years. And almost without exception, the ones which never made the
top 5 of Google failed or floundered.
This comes from the privileged and empirical vantage point of cofounding a major SEO Agency in London.
Every website owner who contacts us for a quotation goes through a
strict process. We audit their website's SEO, analyse their competitors –
and then here's the crucial part – we track their website's Search Engine
Results Positions (SERPS) using automated software. This means that on
a daily basis we know where their website ranks in Google for certain
commercial, and potentially business transforming keywords. This
information gets turned into a graph and we can literally witness how
their site performs over time.
Now, of course some people would go on to become clients and some
wouldn't. Some were just trying to get an idea of the costs involved,
whilst others were at the decision stage of the buying cycle. But whether
they became clients or not, their websites remained in our SERP tracking
software.
This meant, and is still the case today, that without ever intending to, we
built historical data (going back years in some cases) for over 1000 UK
businesses. We know exactly where they ranked in the search engines
the day they got in touch with us, and we know exactly where they rank
today. We know the ups and downs in between, and most importantly,
because every quote involved a phone conversation with the business
owner, we know exactly how successful their website was the day they
got in touch.
So how do you think these websites and businesses did over time? How
clearly do you think the eventual reality matched the giddy excitement
these people felt as they imagined their businesses being the ticket to a
better life?
Well, I am in the unique position to unveil the curtain and tell you.
Our SERP Tracking software is commercial grade so we have the ability
to track thousands of keywords and websites. However, we periodically
give it a 'spring clean' and delete the URLs of website owners who never
got back to us after getting a quotation.
Invariably, I end up going down memory lane. Peppered with
exclamations of "oh that guy! I wonder what happened to him?",
curiosity gets the better of me and I visit their site to see how they're
doing. And almost without exception, the businesses which ended up
getting into the top 5 of Google over time have expanded. They may not
have gone with our company in the end, but at least they did the right
thing and got help with their SEO.
They offer more products and higher end services than before. I notice
an army of employees in their 'About Us’ page that never previously
existed. I see additional branches and offices. Their site bears all the
hallmarks of quality and their reach is bigger than ever. They now offer
franchise opportunities. They are, in a word – successful.
Descend from this bright sunny future, and I see a tragic and marked
difference in websites which never made it to the first page of Google,
let alone the top 5. As I delve deeper and deeper into old enquirers who
never called back, or viewed SEO as an expense rather than an
investment, I witness a litany of shattered dreams. My intrigue into what
happened to them turns into an autopsy.
Time after time I visit these websites 6 months later and I see 'Domain
Name for Sale', or ‘HTTP 404 Error: Page Not Found'. For the businesses
still going, I see the website now offers a completely different product or
service. I note a rebrand or a new logo. I see the breadcrumbs of failure
or stagnation all over their company, and more often than not, their
approach to business and online marketing is just as wrong as I
remembered it when we first made their acquaintance.
The trends amongst these website owners were always clear, and I offer
a breakdown of them to you now so you can make sure you never join
the obituaries of business with them.
They nearly always fell into 3 distinct groups…
• SEO Begrudgers
• Quick Fix Seekers
• DIY Money Savers
SEO Begrudgers
This group thinks of SEO as an expense rather than an investment. Just
like paying their accountant every month, they begrudge the cost and
wish they could just save the cash. SEO is a nuisance to them, and yet it
makes them uncomfortable to not have the SEO 'box' ticked in at least
some capacity. To not do so goes against every online marketing
business article they’ve ever read or forum they’ve ever visited.
They decide what they want to spend on SEO and what it should cost
before they get a single quotation. They're then quickly thrust into
reality and confused to find a spread of monthly fees ranging from £150
to £3,000.
From this point, their only concern is value for money as they bring a
consumer mind set to an investment. But they quickly realise they don't
know how to judge value because they don't understand SEO. They try
to cling onto anything tangible. They rationalise that…
"SEO Company 'x' is offering 10 Press Releases and SEO Company 'y' is
only offering 5 in their package", so Company 'x' must be better.
They then get confused because SEO Company 'z' is 3 times the price
and offers no press releases at all.
SEO begrudgers can't reconcile the amount of money they pre-decided
SEO was worth, with what it actually costs to hire a decent consultant or
agency. And so, because they view SEO as an expense, they never go
beyond enquiring – unable to stomach the risks of the low-end SEO
companies their stubborn price range actually affords them.
This group is caught between a rock and a hard place. And the result is
decision paralysis. Consequently, they never actually bite the bullet and
appoint an SEO company, and their position in Google over time reflects
this.
As I delete these stagnant websites from our SERPS tracker months later,
I always remark, with genuine lament, that the conversation we once
had over the phone led me to conclude their lack of success was
inevitable.
The Quick Fix Seekers
Similar to SEO begrudgers, this group is focussed on SEO as a cost, but
this time they want speed and an overnight business transformation.
Okay, so to be fair, who doesn’t?!
The quick fix seekers are usually start-up businesses who can’t really
afford to pay a consultant to do their SEO, and yet they don’t have the
time or computer literacy to be able to do any themselves. They’re
usually the ones who get in touch with us because, after the initial thrill
of seeing their business and website become a reality, they’re sorely
disappointed to find they appear nowhere in Google for any commercial
keywords at all. They never really considered SEO until the problem
knocked at their front door.
So why are they so impatient?
Well, in the age of the Internet and modern convenience, if you asked
me to start an online shoe store at 11am, I could have the following
completed by 5pm the same day…
• Company Incorporated (business address and phone number
provided by virtual office service).
• Website and logo completed on the online e-commerce website
template builder ‘Shopify'.
• Basic inventory loaded and ready for sale (of course each sale
would need to be fulfilled individually at a local shoe shop, giving
limited profit until suppliers could be sourced).
• Online payment method acquired.
And that’s the problem. It’s so quick and easy to start a business, that
when the sugar rush has subsided, a harsh reality emerges that the
Quick Fixers don’t have the patience for – SEO takes months, and
sometimes even years. That’s a hard thing to swallow if SEO wasn’t part
of your business model (or if it was, it was given scant thought).
As we delete the websites of the Quick Fixers from our SERPS data, it’s
normally clear they ended up getting poor SEO from a company that
promised the world in a month. In many instances, it’s obvious they
ended up being hit by a Google penalty for this.
The DIY Money Savers
You’re probably wondering if this is you?
After all, you could pay someone to do SEO for you, but instead you
chose to buy a book to help teach you. Relax, this isn’t you. Or at least if
the description and blurb of this book did its job, this shouldn’t be you.
No, the DIY Money Savers are a group who have decided SEO is a simple
and transferable skill you can learn in a matter of days, with the name of
the game being in-house self-sustainability within the week.
This group always expose themselves over the phone when they say
things like…
“We’re looking for someone to come into the office about once a month
and get our team up to speed with our SEO. What would that cost?”
Pay a little bit now, then never need to pay anything again. That’s good
business, right?
Wrong. Good business is about leveraging the skills of others, that’s true.
But if you want to take the skill of one party and transfer it to another,
you need to understand the skill in enough detail to make the call if it’s
even worth it.
I always politely decline, explaining their money would be better used
elsewhere due to the complexity of SEO. I'm always happy to point them
in the direction of some helpful online resources, but I stopped trying to
change their outlook a long time ago.
You see, the DIY Money Savers will never listen to me explain that SEO is
a long-term learning commitment with often very technical work. And
that’s because they’re addicted to a business practice that feels very
savvy – saving money and doing everything themselves. They’re
addicted to finding ‘clever ways’ of getting around things. Unique and
convoluted methods of either saving money, or leveraging other people.
And whilst this can work in a lot of areas, it doesn’t when it comes to
large scale growth.
Years ago, I was called by an upmarket London cookery class serving
high end areas like Chelsea and Kensington for a quotation. They said
they wanted to open two more locations in Fulham and Knightsbridge,
but were losing out to competitors ranking higher in Google. I gave them
some advice and an estimate for the work.
They later called me back to ask if my agency would work in exchange
for cookery classes instead of money. Their quote was £850 / month,
with much of that to be spent on their campaign in the first few months
rather than directly paying for our time, so as you can imagine I turned
them down.
I deleted their website nine months later from our SERPS software. They
still had poor Google rankings and only one location in London. It was
clear they hadn’t gotten SEO from anyone.
At the back of this issue is the fear of being taken for a ride. And I can
understand that. We’ve all taken our car to the garage and tried to fake
that we ‘know a bit about engines, so don’t take me for a fool’. We’ve all
nodded in knowing agreement as the mechanic lists off the reasons our
car just failed its annual roadworthiness check – delivered in words
impenetrable to a layman. As if we knew all along that our left-upper
siphon gasket was cracked (not a real car part. Probably).
People hate not understanding and not being in control, so they
instantly assume they’re being ripped off if these emotions enter their
consciousness. And so what’s the only way to manage this fear and lack
of understanding? To find a unique and ‘clever’ way of getting the
service which puts them in some sort of quasi and illusory control.
Well, that’s great and all, but do you think Steve Jobs came to be worth
$31.6 Billion by asking Microsoft if they’d invest $150 Million in 1996 in
exchange for some cookery classes? Exactly.
So, what’s the moral of the story? And what makes you different to a DIY
Money Saver? Well, a lot. By reading this book you’ve thrust a stake in
the ground that admits It’s going to be hard work and take time, but
you’re willing to do it yourself properly. You’re doing It for the control
and the understanding – not just for the sake of saving money (although
this will also be the case).
I’ll be frank. Of all the skills in a business you could choose to learn
rather than blindly trusting to someone else, SEO and online marketing
are the ones which counts.
Chapter 2
“My Journey’s Not a Blueprint,
But Here it is”
I co-founded the London SEO Agency 'Sharpe Digital' over 7 years ago
now, and since its inception we’ve helped nearly 500 UK businesses go
from online obscurity to financial prosperity. But I didn’t wake up one
morning and decide to take on the most competitive industry imaginable
for SEO – SEO itself. No, it was a much more leisurely stroll to the start
line, with all sorts of twists and turns.
I began my career in my early 20s as a low-level, unskilled office
employee at an air conditioning company on the outskirts of London.
Needless to say, the pay matched the value I was offering to the
marketplace.
But I had a plan and I had a dream. I wanted to be an Airline Pilot.
Since I was a teenager I fantasised at how thrilling it would be to
heroically don a pilot’s uniform, strap myself into the cockpit, then
punch jet engines with 115,000 lbs of thrust into the sky. I dreamed of
landing a structure as big as a house on a 45-metre wide strip of tarmac,
then gallantly striding through the airport back to my fully spec’d
Mercedes Benz.
There was just one catch. It’s a tough journey.
To become an Airline Pilot in the UK requires an Airline Transport Pilot’s
Licence (ATPL), 3 years of full time study, and despite what flying schools
will tell you, over £130,000 in course fees and living expenses. And even
that just gets you to the start line. You then need to find an airline that’ll
hire you with no experience, and not before they’ve put you through
two days of tests and interviews. It’s a long, expensive and unsteady
road for sure. But it was one I was willing to undertake. It was my
dream.
As a teenager, I’d frequented a small local flying club – the kind that
teaches people to fly small 2-seater propeller planes – and ingratiated
myself to the point where they'd let me have basic lessons in exchange
for cleaning the planes. Even though this constituted about 2% of the
requirements of an ATPL I was committed and I loved it.
Now in my early 20s working in the accounts division of an air
conditioning company, I was far from my dream, but it was still there,
ever present in the background.
During my lunch breaks and evenings, I would apply to every flying
school, scholarship, and sponsorship programme I could. After a lot of
rejections and countless hours of interview, numeracy, and motor-skill
preparation for the selection processes, I eventually got into a
prestigious flying school. I was finally on the path to flying around the
world for a living.
Fast forward to over 4 years later, and I was staring in the mirror in pride
and disbelief. I was wearing a major UK Airline First Officer uniform. The
silver broach wings pinned to my suit carrying years of commitment,
shimmering in front of me like a totem of struggle and achievement.
For many people, and indeed nearly all Airline Pilots, that would be the
end of it. As far as careers go, not only is it extremely lucrative – with
many major airline training standards Captains seeing out their careers
earning £300k + per year – but it’s indescribably exciting to land a 100tonne piece of metal with hundreds of people’s lives in your hands. You
get a significant amount of time off, discounted travel, private
healthcare, and hey, I can’t say it didn’t help to say I was a pilot when I
met my fiancé. Don’t judge me.
So, you’re probably wondering how on earth I got to be here writing a
book that could have been aptly titled ‘SEO at 35,000ft’?
Good question. Sometimes I really have to stop and marvel at what led
me here too. Let me begin by telling you that at the back of it all was
fear, and the quest for something we all want for our careers deep down
– financial security and control.
You see being an Airline pilot pays well. It pays really well. But it’s got
one substantial financial security flaw. Medical problems that are just
‘bad luck' can steal your licence to operate overnight.
In one moment, all the work that got you to the controls of an airliner
counts for nothing. And worse, because flying is such a specialised job,
overnight you're thrust into an employment market which values the
business qualifications of an 18-year old more than your ability to
interpret weather forecasts or calculate passenger load distribution.
I’m naturally a cautious person, and so losing my licence was always at
the back of my mind. However, the stark reality of it all was thrown in
front of me when a good friend and colleague I’d flown with for years
developed something called Meniere’s – a condition which causes very
occasional bouts of dizziness that can last for a few hours. In any office
job, it wouldn’t have been a consideration for even a second, but in
aviation it was an immediate revoking of all his licence privileges.
To watch this happen to someone close to me really hit home that I
couldn’t put all my eggs in one basket. And so, enter stage left: financial
diversification, and the move from airline, to online.
An online venture became the only clear option in the end. Any
conventional or logistical business requiring my physical presence would
have been too cumbersome to work round the irregular work patterns
of pilot. And so, I began my online journey in hotel rooms, learning
everything I could about building and marketing websites. I started
making commission money through affiliate marketing; owning and
running niche websites with subjects ranging from car security, to home
décor.
It was all pretty crude at first, but within a year I shocked myself at how
quickly I not just added to my income as a pilot, but almost doubled it!
All great, right? Well, not quite.
I was doing really well, but it soon became abundantly clear that the
success of anything I did online was predicated on search engine
optimisation. To make money from affiliate marketing, I had to rank
sites higher and higher in Google. The better they performed in the
search engines, the more money I made.
And so, I began consuming every shred of knowledge I could about SEO.
The process of learning how to please, court, and even occasionally
outsmart Google became so addictive that I couldn’t stop.
I’d read on planes. I’d experiment ranking theories in hotels. I’d engage
in cutting edge ideas on discussion boards. And with the help of my day
job, I attended SEO seminars across 3 continents. It got to the point
where I was better at SEO than all the business ideas, affiliate websites,
and online ventures I needed SEO to promote in the first place.
Eventually word spread amongst my colleagues what I was making
because of SEO, and I was routinely asked by colleagues to give advice
on behalf of their friends and family’s websites and businesses. I became
known as ‘The Google Guy’. I started getting offered money to consult
various brother-in-laws and friends of friends. Eventually, through word
of mouth my reach as an SEO consultant began to go well beyond the
immediate airline community. And that’s when the biggest asset any of
us have on this planet became a problem – time. I just didn’t have
enough of it.
By this point, the financial reward from my online pursuits had dwarfed
my pilot’s income to the point where I had to make a choice. And I’ll be
honest, it was a really tough one. Keep going on as before and run
myself into the ground? Or embrace the control a business gives you by
moving from SEO consulting to founding a Search Engine Optimisation
Agency?
I’ll always be passionate about flying, but in the end, it was a clear
choice. I handed in my 3-month notice to the Chief Pilot, and started my
SEO agency the following summer.
I look back fondly at being a pilot and always will, but now I have the
financial power and control to be able to regularly hire a Cirrus SR22
(Google it – it’s a beauty!). I can now get my fix of the sky whenever I
want and on my terms. And the best bit is, I do it at the very airfield I
used to clean planes at. That always brings a nostalgic smile to my face.
So enough about me, let’s talk about SEO and how it fits into a business.
Chapter 3
“Will SEO Make Me Attractive,
Rich, & Wildly Successful?”
Yes. Next question.
Okay, well maybe not the attractive part, and maybe not 100%
guaranteed for the other two. But, I can tell you this. If you get your
website to the top of Google, you'll experience growth faster than you
ever thought possible. The size of this growth and the income which
follows will then be a function of your business skills, what exactly you’re
selling to the marketplace, and how good you are at selling it.
Think of SEO as a performance enhancing drug. It quickly maximises
whatever the natural ceiling of your ability is – which in this case, is
business acumen and product quality.
Got a substandard website? You'll be successful. Offering a service that
20+ companies below you in Google offer better? Doesn't matter,
people want you instead because you’re at the top of the search engine.
Got a good product people actually love? Well, light the fuse and run,
because your business is about to explode into a near unmanageable
cash-generating monster.
Online marketing and SEO matter now more than ever. A consumer's
reliance on search engines for finding trustworthy products and services
is only getting more and more ingrained. In fact, there’s an untapped
demographic that nobody’s talking about, and they're about to make
online marketing (and keeping up with it) even more critical to a
business’ success – they are, the ‘Millennials'.
Millennials are the generation born around the turn of the century in
2000, and they’re an online marketing oil well that’s about to fissure.
Millennials will be the very first generation ever who enter life almost
genetically predisposed to buy online. Instead of watching it unfold,
they’re the first group to have actually grown up in a world with Google
and the Internet. They’re the first generation who instinctively and
effortlessly know how to assess a business based on the quality of its
online presence.
And they didn’t need to be taught any of this. They hold no textbook on
the subject in high regard. Instead they’ve been groomed over time to
be the ultimate judge and jury of your company’s online marketing skill.
Get it wrong, and they’ll condemn your website to failure. Get it right,
and you’ll harness an impressionable generation drunk on consumerism.
By the time they were about 13 years old in 2013 and got their first bank
card, they were different to other Internet users. They were ready to
buy in an ecosystem where all the wrinkles had already been ironed out.
Believe it or not, until around 2004 Amazon took a significant number of
online orders via call centres. Not because they wanted to. Not because
they didn’t have the functionality to do otherwise. It was because people
didn't feel comfortable putting their card details into a website. Seems
crazy now right?
Millennials won't have experienced anything other than a world where
buying and searching online is the norm. By around 2025, this group will
be old enough to become targets for the full gambit of consumer goods
any market offers. So, prepare to take advantage of it now.
When is SEO Not the Answer?
Of all the website owners who get in contact with our Agency for SEO,
there’s always a proportion we advise to go a different route. Let’s make
sure you’re not one of them before you invest time into courting Google.
For certain types of product and business, SEO sometimes won’t be as
successful in generating a high ROI as the paid advertising platform on
Google called Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords.
Any new business offering a product or service which is either low end /
high volume (such as stationery or office equipment for example) or,
something valued by people bereft of time (such as emergency plumbers
or perhaps personal assistants), will likely be better off with a wellexecuted Google Ads campaign.
This is because in these instances, consumers want the quickest and
most prominent search result, which will always be the Adverts at the
top of the page. People either go to Google to find something quickly, or
they go there to find something they can trust. For speed they’ll be
happy with the Ads. For confidence in quality, they’ll opt for organic.
Pretty simple, right?
Modern Internet users know that up to the first four Google results are
there at the very top because they paid to be there. But, that said, if
someone’s just searching for something like ‘cheap camping mat’, they
don’t have enough skin in the game to bother looking beyond the ads.
We’ve historically turned away anyone trying their hand at things like ecommerce stores for this reason and instead advised they pay for
advertising initially.
Another less common type of business that may not suit SEO is one
which needs to target keywords that compete with vast swathes of noncommercial online content.
A great example of this is a client we once had whose service was as
brilliant as it was unique. The company provided tours of the WWII DDay Normandy beaches direct from London. But with a twist.
You could do it all in just one day.
The tours were aimed at lucrative holiday makers (usually wealthy
retirees from the US) passing through London who wanted to visit the
beaches of Normandy, but didn't have the time to do a typical 2 or 3 day
excursion involving ferries and coaches. Instead this tour operator did it
all by air.
They picked up clients directly from their London hotels, then shuttled
them to a private propeller plane that could seat up to eight, flew them
to Normandy over the beaches, landed for lunch and a private ground
tour spanning several hours, then flew them back to London and
delivered them back to their hotel. All in the same day. And all, for under
$800 per person.
The service was and still is, one of the most clever and niche businesses
I've ever come across. The most satisfying thing for us was that it was
family run, with an owner who was infectiously passionate about the
tours.
However, search engines reverse engineer marketing, and so the very
thing which makes SEO so lucrative can also be its downfall – keywords
are only as good as the people typing them.
Instead of bringing an innovative product or service to people's
attention insidiously and passively (like billboard advertising for
example), Google relies upon and targets exactly what people already
know to type into it, which can only ever be based on their pre-existing
knowledge and exposure. Simply put; people don't know what they
don't know.
The monthly online search volume for keywords like 'London to
Normandy tours in one day' just wasn't there. This left keywords like
'Normandy tours' and 'London to Normandy', but the intent of a user is
very different for these. The former is for ground tours with no transfer
element (they start in Normandy), and the latter is for transport alone
(they begin and end in London).
In the end, this tours website was better suited to Google Ads for the
tight control it offered. As well as the ability to test out different
keywords and exact user locations based on their IP Address, Google Ads
is also a phenomenally powerful tool to test the water before you start
an SEO campaign full throttle.
We now manage their Google Ads account for them, and to date almost
all their custom comes from targeting US locations at specific times with
highly focussed Ads. SEO just can't compete with this.
So, I hope before you start your SEO journey you perform the necessary
due diligence by making sure SEO is right for you. If at all unsure, you can
email me at will@willcoombe.com and I'll be happy to check you're not
about to throw hours and months of your time down the toilet. I may
not get back to you immediately, but I will get back to you.
Here's a quick summary and example checklist of businesses we've
declined to help in the past. Make sure you're not in the list.
• Websites less than a month old.
• E-commerce stores whose growth is 100% reliant on SEO.
• Websites looking to target keywords with few or no people
searching for them. For example, 'binary options trading classes’
with around 10 searches / month. It’s not worth the work for just
10 people!
• Businesses who can’t break even without SEO.
• Companies with a product that’s yet to be trialled for demand in
the marketplace.
Chapter 4
“The Marketing Treasure Map”
If you're new to business (and even if you're a veteran), I'm about to
make sure you never waste a penny on marketing unnecessarily. I'm
going to give you the Marketing Treasure Map.
Ahoy Matey!
Having been privy to thousands of conversations with business owners
looking to market their website or product, I can assure you that you
needn't be afraid of the infamous statistic that 9 out of 10 new
businesses fail within their first year. By reading this, you're about to
separate yourself from the self-inflicted business casualties.
Why self-inflicted? Because the 9 in 10 deserve it. I know that sounds
harsh, but they really do.
Before I'm charged with being mean, I need you to understand
something critical. The 9 in 10 are wonderful people. They have loving
families and no doubt contribute to charity and their local community.
I'm confident they're all hard workers, and know their chosen business
industry back to front. But they all share one condemning trait.
They put product before marketing.
They all come to the table convinced the idea or the product is the
commodity. Big mistake. It's not. A mediocre product marketed well can
create immense wealth. A phenomenal product marketed poorly will
flatline a business.
Consequently the 9 in 10 enter the marketing stage when it's just too
late and all the chips have already been palmed into the middle of the
felt table. They've already put in the late hours away from their family.
They've already drawn down the 9.3% APR bank loan with a 10-year
repayment schedule. They've already committed to the 600 square foot
office premises and two employees on payroll. And now, marketing is
the part they never really thought about or allocated much budget to,
because, after all, their product “speaks for itself”.
By the time they call us, it’s sadly too late to help. Despite our
protestations, they'll never truly believe online marketing is the only
thing they should be concentrating on as the backbone of their business.
Instead, they allocate a sliver of budget to SEO, and a whole lot of
budget to magazine adverts, product launch parties, logo designs, and
PR companies.
I regularly speak to the 9 in 10, and they almost never become clients. By
the time they get to SEO on their business spending spree, it's been
pushed so far down the priority list that they can't afford it without a
100% guaranteed result – which of course SEO can't provide.
Now I'm not suggesting that you come to market with literally no
product to offer (although that is a viable business testing model).
Instead, I offer you a more linear and layered model of how to market
your website or business. And the best bit is, it caters to every budget.
If you follow this properly and your business fails, you can be assured it
was your product that was lacking. If you don't follow this, and randomly
choose pockets to focus on at different times, then you'll never know
how large you could have grown.
So, you've got a great product. What now?
Marketing is about starting at the bottom and then layering successful
channels on top of each other. You start with the lowest risk / lowest
return investments. Then, work your way up to the highest risk / highest
return practices – always layering and never replacing. Always recycling
returns back into the next stage of marketing.
To understand what I mean by risk, we need to talk about consumer
intent and the buying process very quickly.
Consider the following diagram…
Common sense would suggest that all websites and businesses should
start their marketing on the right hemisphere of the diagram, and I’ve no
doubt that if the 9 in 10 saw this image they’d agree. The reality though
is that most people don’t consider where their chosen method of
marketing lies within this model and instead they go for what ‘feels’ safe
or sounds like it would produce great results.
So, they pay for a half page feature ad in an industry magazine. They
pump cash into LinkedIn Ads because they read an article on
Business.com saying they’re performing well right now. They
immediately jump to Facebook advertising because they’re familiar with
using Facebook as a consumer product.
Don’t get me wrong, both LinkedIn and Facebook are amazing marketing
channels, but the common error the 9 in 10 make is to confuse tight
demographic targeting with high commercial consumer intent. Just
because you can show your ads to certain types of people, it doesn’t
mean these people are ready to buy anything. To think your website can
drag the consumer through the process from ‘Problem Awareness’ to
‘Decision’ is a conceited fallacy.
This doesn’t mean marketing which operates on the low consumer
intent side isn’t worth it. Not at all. In fact, this is where the real money
is. This is where herculean companies battle it out in the PR stakes with
budgets that would make a small to medium business owner wince. This
is where the power of a brand exists.
But this side of the scale harbours the riskier and far less predictable
returns on investment, and to operate here you need to be an
established company with vast sums of money behind you to afford
spending with no real tangible gain – and this just isn’t the case for most
businesses.
So, let’s overlay some marketing channels to the consumer buying
process and then consider their potential returns…
Everything in the left hemisphere has potentially huge returns because
you’re getting the consumer at a very base and influential level. But it
lacks the certainty of the right hemisphere. Consequently, marketing on
the right side is more expensive, so what you gain in control, you can
lose in ROI.
You’d think the 9 in 10 would begin with the less risky high conversion
marketing on the right. But they don’t.
Epic fail.
They jump to the familiar and zeitgeist marketing platforms like
Facebook because Google Ads and SEO seem too confusing. And to be
fair to them, confusion leads to a lack of control anyway, so their only
two options become: learn how to implement Google Ads and SEO
themselves; or outsource them. Neither of these are palatable choices,
so they just forget about it.
Operating in the left side of the diagram, by the time they realise their
marketing budget can’t even come close to sustaining the marketing
onslaught required to build a brand, they turn to Google Ads and SEO
with no money left to make even a dent in their sales.
If marketing was a game of chess, SEO would be the queen. Versatile,
formidable, and game-changing. But I’m about to surprise you. SEO isn't'
where you should start your online marketing at all. No, instead you
should start like any great chess titan begins, by testing out and building
strategies with your disposable pawns – which in this case, are Google
Ads campaigns.
With the exception of affiliate marketers (who should go straight to SEO
and stay there) Google Ads is the first marketing channel to conquer and
prove yourself within. Because if your business can’t get a positive ROI
out of it then your website and product offering is simply too poor for
you to continue to operate. Failure at Google Ads is a vivid red flag that
the marketplace will crush your business through natural selection.
How can I be so sure? Because what you pay per click in Google Ads isn’t
decided by Google per se. It’s the maximum auctioned keyword click
amount other websites, and therefore the market, will pay.
It’s why you can may only pay a few cents per click for a keyword like
‘Dog Groomer in Little Rock, and over $50 per click for the nationwide
search term ‘Best Car Insurance’. In the latter case the conversion
returns are commensurate with the click cost and that’s what the
marketplace is willing to pay.
So, if you can’t achieve a positive ROI through Google Ads, don’t blame
your tools. You were ousted by the marketplace. And, if you were ousted
by the marketplace, it’s very unlikely you’ll achieve ultimate success with
other forms of marketing. Because of the ability to target specific search
engine keywords, Google Ads and SEO are the only online marketing
channels that can truly exist right at the end of the consumer buying
journey.
If you’re a wedding caterer in the town of Bradenton. And your Google
Ads adverts only appear when someone types ‘Wedding Caterer in
Bradenton into Google. And you only get charged when someone clicks
on your website. And you still can’t get at least a small positive ROI.
Something is very wrong with your website or pricing.
You should be eternally grateful to Google Ads for highlighting this
before you blew $5,000 on a wedding convention stand or another
$5,000 on a half-page print Advertisement in ‘Bride’ magazine.
Marketing ain't the problem.
Layering Marketing Channels
We need to move away from 2 key failures that will hold you back from
becoming a successful and large company.
Failure #1 - Being a marketing 'Jack of all trades'
Failure #2 - Not layering your marketing channels.
The first failure is pretty self-explanatory. Good results never come from
spreading your focus and budget across multiple marketing fields. You
need to master one and give it the appropriate amount of financial and
time investment before you move on.
But the second failure is a little less well understood. It surrounds the
idea that different marketing channels compete and conflict with one
another. And in the world of online marketing this is just plain wrong.
The best example I can give is based on one of the largest
misconceptions I hear about SEO all the time. It’s what many of the 9 in
10 ask me during our phone calls...
“SEO can save you money on Google Ads, right? If you can rank
organically, you won’t have to spend anything with Google again right?”
Wrong. Wrong. And WRONG!
They can't be faulted for thinking this, but they’re empirically wrong.
You need to think of Google Ads and SEO as two totally separate traffic
pools which need tapping into individually, because that's what they are
– separate. Someone who clicks on an organic search result first didn't
do so by accident. They had up to four perfectly enticing Google Ads
search results to choose from before they got to you. Instead, they
skipped the Ads. Why? Because they don't trust the Ads. It’s as simple as
that.
Although Google tries to make its paid search results as camouflaged as
possible without invoking misdirection consumer laws, most Internet
users know that the first few results are there because companies paid
to be there – not because Google thinks they're the best result for you
(although relevance and quality score metrics don't make throwing up a
Google Ads campaign quite as easy as this. Google still wants to show
the best results within the Ad contenders).
Google users will either be predisposed to going straight to the organic
results, or they won’t. And if you go by the results of the 1.4 Billion
search tests by researchers Group M and Nielsen, there's a colossal
portion of users who ignore the Google Ads results entirely. In fact, they
found 95% of the people in their study only clicked on websites which
ranked organically.
Now, I'm not convinced the percentage is quite this high. And the
proportion of Ad to organic clicks will vary dramatically depending on
the keyword. But one thing should be clear – if you rank organically but
don't appear in Google Ads, there's a portion of traffic you'll never get
access to, and vice versa. Therefore, to think quitting Google Ads by
ranking organically will save you money is a total fallacy. It just means
you weren't able to get a positive ROI with pay per click advertising –
which as discussed, should send alarm bells ringing.
Instead you need to layer your marketing; and once you start something,
don't stop until you get a positive ROI on it. Once achieved move to the
next marketing layer, which should always be incrementally riskier with
higher potential returns. If It's being paid for by the spoils of the
previous layer, it won't ever matter that It’s riskier.
The Map Itself
Almost without exception, if you're trying to make money from a
website, here's where you should start. If you make it to the end of the
map, I guarantee you will be a large and successful company. If you
don't, I'm afraid to tell you the marketplace has spoken, so you need to
listen and move on.
1. Google Ads
2. SEO
3. Social media advertising
4. Content marketing
5. PR
With each step down, the ability to guarantee commercial intent from
the user gets lower and lower, but conversely the net being cast gets
bigger and bigger with potentially huge ROIs.
Social media advertising is somewhat of an anomaly because you can get
hyper targeted. But it marks the first part of the map where the ‘who’s
seeking who’ gets reversed. With Google Ads and SEO, the buyer is
coming to you (inbound marketing), which puts you firmly in the driving
seat. With social media advertising, most content marketing, and
certainly PR, you’re on the back foot trying to attract and sell (outbound
marketing). With Google Ads, you can tightly control your marketing, but
the ROI is generally lower. With PR there’s little control, but the ROI can
be huge.
If you’re starting out, you just need to reduce risk as much as possible so
follow this map sequentially and you can’t go wrong.
That said, you’re reading a book about SEO, so discussing other
marketing forms is for another day.
So, let’s move on, and let’s talk time.
Chapter 5
“Let’s Talk Time”
So how long is SEO going to take?
Good question. Are you ready to feel frustrated and annoyed with me?
Okay here goes...
Answer = “It Depends”.
Sorry.
Getting to the top of Google will vary dramatically, depending on the
strength of your website and the power of your competition. After all,
SEO is a zero-sum game, so if you're going to get into one of the top ten
positions someone is going to have to be relegated and pushed off the
first page to make way for you.
I appreciate it may still be useful to understand how long this is all going
to take though, so let me give you some very broad examples of
timeframes to the top three positions in Google (with accompanying
keyword examples).
Let's begin with the easiest websites to rank, then and work our way up.
1. Affiliate Websites Targeting Longer Keywords
with Fewer People Searching for Them
• Example Keyword: 'best steering wheel car lock'
• Competition Level: Low
• Financial Rewards: Low
• Timeframe: 2 months
2. Websites Targeting a Local Town or City with
Moderately Competitive Keywords
• Example Keyword: 'wedding suit hire manchester'
• Competition Level: Medium
• Financial Rewards: Medium
• Timeframe: 2 - 4 months
3. Websites Targeting a Local Town or City with
Highly Competitive Keywords
• Example Keyword: 'best london architect'
• Competition Level: High
• Financial Rewards: High
• Timeframe: 4 - 6 months
4. Websites Targeting Low to Medium Competition
Keywords Nationally
• Example Keyword: 'crm consultants uk'
• Competition Level: Medium
• Financial Rewards: High
• Timeframe: 6 - 12 months
5. Websites Targeting Highly Competitive
Keywords Nationally
• Example Keyword: ‘car insurance usa’
• Competition Level: Meteoric
• Financial Rewards: Unfathomable
• Timeframe: 12 months +
As you can see, if you're going after financially life-changing keywords,
the commitment required isn't for the faint hearted. But, if you just want
a great lifestyle with the toys to boot, excess monthly cash in your
account, and the ability to grow your business or website exponentially
under your own control, then keywords requiring 4 - 6 months to crack
are well within your reach.
The good news is, no matter what you're trying to achieve, you don't
need to dedicate 9 hours a day to this (nor can you with any positive
return on your time investment). It's just not necessary. A few hours a
week is all it takes.
SEO is slow burn for sure, but stick with it, because the rewards are
huge.
The Immediate Gratification Lie
The final thing you need to know before we get into the ‘nitty gritty’ of
SEO surrounds the issue of immediate gratification, and namely the lack
of it.
You need to understand that SEO isn't difficult. It really isn’t. Most of it’s
common sense, and the main things you need to do can be broken down
into easily digestible digital chunks. What really separates the winners
from the losers in SEO – and indeed all disciplines for that matter – is the
ability to work for no immediate, tangible gain.
To put in long hours and then not see the results for potentially months.
To toil and struggle over and over without categorically knowing if what
you're doing today will be the reason for position rises in a couple of
weeks or months.
SEO isn't like other marketing channels. There's no 'Ta Daaaaaa!'
moment. You need to be okay with working very hard and not seeing the
rewards immediately. And even when you do see results, you have to try
to work out, oftentimes fruitlessly, what caused them.
All sounds a bit like black magic, right? How can you justify the work if
you can't know for sure what works and what doesn't?
Simple. Because the trend between consistent SEO over a prolonged
period of time, and getting a website to the number 1 spot in Google, is
undeniable and clear.
Think of SEO like trying to lose weight. By the time you actually get on
the scales and notice you've dropped 10lbs, you won’t be able put your
finger on whether it was the morning walks to work, the cutting out
alcohol, or the reduction in carbs. And you'll never know because it
wasn't just about one thing. It was about doing lots of small things well,
and doing them consistently.
So why am I making a point of this? After all, it's pretty obvious stuff
really.
The answer is, because you need it to break through the noise of SEO
advice online. There's an overwhelming amount of online content that
will try to convince you there's a new focus and trick that 'Google
doesn't want you to know!'.
It's all shameless trash and you need to ignore it. Unless you're talking to
the head of Google's search Ben Gomes, there is no such thing as an SEO
guru – not even me I’m sad to say! I'm still learning myself, and with the
never-ending algorithm updates that Google release, this process will
never end.
Even the most successful SEO specialist is, and always will be, a humble
apprentice who bows down before the mighty Google. We don't control
search engines, so it doesn't matter how long you've been doing it – it's
always a learning curve.
I say this not to intimidate you, but to lift the curtain on the companies
who stand to profit from pretending they've got it all sewn up and they
know how to game Google. They don't. Nobody really does.
Quick fixes, 'tricks' and guaranteed results peddled by online resources
all serve to dish out something the weak feast on – immediate
gratification. Don't fall foul of this. SEO is a mostly slow process with
little instant feedback, so be prepared to work hard on what can
sometimes feel like a calculated leap of faith.
But keep persevering.
And remember, like Steve Jobs said in his historic Stanford University
Address, you can only connect the dots looking back – not forward.
Chapter 6
“How Google Works”
To get good at SEO you need to first understand the principles of search
engines. Stop yawning at the back please – this won't take long I
promise. Even if you’re an SEO veteran, a quick reminder will help shake
things up and grab you out the trees so you can begin to see the wood
again.
The first thing to remember is that Google isn’t a government funded
organisation or charity. They’re not trying to advance humanity by
intravenously injecting cultural and scientific information into the
public’s arm. Yes, they are improving the world by putting a wealth of
knowledge and information at people’s fingertips, but that’s not why
they do it. They do it for money. Google is a business. It’s as simple as
that.
Showing the best, and most relevant search results possible to its users
isn’t just a casual modus operandi – it’s the lifeblood of their entire
business. And when they get it wrong, people think about using Bing or
Yahoo instead. And when that happens, less people click on Google
Advertisements, which in turn harms revenue. So, it’s in Google’s best
interests to work out the most relevant and useful set of results on a
page to satisfy the user.
So How Does Google Actually Work?
Stage One – Indexing the Web
When you search the Internet on Google, you aren’t searching the web
at all. You’re searching Google’s Index of the web, which it builds by
crawling as much of the Internet as it can with software called ‘Spiders’,
or ‘The Googlebot’.
So you aren’t actually searching the web in real time. Once Google has
its complete index of the web (which incidentally is over 100 Million
gigabytes in size), it goes through a filtration process to make sure the
most obviously depraved or spammy web pages are deleted. Think
Russian bride sites and gentleman enlargement offers.
Stage Two – Matching Content to Your Query
Once you type in a keyword and hit the Return key, some pretty voodoo
things start to happen. Using simple word, synonym, context, and
semantic matches, Google first discards any web pages that clearly
aren’t relevant to your search topic. The remaining pages then get
ordered by coded algorithms with over 200 ranking factors.
Of course nobody knows for sure what’s in Google’s algorithms, but
there are two quite clear criteria – relevance (usefulness) and popularity
(trust). The former is satisfied using ‘On-Page’ SEO, and the latter with
‘Off-Page’ SEO. We’ll discuss these in depth a little later.
Stage Three – The User Behaviour Feedback Loop
The last stage of search is relatively new to Google's algorithms, but It's
the most advanced. Once a user types in a keyword, their behaviour and
patterns of interaction with the search results are closely monitored to
give feedback. So, if a website is appearing in fourth position and every
time people click on it, they don't spend long there, Google knows this
particular site is proving unhelpful to users and should subsequently be
pushed down the rankings.
Likewise, if a site is newly in the ninth position and users clearly engage
with it (in terms of time spent on it, and the number of internal links
they click), Google will leapfrog it to the top where it can be just as
useful to even more sets of eyeballs.
Chapter 7
“Become a Pro SEO in 5 Minutes
– The Common Sense Check”
Enough theory and business talk. Let's start to get into Search Engine
Optimisation. I'm about to give you the best foundation in SEO possible
by gifting you a piece of knowledge that will see you graduating into
your own experiments and theories, long after you've finished reading
this book.
If you remember nothing else, let me imprint something on you in
indelible ink.
Whenever you're doing an SEO task, or trying to decide if something will
work in the search engines or not, pretend you're Google and ask
yourself the following question...
'If I was a Google Engineer, would I reward, punish, or be indifferent to
the SEO about to be performed?'
This might seem like a simple common sense check to ask yourself, but
most don't do it. This then leads them down the path of either a poor
return on time investment, or even worse, a domain penalisation.
You're probably thinking, 'yeah okay, but I'll only do the stuff everyone
knows works'. It's a good attitude but I can assure you that by the time
everyone knows something works in the mainstream, it no longer works
as well. SEO is like property investment in up and coming areas. By the
time a town is a known growth hotspot, prices have already peaked and
profits are minimal. The spoils go to the real innovators and risk
assumers who came up with the hypothesis something would work, and
then executed it well.
Don't get me wrong, there are volumes of SEO best practices that are
universally known to work. But to truly succeed, you need to be able to
decipher who is correct in what they're touting at the cutting edge. And
remember, unlike heavily peer-regulated science journals in medicine, in
SEO everyone claims they're 100% correct because It's in their financial
interest to do so.
Plus, it's not possible to prove them otherwise. There's just a long line of
potions being sold by loud marketers, and you need to choose the right
mixture on your own I’m afraid. Don't wait for the textbook.
The good news is, if you apply the common sense check, you can rarely
go wrong. In fact, you can take it one step further and ask yourself, 'how
quickly or easily could another website do what I'm doing to try and
boost my rankings?'. If the answer is 'very', then you're making an
average choice as best, and damaging at worst.
For example, commenting on industry forums to acquire backlinks to
your site from your forum profile link. What's the barrier of entry to
this? Almost zero. So what makes you think Google will value these
types of links? Exactly. They won't penalise you (unless of course the
forums are spammy), but unless you're outsourcing the commenting or
leveraging an employee, is it a good use of your time?
Or perhaps you could buy 1000 Facebook 'Likes'. Well okay, but do you
really think Google will reward you for this social signal when the
customer interaction with your business' Facebook profile is otherwise
non-existent? Yes, they do monitor this.
I can assure you Google isn't stupid, and so trying to outsmart their over
300, highly educated, full-time search engineers whose sole purpose is
to order the Internet properly without being compromised by cheats, is
quite frankly deluded.
This leaves us with no choice but to do everything the right way, and I'm
afraid (as well as happy) to say the hard work way. Because when
something's difficult or laborious, you can bet your bottom dollar your
competitors won't want to do to it. Outwork them and your SEO results
(and bank account) will reflect and reward this tenacity.
The added bonus is it means you'll never need to fear a manual or
algorithmic penalty from Google if you're doing things above board.
You’ll know your website and business is futureproofed.
So, if we're going to do SEO properly, what does ‘properly’ look like?
The answer: hundreds of seemingly small things done well. Which leads
me onto ‘The Magic Bullet Fallacy’.
Chapter 8
“The Magic Bullet Fallacy”
Let's get one thing straight.
No single thing is going to rank your site number one. Not even one
major component will. SEO is about consistency of implementation,
ticking small boxes, and eliminating anything that might be holding you
back. That’s genuinely it.
There are two main reasons many corners of the industry still pump out
the idea of a quick or simple solution to ranking your website.
1. It's a Hangover from The Past
At one time, it was indeed true that you could catapult yourself to the
number one position in Google by doing fast and easy things. When the
big ‘G’ was still in its relative infancy during the period between 2000
and 2009 (in 2009 the so called 'Penguin' and 'Panda' algorithm updates
were rolled out), there were many back alleys to rankings.
One of the most famous was to have your target keyword repeated back
to back in a wall of text that was the same colour as the background. To
the user It was invisible, but to Google the site appeared to be steeped
in rich keyword density and high relevance.
Another tactic was 3-way linking. Google has never given much credence
to reciprocated links, simply because It's obvious two websites are
scratching each other's backs if they link to one another. A way round
this was to introduce a third participant website, so that…
Website A links to website B
Website B links to website C
Website C links to website A
Hey Presto! No reciprocal links! But again, Google got wise and it
stopped working.
For most of Google's history, it's been a game of cat and mouse between
SEOs and the search engines. Whilst both were growing into what they
would become today, the relationship echoed that of car thieves and
anti-car theft technology. One party had to get smarter than the other in
incremental steps. However, just like car theft, the pool of people with
the appropriate expertise and knowhow diminished. If all you need to
break into a car is a coat hanger, any layman can do it. If, however, you
now need to infiltrate a coded electronic immobiliser, fewer people can
do it.
SEO is much the same, with only a select few possessing the required
skills to cheat the system. Do you want to be one of this elite team?
Hopefully your answer is “No”, because it's now far easier just to play by
the rules. Your time is much better spent earning the money to buy a
car, than dedicating the time to learn how to steal it. Think long term
and you can't go wrong.
Fast forward to the last few years and the simple fact is, Magic Bullets
don't work. Google is way way too sophisticated.
2. Magic Bullets Sell
Picture a 3800-word online article about an SEO practice that will be
hours, if not days, of work. Performed correctly, it will constitute about
4% of what Google considers when ranking websites. The article signs off
with the disclaimer that the effectiveness of the technique is probable
only in logical theory, and can't be conclusively proved.
Does that sound fun and sexy?
Now I want you to imagine a 1500-word article brimming with loud
imagery, entertainment, absolutes, and a pithy hook in the headline
professing this 'little known trick will 'TRIPLE' your organic traffic
overnight!’.
I think you get the point.
The online SEO fraternity is littered with blog posts and articles all trying
to be the siren call that you follow into the rocks. Talked about articles
get linked to, and links (as you’ll find out later) = rankings. With such a
saturated information market, many bloggers are forced to bottom feed
from ranking articles which target very long-tail keywords, or by writing
about unproven details of well-known techniques that just don't need
that kind of depth.
In short, a lot of SEO content marketing online wants you to buy into the
quick fix, because that will keep you coming back for more.
PART II –
PREPARING FOR SEO
Chapter 9
“The 3 Types of SEO Business
Model”
There are numerous ways to make life-changing money from search
engine optimisation, because once you’ve acquired the skill of being able
to influence Google rankings for profit, the world’s your oyster.
SEO business models typically fall into three categories…
• Affiliate SEO
• Business SEO
• Client SEO
This chapter is for those interested in the ways you can profit from
search engine optimisation. You may know that you want to start your
SEO journey, but you may also be unsure about which route to take.
Well, here I’ll lay out the different ways you can make money, and from
there you can make the right choice for you based on your personality.
If you already have a website and you know how you’ll ultimately make
money from SEO then just read the section that relates to you, and then
skip ahead to the next chapter. But before you do, you should read the
section in this Chapter called ‘The Cash Formula: How to Translate
Rankings to Money in Your Wallet’. It’s going to be very useful later.
Affiliate SEO
Before I talk about the world of affiliate SEO, let me touch upon the
general concept of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing describes the
process of recommending or referencing someone else’s product or
service on your own website in exchange for a commission should a user
go on to buy that product or service via a special tracking link.
For example, let’s say you have a website reviewing the best amateur
camera equipment out there. It doesn’t sell anything. It just writes
passionately about photography. If you provide special affiliate tracking
links to 3rd party retailers where people can buy the cameras you
recommend – and someone goes on to buy a camera from the retailer –
you’ll get the commission.
Although we’re concerned with the Internet here, the term ‘Affiliate
Marketing’ isn’t restricted to online sales though. For example, if your
broadband provider offers you cashback when you persuade your
parents to switch to that provider as well, then technically speaking,
you’re an affiliate marketer. You are ‘affiliated’ with that product, and
you are ‘marketing’ it to a prospect on behalf of the company who pays
you the commission.
Before I graduated into SEO consulting, I was an affiliate marketer. I’d
buy advertising space across the Internet and then use that space to try
and sell dating website subscriptions.
I specialised in the French, over-50s market (this isn’t a joke, I really
did!), so every single time a French lady would click on an advert of mine
(usually featuring some handsome grey-haired man, or should I say,
Monsieur), and then go on to sign up to the dating website, I would
receive $25.
When you think of making money from a laptop on a beach somewhere,
think affiliate SEO. If you manage to get this type of SEO enterprise right,
you can make an unbelievable monthly income from it.
The process of creating an affiliate website goes something like this:
1. Identify a product or service that offers an affiliate partnership.
2. Find keywords online which generate a significant amount of traffic that could be
motivated to buy that product or service.
3. Create a website featuring content on the topic of that product or service.
4. Rank that website as high up in Google (or other reputable search engines) as possible
for the keywords you’ve identified.
5. Refine your website to funnel as many people as possible to click on your affiliate links.
If people buy the product or service you’re recommending, you’re paid a
commission on every sale.
It sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? Well, it truly is.
There are few nicer feelings in life than logging in to your affiliate
network account and seeing that someone in Iowa purchased a
Chesterfield Sofa that you didn’t design, manufacture or ship, but you
just got paid $97.25 of the profit for. Best of all, they purchased it at 3am
whilst you were sleeping! God bless capitalism.
However, before you start hastily writing your notice of resignation to
your current boss (there’ll be time for that I promise!), there are a few
negatives to affiliate SEO that you need to consider.
So here are the pros and cons of affiliate SEO laid out nicely for you:
The Pros of Affiliate Marketing
It’s Passive
Affiliate SEO is a great way to earn passive income. You build your
asset (your website) just the once. You make the effort to learn about
SEO. You leverage that knowledge to rank for high-volume keywords,
and you profit over-and-over again every time another person buys
what you are touting.
It’s Scalable
I know people who earn over $50,000 per month doing affiliate SEO
(I’ve seen their affiliate accounts), so if you can rank your website well
for some good online niches, there is a lot of money to be made.
It Suits Introverts
I don’t know about you, but I’m a massive introvert. The idea of
selling to people through ‘networking’ makes me queasy. If you’re
looking for a way to make exceptional money without having to speak
to anyone, affiliate SEO could be for you.
The Cons of Affiliate Marketing
It Lacks Control
This is the very reason I steered away from affiliate SEO in the end,
even though I was starting to make great money from it. Not only are
you unable to guarantee Google’s ranking algorithm, but you don’t
control the terms of the affiliate commissions. These two factors
combined mean that if your website gets removed from the Google
index, or the affiliate offer you’re selling is withdrawn, your eyewatering monthly income in June can fall to $0 in July.
Bring a Knuckleduster. It’s Competitive
Affiliate marketing is a lovely way to make passive income. You can do
it from any place in the world as long as you’ve got an Internet
connection. That’s why in the very profitable online niches, you’ll
likely come up against fierce competition.
So, what do you need to become an affiliate SEO? Well, this book is
about the ‘ranking in Google’ part of affiliate marketing, so I’ll be
glossing over things like how to choose an affiliate offer. Besides, the
Internet is filled to the brim with information on the subject. Instead I’ll
give you a quick overview of the affiliate process…
To Become an Affiliate Marketer, You’ll Need 4 ingredients…
1. An Affiliate Offer
First thing’s first – we need to have a product or service to
recommend to people, and a commission agreement set up between
you and the business selling it. You can sign up to any one of the
many affiliate networks available online who will then generate the
special tracking links you can pepper your website with. Some
example networks you can sign up to include…
www.ClickBank.com
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com
https://partnernetwork.ebay.co.uk
www.cj.com
2. Traffic Generating Keywords for That Offer
Once we’ve identified a list of offers we’re interested in selling, it’s
time to do some keyword research. We need to find volumegenerating keywords that have a level of commercial intent
surrounding any of the products we’re looking to sell.
3. A Website
We need to register a domain. We need to create a new website on
that domain. And we need to think about the content we’re going to
add to that website to give us the best chance of successfully selling
to our users.
4. Skills to Rank That Website Highly in Google
If you’ve got the first 3 tasks above sorted, the only thing left to do is
get your website on the first page of Google for the keywords. This
after all is where all your motivated buyers are going to see it.
Choose the right product to sell. Choose the right keywords to rank for.
Create the right website. And choose the right SEO tactics to rank that
website.
Do this and you can earn more money than you ever thought possible
anywhere in the world with extremely little input and maintenance. That
is the wonderful world of affiliate SEO.
Business SEO
Business SEO simply refers to using SEO as a means to market your
existing product or service.
My journey has seen me settle as a search engine marketing consultant
for businesses, and I migrated to this from Affiliate SEO because I love
helping other people profit and grow from my help. There’s nothing I
enjoy more (whilst fully clothed anyway) than being responsible for the
growth in value of a company. It’s a genuine thrill.
If you become great at SEO, you become great at online marketing. If
you become great at online marketing, you become a money-printing
machine in pretty much any industry and any business in existence.
Remember, a poor to average product or service can be very successful
with good marketing, whereas a genuinely great product or service
marketed poorly will likely tank faster than a chocolate teapot.
Through SEO you have the key to unlock profitability to almost any
business venture you can think of. If there’s a market for a certain
product or service, you can position your business as the number 1
choice for that market – locally, nationally, or globally.
Opportunities for Local Business
If you run a local business (a business targeting customers in a specific
area or region), you’re at a huge advantage in the search engines.
Thanks to updates in Google’s algorithm it’s become very difficult to
‘game’ the system, and many business websites that were previously
clogging up the first page using underhand tactics have been penalised
and kicked off Google’s index.
This means the level of genuine online competition is generally poor,
and I’m yet to see a local business search results page on Google where I
can’t get a website into the top-5 results within 2 - 4 months.
National or Global Targeting
Whilst levels of online competition for nationally and globally targeted
keywords are generally much higher, you’ll still be ahead of 99% of the
competition by taking on board the information in this book.
Depending on the size of your company, you may or may not have the
time to do the practical SEO work yourself, but even if you’re delegating
or outsourcing it, having a good background knowledge in the topic will
put you in good stead to manage other people doing it for you.
Don’t Believe SEO Can Transform Your Business?
What I’m about to show you applies to all commercial SEO endeavours,
but it’s even more pertinent to business SEO (which is why I’ve included
it in this section).
I’m going to walk you through a process you can apply right now to
determine the value of SEO for your business.
It involves a bit of (simple) maths, and an online tool called SEMRush...
https://www.semrush.com
Just in case you were wondering, the ‘SEM’ in SEMRush stands for
‘Search Engine Marketing’. It’s got a pro version you can sign up to, but
the basic version is still really useful.
The Cash Formula: How to Translate Rankings to Money in Your Wallet
At the end of this section there’s a signpost to a video tutorial on how to
work this out for your own business venture. On it I’ll walk you through
how much money SEO will make you; but for now, let’s look at an
example.
Let’s say...
• You’re an architecture company serving the London area.
• Every new client you secure is worth roughly £1,500 in revenue.
• You’ve decided to go for your industry’s ‘big hitter’ keywords
So, armed with this, how can we categorically know the money we stand
to make from SEO? Great question. Let me answer it in 7 simple steps.
Step 1 – Choose a Keyword
Choose 1 or 2 obviously attractive keywords for the industry in question,
which in this example would be something like ‘london architects’ or
‘architects london’.
Step 2 – Find the Big Kahuna
Type one of these keywords into Google, and note what competitor
website is featured highest in the organic rankings.
Step 3 – Start Snooping Around Using SEMRush
Visit www.semrush.com and enter that competitor’s domain into the
domain overview box. From the results, click on the ‘View full results’
button underneath the ‘Top Organic Results’ section.
Step 4 – Get the Keyword’s Monthly Traffic Volume Estimate
Make a note of the SEMRush traffic ‘Volume’ estimate for your chosen
keyword. If it’s is in the top 10 monthly traffic volume results, then the
free version of SEMRush will display it. If it’s 11+ you’ll need the
upgraded version to unlock it. If this is the case, you can unlock a free
trial for 14 days on the resources page of my website here…
www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources
There you’ll find the one and only affiliate link I use in this entire book.
Before I get charged with plugging services to make money from them
though, the only reason I provide an affiliate link for SEMRush is because
with it you can get a free trial of the upgraded pro version for 14 days. If
you end up choosing to keep your subscription with them I get a
commission a few weeks later, but that’s not my world domination
masterplan.
I want to make this absolutely clear – I’m only signed up to the SEMRush
affiliate scheme so you can get the free trial if you want to do more
thorough research. Your trust in this book is worth more to me than
some pocket change from one affiliate link.
Once you’ve signed up, make a reminder to cancel it before you’re
charged. Yes, SEMRush is very good, but I’m utterly paranoid of you
thinking I’m selling it to you, so take the trial and run before you’ve paid.
Step 5– Reveal How Many Visitors the Top Result in Google is Getting
from the Chosen Keyword
Multiply the traffic ‘Volume’ by the ‘Traffic %’ percentage. This will tell
you how many visitors are landing on your competitor’s website from
this keyword alone.
In our example, it shows that approximately 25% of the 1,000 monthly
visitors are landing on the website from ‘architects london’
So, 25% of 1,000 = 250 prospective customers that will land on your
company’s website if you beat your online competition and rank at the
top of Google for this one keyword.
Step 6 – Calculate the Number of Extra Customers You’d Achieve from
being No.1 in Google
Multiply the number of prospective customers by your website’s
conversion rate. If you don’t know this already, you can use 5% as an
average. Therefore 5% of 250 = 12 guaranteed extra monthly customers
who will use your service if you can beat the current website to the No.1
Google spot for just this keyword.
Step 7 – Calculate Extra Revenue from Being No.1 in Google for the
Keyword
Now multiply the extra monthly customers by the average value a
customer is worth to you, and voila – you have the real-world value of a
well-executed SEO plan in monetary terms; which in the example of an
architect in London – is an extra £18,000 / month in revenue from just
one keyword.
If you’re currently scratching your head with a bemused look on your
face, don’t worry. Just watch the short video.
‘The Cash Formula: How to Translate Rankings to Money in Your Wallet’ Video Tutorial
(10:56 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
You Are Who Google Says You Are
As you can see in the above example, the monthly income of any
business can be massively increased by getting to the top of Google for
just 1 keyword.
The thing that should have you salivating by now, is that with a good
SEO strategy in place it’s likely you’ll hit the first page for not just one,
but hundreds of profitable keywords – bringing your return on
investment with SEO up to eye-watering levels.
But It’s not just about getting eyeballs on your website either. Good SEO
brings with it a good online reputation as a whole, which in turn
increases the percentage of people who ultimately do business with you.
For example, during an SEO campaign we perform tasks including:
attracting lots of positive Google & 3rd party reviews, creating a
plethora of different social properties, and signing up to various industry
professional bodies.
All this will help your business’ visibility grow online – increasing brand
awareness and ultimately the likelihood of people using your product or
service.
Client SEO
Client SEO is what we do. People pay us to conduct bespoke SEO
campaigns on their websites, and we make them more money than they
pay us. It’s as simple as that. If you’re good at SEO it’s a fantastic
business model, but probably not for the reasons you think.
Everyone within our SEO Agency, in some form or other, helps other
businesses make more money. Yes, we can talk about rankings,
algorithms and SERPS, but that’s not what someone who picks up the
phone and calls us is really interested in.
They’re really interested in making more money.
When you strip it right back to the bone, SEO is simply a means to profit
by getting more people to look at your website.
The beauty of building revenue for someone else lies in one of my
favourite quotes from the success guru Zig Ziglar:
“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other
people get what they want”
Zig Ziglar
I’m guessing you want more money? Okay that’s fine –– we're on the
same team. But here’s the reality check for those amongst you who
want to learn SEO just for the sake of money. Don’t bother. Please, just
don’t waste yours and other people’s time. Because unless you’re
coming at it with the mind set of helping other people make money, and
creating value within the marketplace, you won’t get any wealthier from
SEO. In fact, you won’t get richer from any business practice.
Allow me to lead by example…
Let’s imagine you manufacture and sell Chesterfield Sofas (this is my ‘go
to’ example by the way, so don’t think I’m a man utterly obsessed by
tufted leather furniture!).
It costs $50 to make one, and you sell it for $500. That’s $450 profit.
You currently sell 10 per month. Total monthly profit = $4500. Not bad.
If I then told you I could get several hundred extra people looking at your
Chesterfield Sofa website – resulting in 5 more sofa sales per month and
an extra $2,250 in profit – how much would you be willing to pay me?
$200? $500? $1000? $1,500? Your answer should be $2,249.
The highest monthly fee someone has paid me to work on their website
is $10,600 / month + tax.
The lowest monthly fee someone has paid me to work on their website’s
SEO is $255 / month. (this was my second ever client)
I’ll tell you now that the difference in the amount of SEO work and effort
spent on the two websites these fees relate to was minimal.
Please hear me when I say…
“The extent to which you get paid (in anything) depends on how much
value you deliver to someone”
In the first example, I increased monthly sessions (people using the
website) by 2,500. This then generated that business much, much more
than they were paying our agency. Was it worth it for that business to
pay us that much money per month? Of course.
There are thousands of healthy profit-making businesses in just the UK,
let alone the USA, Australia and the rest of the world. There is currently
$60,000,000,000,000 ($60 Trillion) circulating round the world economy
as I write this!
If you can increase a business’s profit by just $1 more than they pay you,
SEO is worth it. Get people to understand this using the SEO cash
formula we recently went through, and you can be very profitable from
client SEO.
Unlike most professions though, search engine optimisation consulting is
completely unregulated. There’s no governing body, no statutory
corporation performing audits on the work SEO agencies carry out, and
no rule book.
Google doesn’t volunteer any in-depth information about how its
ranking algorithm works – only guidelines and philosophies. As such, all
search engine optimisation practitioners are working on is their
knowledge and experience. Granted, this may be drawing on years of
experience and swathes of historical data, but nonetheless, half the time
SEO is based on common sense rather than any secret.
This means that if you can get up to speed on the latest SEO knowledge
out there in books, blogs and forums, you can become a more skilled
SEO than 99.9% of the population. And by becoming an expert in SEO,
you become incredibly valuable to people who can profit from higher
Google rankings – which is pretty much any business owner in the world.
A study by Borrell Associates estimated $72 Billion was spent on SEO in
2018. That’s a lot of money.
By 2021, this is estimated to reach $80 Billion.
This massive growth reflects the business world finally starting to realise
how essential good rankings in Google are for long-term company
growth. If you’re a reasonable person to communicate with and you
have good SEO skills, business owners, marketing managers,
entrepreneurs and CEOs will throw cash at you to help their website.
It’s not within the remit of this book to start talking about how to set up
a successful SEO Agency, but if you’ve already decided this is for you,
then get in touch with me at will@willcoombe.com and I’ll be happy to
give you some advice.
My only pre-requisite to helping is that you’ve gone out there and
proven you can rank a website in real life. If you haven’t the chances are
I won’t reply I’m afraid, because it’s ethically questionable at best for
anyone to start trying to charge people for a skill they’ve never tested in
the field.
Chapter 10
“Anatomy of an SEO Campaign”
Hold tight, because you're going to be consumed by the two terms ‘OnPage’ and ‘Off-Page’ Optimisation. They’re going to form the backbone
of your SEO journey so you’ll need to learn to love them. To loosely
outline an SEO campaign, the order of proceedings will always be...
1. Keyword Research
2. On-Page Optimisation
3. Off-Page Optimisation
4. Progress Monitoring
5. Evidence Based Refinement
All 5 of these will be explored in depth, but let's take a very brief look at
them now.
1. Keyword Research
This is the self-explanatory due diligence and preparation you should
take very seriously indeed. To do SEO properly, you only get a shot at a
handful of choice commercial keywords, so you need to make sure
they're the right balance of monthly search volume, commerciality, and
competitiveness. Choose the wrong ones and you can flush weeks of
work down the toilet.
2. 'On-Page' Optimisation
This is where the actual optimisation all begins; and it's wonderfully
controllable. The term 'On-Page' is only somewhat descriptive because
it's in fact referring to anything and everything we optimise about the
site itself – not just a page on the site.
The simple way to think about it is this: if to perform an SEO task you
need to log into your content management system (WordPress, Joomla
etc.) or enter your host's control panel – you're about to do 'On-Page'
SEO.
On-Page is where we dress up your site directly, both in terms of content
and coding, to please Google. Or rather, it's where we specifically tell the
search engine what topics and keywords to consider your site as being
about.
The important word here is 'consider', because Google only wants a bit
of help with this. Get too aggressive with your On-Page optimisation and
you can risk an over-optimisation penalty. It’s a tricky balancing act!
Some example On-Page factors we would think about are...
• 'Header’ tags
• 'Meta' tags
• Keyword density
• Content word count
• Synonym placement
• Internal link architecture
If you’re new to SEO don’t freak out when you see these terms – we’ll be
breaking down each one in detail later.
3. 'Off-Page' Optimisation
A far less controllable process, Off-Page SEO is all to do with how other
websites and online entities cite, reference, and interact with your
website. As they do this, Google sees whether they corroborate and
complement your On-Page optimisation, or whether they act to
contradict it.
For example, if you had a website selling printers, but for some mad
reason you optimised its On-Page factors perfectly for the keyword 'dog
grooming', then Off-Page factors would eventually prevent your site
from ranking well for any keywords surrounding the preening of
puppies. Google will see the rest of the Internet referring to you as a
printer merchant through signals like links and reviews, and discard what
you're saying the site is about.
Think of Google as a blind person you meet at a fancy-dress party.
Bear with me here.
If you’re dressed up as a cowboy, but tell the blind person you've come
as an Indian, eventually they’ll hear enough people say, "hey, nice
cowboy outfit". Eventually their trust and opinion of you will drop.
Examples of Off-Page ranking factors include...
• Number, quality and relevance of backlinks to your site, including
anchor text (the wording of the individual links).
• Google reviews.
• Social media interactions with your accounts.
• Consistency of your exact contact details across the Internet.
Whereas On-Page SEO consists mostly of tasks you only need to perform
once, Off-Page SEO and the acquisition of good backlinks is an ongoing
thing. Taking a break won’t negatively impact your rankings per se, but
rather your competition will usually catch up and beat you.
4. Progress Monitoring
As you're optimising, you need to track if what you're doing is having the
desired and predicted impact on your rankings. Therefore, monitoring
your position in Google for your target keywords is essential. More on
this later.
5. Evidence Based Refinement
As soon as you get enough feedback from monitoring the results, the
SEO process comes full circle. You assess if what you did / are doing is
having the desired impact on rankings, and then go back to keyword
analysis before tweaking your On-Page and Off-Page processes again.
As you can see, the SEO process is a cycle, with the wins becoming more
and more incremental the more times you go around the loop.
How to Judge Progress
The most vital thing for tracking the impact of your work – as well as
keeping your motivation as high as it needs to be – is judging your
progress properly. Don't just judge the merits of your work by your bank
balance. You need to put a data analyst’s hat on here to maximise the
return on your time investment.
There are 2 tracking focusses in SEO – your search engine results
positions (or ‘SERPS’ for short), and an analysis of the resultant traffic
using Google Analytics.
SERPS Tracking
On day one of your SEO campaign, you need to draw a line in the sand
and note your site's positions in Google for your target keywords.
Without this, there's no baseline by which to judge your SEO.
You can track other things, but ultimately your bank account doesn't
care about how many Facebook likes you have, or the number of
backlinks going to your site. It cares about your ranking position and the
traffic that converts into cash, so let's measure them.
There are two main ways to monitor your SERPS – manually, or by using
tracking software.
Manual SERPS Tracking
You'll need to create a spreadsheet and check where you are regularly
by typing each target keyword into Google and hunting for your site
yourself. This is clearly the most labour-intensive option, but it's free.
If you do choose to do this, try to avoid checking daily because it's just
not necessary and can be a huge emotional rollercoaster if you do.
When practicing optimisation, Google does something the SEO industry
calls the 'Google Dance', which is where your rankings will wildly
fluctuate for a period before eventually settling down. It happens
because Google's default reaction to most optimisation changes is to
assume guilt until innocence is proven. The dance is perfectly normal,
but even if you don't have it, it's still not worth checking your SERPS any
more regularly than once every two weeks.
To check the SERPS yourself, make sure you're logged out of your Google
account, and clear your browser cache and cookies (viewing in a private
browser window will achieve the same thing). This is because Google
artificially pushes a site your computer visits regularly further to the top
of the results. So here's the kicker – it does it only on your computer.
We've had enquiries from businesses who have been horrified to see
where they really stand in Google once they’ve cleared their browser’s
cache.
SERPS Tracking Software
If you're serious about your website's success, this is far and away the
better option. There are many online tracker programs (some with free
trials) but the best in my experience is SerpFox – www.serpfox.com.
It has some limitations but it's very easy to use. Just plug in your
website, choose the keywords you want to track, and you're away. It'll
create graphs from the data so you can monitor changes over time
visually, and this is crucial when trying to match up past SEO efforts to
an increase (or decrease) in rankings. You can even set up alerts based
on going up or down in Google.
At the time of writing, SerpFox costs around $10 / month for a starter
package.
Tracking Traffic
If you haven't already, you need to set up Google Analytics to make the
most from your SEO efforts. It's incredibly detailed in the data it offers,
but downloading an app like 'Analytics Pro3' for smartphones simplifies
it down to the metrics we really care about – traffic trends / volume, and
bounce rate.
Chapter 11
“How to Use This Book to its
Best”
We're about to really get stuck into it now, but before we do, a quick
note on how to get the most from this book.
References to External Websites & Online Tools
You're going to get the map & blueprint for getting your website to the
top of Google, but the format of a book isn't ideal for teaching onscreen
computer elements when they're required. If bombarded with
screenshots with accompanying text like 'click here', and 'now scroll
down to here' I'm certain this book would be seven times the size (that's
not an exaggeration – it would be around 1000 pages long).
You’d be slamming your head into a brick wall after reading just 10% of
that.
The format just doesn't lend itself well to online education. The good
news is, it's mostly unnecessary to talk about the websites and online
tools we'll be using to such a granular level, because they themselves
provide all the education and support you'll need on how to use them.
For example, I just mentioned the SERP tracking software 'SerpFox’, but
I'm not going to start showing you how to set up an account and use it –
there's more than enough information at www.serpfox.com to achieve
this. Plus, like most software I’ll be referencing, the interfaces are very
intuitive and straightforward.
Instead, this book is intended to guide you through the whole process of
SEO from start to finish, without bumf or content that can be better
expanded upon elsewhere.
There are some online resources I’ll be walking you through in a little
more depth, but it’ll usually be to avoid you wasting time if the resource
is only required for one function but it offers many.
You’re Using WordPress, Right?
If you don’t know what WordPress is, let me explain. If you do, please
forgive me because I’m about to patronise you to the point of trying to
rub you on the tummy.
Aren’t you adorable! Have a biscuit!
WordPress is something called a Content Management System, or CMS
for short. And a CMS is simply a user-friendly interface between you and
your website to avoid you having to know how to code the languages of
websites (HTML and CSS).
If you want to log in to your site to add some content, your CMS is the
platform you’re using to do it. It’s a simple way of building and editing
sites in a style commonly known as ‘WYSIWYG’ – which is phonetically
pronounced ‘Whizzy-Wig’, and stands for What You See Is What You
Get.
Now, I say you’re using WordPress, but actually WordPress is one of
many available CMSs out there, and you might well be using one of its
rivals like Drupal, Weebly, or Shopify. In fact, you might not be using a
CMS at all. You might be coding everything yourself using Dreamweaver
or another similar HTML / CSS editor. If you are, I doff my hat to you
good sir, but for SEO purposes you’re at no advantage I’m afraid.
Of all the ways you can build and edit a website for SEO, WordPress is by
far the best and most widely used (50% of all websites are powered by
WordPress). And so, this book is going to assume you use it too.
If someone else built your website for you and you’re not sure, just ask
them if it’s been created on the WordPress platform. Nine times out of
ten they’ll say “Yes”. If they’re at all reticent about giving over this
information it’s because they don’t want you to know their dirty little
secret – that they charged you, probably a lot, to build your website on a
platform even my dog Matt Cutts could use. Yes, my dog is really called
Matt Cutts. If you don’t know who Matt Cutts is just Google him.
I know. Few question my passion for SEO when they find out I regularly
take Google’s ex Head of Spam Software Engineer for walks on the
beach – I really do live and breathe this subject.
The Book’s Accompanying Video Series
Just in case you’ve forgotten, anytime you see this…
‘Example’ Video Tutorial (02:34 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
...there’s a section that would be better explained by showing you how it
works via a video tutorial. Just visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources
for a full list of videos.
Ready to Take Over the World?
Are you ready to boost your website to the top of Google? Okay great!
So, without further ado, let’s get your bank account humming, with
Search Engine Optimisation.
Chapter 12
“Keywords”
Keywords underpin everything we do in SEO. They form the campaign
blueprint and trajectory of everything a website needs to attain financial
success – so in this chapter we’re not going to cut corners.
You might find yourself yawning or reaching for matchsticks to keep
your eyelids open but trust me, this is not the part you want to skim
over. Get something wrong here, and the effects of time wasted ripple
through your entire campaign, so let’s give keywords the respect they
deserve.
Within our SEO Agency, we use the term ‘keyword’ every single working
day, but it’s sometimes easy to forget that most folks unfamiliar with the
SEO industry likely won’t know what the hell a keyword actually is.
So, before we move on, let’s give ourselves a quick definition:
“A keyword refers to any word or multi-word phrase that a search
engine user types into a search bar.”
You’re probably thinking ‘Well, duh!’, but the important thing to flag
from that is ‘...or multi-word’. Remember a keyword, although a
singular, also refers to plural words. It’s stupid, but I didn't make the
rules!
It’s keywords that all websites are fiercely battling over, and things can
get mighty aggressive given that search engine optimisation is a zerosum game. To get to the top of Google for any given keyword you’re
going to have to knock someone else off it first. And even then, you can
sometimes only be a temporary custodian. SEO is very much like the
game of ‘capture the flag’, but that’s what makes it so thrilling.
The 3 Types of Keyword
Keywords take various shapes and forms, but they usually fall into three
different groups or categories. These categories are defined by the
inferred intent of the user when they type that keyword into their
search bar.
Let me explain…
1. Informational / Entertainment Keywords
These keywords are usually informational in intent. The user likely wants
a quick answer to a specific question. E.g. ‘how many feet in a mile?’, or
‘what’s the capital of Slovenia?’. This group also contains any keywords
which are entertainment-based and harbour no commercial intent from
the user. E.g. things like ‘funny cat videos’.
2. Commercial Keywords
This group comprises most keywords searched for in Google. Here, the
user is typing in phrases that request the solution to a problem. A pain
point to be solved. It’s the very lifeblood of business. As such, in the right
hands these keywords represent sweet sweet profit. Some examples
would be ‘sarasota real estate agent’, or perhaps ‘cheap life insurance’.
3. Branded Keywords
Branded keywords reflect the user searching for a specific company,
organisation or individual. There’s obviously commercial intent there,
but these keywords are using Google as a sort of rolodex rather that a
portal for finding solutions to problems.
Keyword Hunting
The US Marines are a big fan of the adage…
‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance’.
If it’s good enough for the Marines, it’s good enough for Internet
marketers! So, if we’re serious about increasing the profitability of our
website by boosting its visibility in Google, then we must formulate an
SEO plan so thorough, that executing it almost becomes a formality.
At the beginning of any SEO campaign we need to go ‘keyword hunting’.
This is widely known by the industry as ’keyword research’ but, for me,
there are always negative connotations associated with the word
‘research’ (I think it stems from my childhood science lessons). It makes
this important process seem intimidating and dull when it really
shouldn’t be. I think of it differently.
So, you’ve got a computer, an Internet connection, and the will to be a
success. Where do you begin?
Basically, we need to identify and uncover keywords that share 3
important characteristics:
1. Enough people typing them into Google every month to render
getting a No.1 ranking truly exciting. That is, the potential financial
rewards need to be large enough to keep you interested, even when
the going gets tough.
2. We need keywords with commercial intent from the user. There’s no
use putting the time and effort into SEO if the resultant traffic
doesn’t line our pockets with cash.
3. We need to rule out keywords we don’t have a cat in hells chance of
ranking for without an untenable budget and timeframe. Realistic
competition levels are a must.
If you’ve been in your website’s industry for a reasonable length of time,
you’ll intuitively know (or be able to guess) the keywords that will
generate you the most profitable traffic. We just need to spend a little
time backing up your assumptions with data before we start throwing
ourselves into the work.
How to Perform Keyword Hunting (Keyword Research)
Just before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to hunt for keywords,
let me stress again that this is one of the most important activities
associated with SEO success. Take it from me, realising 6 months down
the line – after you’ve expended a countless number of hours and days
working – that you’ve been targeting the wrong keywords all along, is
not a great feeling!
So, let’s do it right.
All we need for keyword hunting is a bit of common sense and two
online tools – Google’s ‘Keyword Planner Tool’ and SEMRush.
You’re about to be bombarded by annotated screenshots, but you’ll be
guided at the end of this section to another video tutorial where I show
you all this in action.
Good keyword hunting consists of 3 distinct phases…
1. Brainstorming common sense keywords
2. Gathering keywords from Google itself
3. Checking how lucrative the keywords will be
Phase One – Brainstorming ‘Common Sense’ Keywords
So, let’s start with an example and a dollop of some common sense shall
we?
Let’s say you run a plumbing business in Putney in West London. Put
yourself in the shoes of your customers. They’ve just had a pipe under
their sink burst and they’re searching for a solution to the problem.
What are they going to be typing into Google?
It’s not a trick question. More often than not, the most obvious
keywords are the most profitable. Don’t try to be too clever; we’re not
looking for sneaky keywords that offer small pockets of traffic (that can
come later when we’re looking to push our business past the 7-figure
stage!).
So, how about:
‘plumber west london’
‘emergency plumber west london’
‘putney plumber’
‘emergency plumber putney’
Just pick a few of the most obvious keywords that spring to mind as
these will likely end up being your main target keywords. However, we
need to carry on with our research to ensure there aren’t other monster
keywords out there we should target.
To start gathering some more keyword ideas based on what customers
are actually typing into Google, visit a great tool called ‘UberSuggest’ at
https://ubersuggest.io. It’ll help you flesh out a portfolio of target
keywords with ease.
Phase Two – Gather Keywords from Google Itself
Now, visit this page – https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keywordplanner
Welcome to Google’s Keyword Planner tool. It’s a powerful piece of kit
created by the big ‘G’ for its Google Ads program (the adverts at the top
of a search result page). It’s there to help pay-per-click advertisers find
keywords to create adverts with on Google, but we’re going to reappropriate it to check our common sense keywords are indeed good
search phrases to target. We can also use it to research other keyword
suggestions and potentials for our industry.
Here’s how to use the tool in 5 simple steps…
Note: where a screenshot is used, the step number is clearly marked with
a big red arrow pointing to what I’m telling you to look at.
STEP 1. Click on ‘Find new keywords’
STEP 2. Type your common sense keywords into the box pressing the
enter key after each entry
STEP 3. Select ‘Get Started’ button
STEP 4. Check the average number of monthly searches as per the
following screenshot. Note: if there are no monthly searches you’ll see
a dash like this ‘–‘.
STEP 5. Scroll down and look at the ‘Idea’ list based on your ‘common
sense’ keywords. Are there any keywords that fit nicely with your
product or service and would likely produce profitable traffic? If so,
note them down.
After this process, you should have a list of keywords that you think may
be worth targeting with your SEO efforts. Great!
Phase Three – Making Sure These Keywords Will Make You Money –
Using ‘SEMRush’
If you skipped Chapter 9 you won’t have read the section on how to use
SEMRush.com to ascertain the commercial value of a keyword to your
business. Naughty you!
But even if you did read it, we’re going to go over it one more time
because it’s one of the most critical SEO preparatory tasks you can do.
So, let’s look at SEMrush.com to confirm the keywords we’d like to
target are viable. Also, (and this is the exciting bit) let’s work out how
much extra money we stand to make by ranking well for these
keywords.
Sound good? Sound refreshingly scientific for SEO? Great, because it is.
In fact, this is the part 99% of SEO experts miss out so you’re already
way ahead of the game.
STEP 1. Type one of the main keywords you’re considering targeting
into Google. In our plumbing example, we’re going to go with
‘plumber west london’.
STEP 2. Pick the first direct competitor from the organic results, and
copy or note down their website domain. In this instance, it’s
westlondon-plumbing.co.uk.
STEP 3. Visit SEMRush.com.
STEP 4. As per the screenshot below, paste your competitor’s domain
into the search bar and hit ‘Search’. Remember, a domain is a web
address without the ‘http://www.’ at the beginning.
STEP 5. Make a note of the blue coloured total ‘Organic Search’ traffic
the tool estimates the competitor website is receiving. In this
example, it’s only 89 visitors per month (not a lot!)
STEP 6. Scroll down the page to the ‘TOP ORGANIC KEYWORDS’
section, and click on the blue ‘view full report’ button.
STEP 7. From the results, find the keyword you’re researching (you
can type it into the search filter if you’re having trouble finding it).
Note the monthly traffic ‘Volume’ the keyword is receiving (which
should be more or less the same as in the Google Keyword Planner
Tool), but pay special attention to the ‘Traffic %’ metric, because this
is where the magic happens.
The ‘Traffic %’ tells us out of all the monthly visitors the website gets,
what percentage of that traffic comes from this specific keyword
alone. In the example below, we can see that this plumbing website
gets around 57% of its total monthly traffic from ranking number 1 for
the keyword ‘plumber west london’.
This gives us the two essential pieces of information to assess
whether targeting this keyword will be worth it. Firstly, it tells us how
many visitors are landing on their website from their current ranking
position for that specific keyword, which in turn tells us how much
traffic we stand to get by beating them.
Secondly, applying a known, or estimated website conversion rate, we
can now work out how much money that keyword would make us if
we could rank No.1 for it ourselves.
STEP 8. It’s time to run the numbers! Continuing with the plumbing
example...
The website www.westlondon-plumbing.co.uk receives 89 monthly
visitors.
The keyword ‘plumbers west london’ supplies 57.3% of this traffic, so
51 potential customers a month land on and browse the site having
put this keyword into Google.
Now let’s transpose this data onto our own website to predict the
financial gain of ranking number 1 for the same keyword.
If we know our website’s conversion rate (the proportion of website
visitors who go on to use our service or buy our product), then we can
apply this to the 51 to see how many visitors would become
customers from this keyword.
If you don’t know your conversion rate, you can use 3% (conversion
rates can hugely vary from industry to industry and depending on
website design and user experience, but 3% is pretty conservative for
most sites)
So, 3% of 51 visitors = 1.5 extra customers a month by ranking for this
one keyword ‘plumbers west london’.
And there we have it. We’ve taken a very wishy washy and ethereal
marketing avenue – search engine optimisation – and we’ve been
able to empirically work out if it’s worth the time and money to go
after a particular keyword.
This whole process can be replicated for any keyword you’re
interested in targeting. And the best part is, doing keyword research
this way can transform an intangible sense of ‘ranking well on Google’
to a much more concrete and known reward for appearing in a
specific position for a specific keyword.
In the plumbing example, spending a few hours a week for 3 months
to get to number 1 (although having looked into this specific example
I can tell you now this wouldn’t take more a few hours work total and
30 days to achieve) translates to an additional 18 life customers a
year, which for a London plumber would easily translate to an
additional £10,000 in business.
Don’t forget also that this is a very humble and simple example of the
maths involved in keyword hunting. As the stakes get higher so too do
the rewards. Applying the same mathematical logic to an architect
firm in London where one additional client can mean thousands of
pounds, you can be talking about one keyword supplying additional
annual revenue north of £250,000 – figures that are more than
theory, because that’s exactly what I helped one very happy South
London Architecture firm achieve by ranking for one measly (albeit
competitive) keyword.
Focus on the Few
As with so much in life, you need to think ‘quality’ not ‘quantity’. In my
experience, focussing on too many keywords (if you’re not already a
large authority website) will cause the death of any successful SEO
campaign before it’s even begun. What ends up happening is your
attention gets spread too thin and the whole optimisation process
becomes unmanageable and weak.
If you’re a smaller website, use one of the main advantages you have
over larger websites in your industry – focus. Choose a maximum of 10
keywords to concentrate your campaign on for now.
‘Keyword Research’ Video Tutorial (27:11 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Chapter 13
“Choosing Domains”
A domain is of course just the name for a unique place or area on the
Internet where a website can be viewed. But how do they affect your
SEO?
Well, the important distinction to make is that the SEO ‘strength’ of a
website domain lies in the history and age of the domain itself, rather
than the actual files (content) of the site.
Theoretically, we could take an organisation like the BBC, and transfer all
the current files and databases on bbc.com over to a freshly created
domain called britishnewsandbroadcasting.com. When you visited the
new domain, you would see the BBC’s website in front of you – just as
you know it now – with all the articles and media associated with it.
However, the website would receive no online visibility because the
domain britishnewsandbroadcasting.com has no history and standing in
Google.
The domain you choose to build and showcase a website on is one of the
most important decisions you can make for your online venture. Not
only will this domain become your online brand that you’ll publicise and
share with people, but it’s the entity that Google identifies with when
considering your optimisation.
How Domains Contribute To SEO
Bored and tired of plumbing SEO examples? Well you’re about to beg
me to bring them back, because for the rest of this chapter we’re going
to talk about couches instead. Interesting huh?
Let’s pretend that we’ve just finished our keyword hunting session, and
the primary keyword we’d like to get to the top of Google for is
‘Chesterfield Sofa’. Yes, there’s a real interior design theme going on in
this book, and I have no idea why! Anyway, I digress.
In the early days of Google, when its ranking algorithm was less
advanced and over-optimisation was less of a consideration, Google
would look at your domain name as a huge indicator of the relevance of
your site towards an industry, niche, or set of keywords.
The domain name chesterfield-sofa.com could be registered and you’d
have a massive SEO advantage over a competitor for the keyword
‘chesterfield sofa’ simply because the domain is also the target keyword.
If you then mentioned ‘chesterfield sofa’ hundreds of times in the
content of the website, and managed to get links coming to it where the
words included in that link (the link’s ‘anchor text’) were ‘chesterfield
sofa’, then reaching position number No.1 in Google was almost an
inevitability.
Those were simpler times. Fast-forward to the present day.
Armies of Google engineers have now spent hundreds of thousands of
collective hours developing its ranking algorithms, and they’ve
developed a formidable beast. Whereas before an SEO expert just had to
lead a kitten to a saucer of milk, we now have to domesticate a 250lb
lion.
Google has become brutally adept at uncovering deliberate and
unnatural efforts to optimise a website for a given keyword. Anyone
caught dabbling in excessively aggressive optimisation practices will
likely have their domain penalised. And quite rightly so really.
Anyway, back to domains.
All this isn’t to say Google doesn’t look upon a domain name as an
indicator to a site’s relevance anymore. It just places far less emphasis
on them these days. All things being equal, a site with a domain name
including the target keyword will rank higher than one with a domain
name that doesn’t.
What Domain Name Do You Choose?
All the theory is great, but it still doesn’t help you decide what domain
name to choose for your website if you’re trying to rank it highly in
Google. So, what do you do?
There are essentially 3 types of domain name you can choose from:
‘Exact Match’, ‘Partial Match’, and ‘Branded’.
• Exact Match Domain (EMD) – the name of the domain contains
only the commercial keyword or phrase you’re targeting in the
search engines. For example: chesterfield-sofa.com.
• Partial Match Domain (PMD) – the name of the domain contains
part or all of the commercial keyword / phrase you’re targeting, but
with other words included. For example: chesterfield-sofalovers.com.
• Branded Domain – doesn’t contain the commercial keyword or
phrase targeted in the search engines. E.g. willsfurniture.com
For those still yet to choose their domain for their online venture, my
wholehearted advice to you is to choose a branded domain.
“But wait!” I hear you cry. “You’ve just told me that all things being
equal, my website will likely rank higher with my target keyword
included in my domain. What gives?”.
As far as I’m concerned, the benefit of having a partial or exact-match
domain is massively outstripped by the likelihood of getting penalised by
Google for over-optimisation. I liken it to not declaring a small amount of
extra income you’ve made when filing your taxes. You may well get
away with it and benefit from a little bit of extra cash, but if the tax
office takes a closer look at your finances, you’ve got a serious problem.
Trying to operate on the edge of the Google penalty envelope is too
much stress. It’s just not worth the hassle.
Remember, any SEO project should be looked at through the lens of a
long-term business venture. Several years ago, it was completely viable
to throw a website up, target some high-volume keywords, do a few
cheap SEO tactics, rank your website in a relatively short period of time,
and then milk it dry before you were inevitably penalised.
Unfortunately, the days of ‘ranking and banking’ (yes I just used a phrase
so tacky you may be holding back vomit right now) are pretty much over
in my opinion. The return on investment of trying (and succeeding) to
heavily game the system is just too low for it to be worth it.
Believe it or not though, this is actually all fantastic news for you and
me. The barrier to entry for ranking websites has become higher, but the
rewards for those willing to put the work in are sweeter. If we’re ready
to focus on our website’s SEO and build an online asset, we’re not going
to get outdone by a 17-year old in his or her bedroom trying to rank a
handful of websites for commercial keywords in their spare time for a
quick buck.
All that said, I desperately don’t want you fall into the trap of
overestimating your competition. It seems that people new to SEO (and
indeed business) always do this. And wrongly so.
Believe me, there are very few people out there willing to commit to a
solid, 3+ month SEO strategy. If you do the right things with your
website on a consistent basis, you will eventually get to number 1.
Providing the keyword you’re targeting has commercial intent, you’ll
have more conversions than you’ll be able to handle.
So, to summarise, the safe option is to create a completely branded
domain that you’ll be able to position as the leader in your industry. In
other words, don’t try to get clever. Just register a domain that humans
can connect with. Not one that’s meant to court Google.
Registering A Domain
If the domain name you’re looking for hasn’t been taken already, you
can register it using any one of the many domain registrars available
online – ‘GoDaddy.com’, ‘NameCheap.com’, and ‘BlueHost.com’ to name
but a few.
Simply sign up to a free account and check your chosen domain name
isn’t already gone. The interface of GoDaddy is particularly user friendly,
so if you’ve never registered a domain name before I’d recommend
using them.
Back to my Chesterfield Sofa theme.
If we’re trying to target the keyword ‘chesterfield sofas’, we’re looking to
register a branded or very lightly optimised domain. For example,
something like luxurytufting.com or greaveshomefurnishing.com would
be fine.
What we want to avoid is something like chesterfieldsofa.com or
leatherchesterfieldcouches.com. With these we’d be positioning
ourselves nicely for an over-optimisation penalty, and they’d cause us a
headache later when we really start building the SEO of the site.
What on Earth Does ‘WHOIS’ Mean?
At some point in the registration process you’ll likely be asked if you
want to add ‘WHOIS’ privacy to your domain. If you don’t add this, the
contact information associated with your registrar account will be
publically available through something called the WHOIS database.
Whether you decide to add privacy to your domain or not, for SEO
purposes you should make sure the contact information associated with
your registrar account is consistent – right down to the exact character –
with the information on your hosting account (where your website files
are located). If Google sees a consistent name, address and phone
number associated with your website, this serves to boost your site’s
trust and legitimacy. More on this later.
Now we’ve chosen and registered a domain for our new website, things
are getting exciting. We can start to optimise it for our chosen
keyword(s) and begin the process of dominating Google!
In other words, we can really start to get our hands dirty.
PART III –
GETTING YOUR HANDS DIRTY
Chapter 14
“The Four Pillars of SEO”
Well, this is it my friend.
We know why SEO is so important. We’ve identified the keywords that
are going to make us money. And we’ve got our shiny new branded
domain name. It’s time. We’re ready to get down and dirty into the nuts
and bolts of SEO.
I’ll start by telling you a secret (four secrets to be exact) about Search
Engine Optimisation. Ready? Okay here goes…
It’s easy.
No really, I’m not being facetious. It is.
There are only 4 things we need to do to make Google put our web page
at the very top of the search results for any given keyword – and it’s all
common sense stuff.
Allow me to introduce, the 4 Pillars of SEO.
Pillar 1 – Relevance
We need to make sure every page has a specific target topic and is rich
in associated target keywords. What is more, it needs to be useful to the
end user – the human.
This is relevance.
Pillar 2 – Crawlability
From a facilitative point of view, we need to make it easy for Google to
scan and inspect our web pages.
This is commonly known as crawlability.
Pillar 3 – Engagement
We must show Google the hallmarks that their users are spending lots of
time on our web pages and digesting the content.
This is engagement.
Pillar 4 – Authority
Finally, we need to show Google that our content is credible, and is
being vouched for by other trustworthy websites within the industry
that our keyword is related to.
This is authority.
It’s incredible that SEO is a $70 Billion industry and yet it all boils down
to just four things that Google wants to see a website do.
By the time you’ve finished reading the next chapter, you’ll be able to
take action on your own website to successfully tick off 3 out of the 4 of
these pillars.
In the next 3 chapters, I’m going to show you exactly what you need to
do to tell Google that your web page has:
1. Relevance
2. Crawlability
3. Engagement
These three things combined form ’On-Page’ Search Engine
Optimisation. It’s a monster topic we’re going to break down slowly,
whilst cutting through the enormous amount of online noise regarding
the subject. The beauty of on-page optimisation is that, if you do it right,
it’s usually a one-time activity. Once it’s done, it’s done.
The fourth and final piece of the SEO puzzle – website Authority – will be
covered in Chapters 18, 19, and 20 in what I hope will be a crescendo of
logic and light bulb inducing moments. This fourth Pillar is also known as
‘Off-Page’ Optimisation.
Chapter 15
“On-Page Optimisation – Page
Relevance”
Up until a few years ago, Google’s algorithm was pretty rudimentary
really. In fact, it could most accurately be likened to having the
sophistication level of a young child. A great description can be found by
AJ Kohn in the ‘About’ section of his blog ‘Blind Five Year Old’, in which
Google is indeed the visually impaired child in question.
The meaning? It’s an SEO philosophy reminding us to keep things
obvious and simple for Google because after all, it’s artificial intelligence
in its infancy.
These may sound like derogatory definitions, but let’s give the Big ‘G’ a
break for a minute.
Have you or I ever tried to create a search engine with accompanying
algorithms? Exactly. If we were capable of indexing and ordering the
entire 100 Billion Gigabytes of data comprising ‘The Internet’ (forget the
‘deep web’ for now) we’d no doubt feel pretty smug. If we could then
answer any user’s search query at an average speed of 0.59 seconds,
we’d probably feel like we could attend a high school reunion with at
least something to talk about.
But of course in the age of SEO we know a blind five year old can be lied
to or manipulated. Now there’s a hyper weird ‘postmodern’ sentence I
never thought I’d hear – let alone be the author of!
6 - 9 years ago, you could tell Google a page on your site was about the
keyword ‘best dog training’ by doing things like repeating the phrase
‘best dog training’ over and over in your content. Google would then
consider that webpage highly relevant to training dogs and rank it
accordingly.
You could then create a new web page on your site and tell Google this
section was about ‘best dog obedience classes’. Young and innocent
Google would consider this a totally different topic and rank the
separate page for ‘best dog obedience classes’ too.
These days, Google has developed into more like an adolescent who
perhaps needs strong prescription glasses, but isn't blind. It not only
knows which words and phrases are synonymous with others, but it can
also learn the context of any given search through repeated user
behaviour. Pretty impressive stuff.
Nowadays, Google would treat ‘best dog training’ as almost the exact
same keyword phrase as ‘best dog obedience classes’. The user intent
behind both searches is nearly identical – someone wants a well
behaved dog – and Google's now smart enough to know it.
So, what does this mean for us? Well, the implication is simple. We need
to think 'topic' not 'keyword'. We need to clearly divide the web pages
on our site by overall topic as opposed to the individual keyword.
Are you keeping up there at the back?! Perhaps an example is in order.
Let’s say we’re a plumber and we’re doing SEO on our website. We’ve
got our branded domain and have put in oodles of time to identify the
target keywords we believe will generate a good level of lucrative traffic
with commercial intent.
The Target Keywords Are…
plumber london
best plumbers in south london
heating engineer london
Boiler installation london
underfloor heating london
shower fitter london
shower repair
plumbing services
central heating repair
boiler servicing
shower repair
boiler repair london
To target these keywords effectively, we need to appreciate that Google
understands the overall topic groups each one refers to. So, if we go
guns blazing creating different pages to target different keywords that
fall into the same topic, we’ll just confuse Google and our overall
rankings will be average at best.
Instead, we need to create topic pages. These are individual web pages
targeting multiple keywords, all within the same overall subject.
Still confused?
Well, from the example above, we wouldn't create 12 separate pages on
our site to target each of the 12 different keywords. Oh no sir. You can
stop that right now. Instead we'd identify the distinguishable topics
these keywords fall into, and then create a separate page for each topic.
Did I just say the same thing twice but in a slightly different way? Good,
because this is one of the least understood concepts in SEO so I want it
hammered home.
We must identify a ‘primary keyword’ within each topic (usually the
keyword with the most monthly traffic) and focus solely on that. The
good part is we can forget the other keywords without worry because
we’d very likely rank well for them too should our primary keyword page
get traction in the search engines.
The 12 keywords in our plumbing example can be split into 4 clear
topics, with corresponding pages then created for each topic – as per
below.
If you just skim-read that table, I’d really encourage you to look at it
again. Spend at least a few minutes absorbing the subtle differences in
the topics, pages, and primary & secondary keywords. You’ll be going it
alone for your own website so understanding the foundations here are
critical.
Happy? Good. So now that we’ve identified the pages on our website we
need to create, let’s look at all the factors that impact on-page
optimisation – and fundamentally, the cash in your pocket.
Page Relevance
One of the few things we have direct control over is the content on our
site. We have the ability to make our text and media as relevant as
possible to the profitable target keywords we’ve previously identified.
I want you to think of your website’s interaction with Google’s crawling
software as an ‘elevator pitch’. In a very short time (the time it takes
Google to crawl your website no less), your web page has a small
window of opportunity to show Google what topic or keywords it’s
about.
You won’t be able to get your site to the very top of the search engine
for a phrase unless you make it unmistakably clear to Google’s algorithm
that your web page is unequivocally relevant to that keyword. Basically,
if you don’t buy a ticket, you can’t win the lottery.
So how do we make a page relevant to our target keywords? Simple. By
worshipping the 8 tablets of On-Page SEO.
1. URLs
2. Title Tags
3. Header Tags
4. Keyword Use & Density
5. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
6. Image Filenames / Alt Tags
7. Outbound Links
8. Topic Relevance
We’ll unpack each one in just a moment, but I want to mention two
important housekeeping items quickly.
Firstly, be aware that a few of these factors will require a very basic
understanding of HTML and web-development to fully grasp and
subsequently implement them on your site. If you’re already a tinkerer
of all things online then great. But Just in case you’re an out and out
beginner, don’t be threatened by the seemingly obscure terminology I’ll
be using. You don’t need to be a genius to understand anything here.
You really don’t.
Remember, anything I talk about that would be easier to explain on a
computer, I’ve created a specific accompanying tutorial video for at
www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources. In this particular section, there are
video lessons for URLs, Title Tags, Header Tags, and Image Filenames /
Alt Tags. All videos are short and easily digestible, so why not grab a cup
of coffee and take a front row seat for the show.
Secondly, a note about your domain. In the content that follows, I
advocate the inclusion of your primary keyword on the basis that you’re
working with a branded, or lightly optimised domain name. If you have a
highly-optimised Partial Match Domain (PMD) or Exact Match Domain
(EMD), it’s probably safer to reduce the exact keyword use in some of
these factors to avoid an over-optimisation penalty. I’d replace them
with synonyms or closely-related keywords instead.
Okay. Ready? Let’s optimise the s#*t out of your website.
URLs
Your Uniform Resource Locator (URL) specifies where any given web
page is located on the Internet (e.g. http://www.example.com/examplepage). More importantly for SEO, it specifies where your page is located
within the architecture of your own website. Not only can you signal to
Google what your page is about through a URL, but you can also tell its
spiders how the page you want to rank fits into the overall hierarchy of
your website – which again, allocates it importance.
Let’s say you’re trying to rank a page titled ‘Best Vegetarian Diets’. What
will its URL look like? Here are a couple of examples.
Google will infer that a URL like…
http://www.vegetarianism4ever.com/usa/category/weight-loss/bestvegetarian-diets
...represents a page less important than:
http://www.vegetarianism4ever.com/best-vegetarian-diets
This is simply because the first example is a web page located within 3
subdirectories (usa/category/weight-loss) of your website, whereas the
second example shows one located at the root-domain level, or nearer
the core (homepage), of your website
Action Step
For most small to medium authority websites, I like to place pages I’m
trying to rank a maximum of 1 subdirectory away from the root domain
(e.g. http://www.mysite.com/subdirectory/page). You’ll need a lot of
domain authority to have ranking success with web pages placed any
further from the root domain than this.
For all branded domains, include your primary keyword in the URL, and
don’t make it excessively long (keep it 5 words or under). E.g.
http://www.healthyliving.com/best-vegetarian-diet.
‘URL Structures’ Video Tutorial (07:57 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Page Title Tags
Imagine you’re browsing a bookstore.
You’re looking for a book on a very specific category of vegetarianism.
Why? I don’t know, but you’ve got your reasons.
You’re in the Health & Well-Being section, and you’re scanning the titles.
Why are you scanning the titles? Because that’s the quickest and most
effective thing you can do to ascertain the relevance of the content
within the numerous books on offer to you – short of pitching a tent in
the aisle and beginning a reading marathon.
This is exactly what Google does to quickly understand just how relevant
your webpage is to a specific topic or keyword. It scans titles. And to be
more specific, it scans something called your page’s ‘Title Tag’, of which
there’s only one available to populate, so what we populate it with, is
very important.
There’s an accompanying video tutorial on my site to show you exactly
what one is, and how to add it to your website’s pages on WordPress.
Even if you know how to do this already I’d recommend watching it
because it’s packed full of tips and best practices.
Action Step
Make sure your primary keyword is in the Page Title Tag as near the start
as possible (ideally the first words). For instance, if you have a web page
that you want to rank for the keyword ‘vegetarian diet’, your Title Tag
might be something like ‘Vegetarian Diet Plan | Vegetarianism 4 Ever’.
‘Page Title’ Video Tutorial (04:47 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Header
Tags
In the
same
vein as
Title
Tags,
Google
uses
‘Header
Tags’ to
quickly
identify
the
relevance, content and structure of your page. It can determine what
user queries your page is trying to address – therefore quickly
understanding which keywords your web page should be considered for
in their search results.
So what are Header Tags? Well, in essence they’re a universal way of
denoting headings and subheadings in a way that Google can
understand when it crawls your site. It’s great that you want to use a
24pt bold font to inform the reader that they’re looking at the heading
of a section, but Google can't universally assume you mean it to be one
just by virtue of the typeface. What if another website uses 24pt bold
font for its main body of text?
The answer is you must specifically tell Google what’s a section heading
on your page. And then you need to tell it what’s a subheading. And
then a sub-subheading. And so on. Remember the blind five year old
analogy?
The tags are only visible in the raw html of your website, and bookend
either side of your headings like this...
<h1>This Is the Most Important Heading on the Page</h1>
The ‘h’ in <h1> just means ‘Heading’, and the number denotes the
importance level of the heading, with number 1 being the most
important at the top of the page. You can consider <h2> tags
subheadings, and <h3> tags, sub-subheadings.
This might all sound complicated but it’s not. In reality you just need to
be sparing and careful in what keywords you use within the tags,
because they’re what you’re telling the blind five year old your content
is all about.
Action Step
A logical use of header tags with primary keyword-related terminology is
the way to go.
H1 Tag – Even though Google has announced it doesn’t discredit
multiple H1 tags on a page, I like to play it 100% safe and only use one
H1 tag that clearly describes what your page is about. I.e. Use your
primary keyword.
H2 tags – Your subheadings are a great opportunity to emphasise
relevance to your primary keyword’s topic. You can use multiple
subheading tags. Include synonyms here to really cement the topic of
your page in Google’s eyes.
H3, H4 tags etc. – No need to go overboard with your optimisation. Just
use these naturally to help structure your content for the best user
experience possible. They’re so low down in the pecking order than you
need not worry about them for SEO.
‘Header Tags’ Video Tutorial (05:30 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Keyword Use & Density
This is one of the most basic factors in communicating relevance to
Google. Simply put, keyword density is the amount of times a keyword
or phrase appears in the content of a web page; compared to the total
amount of text on said page. For example, if out a 1000 word article the
keyword ‘pumpkin’ appeared 10 times, the page would have a keyword
density of 1% for that particular word.
Action Step
So what keyword density percentage should you strive for? You’re a dry
cleaner in New York, so how many times should you say ‘dry cleaners’?
And how many times ‘New York’?
Unfortunately, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ rule here. Go too hard with
the density for a particular keyword, and you’ll become over-optimised
for it. Go too soft and Google won’t think you’re particularly relevant to
the phrase. Either way, the outcome’s the same – rankings that don’t
put food on the table.
So what do you do? Simple. You snoop like a super sleuth and copy your
competitors’ keyword densities of course. And I’m not talking the
mediocre businesses. I’m talking about the big players in the organic top
5 spots of Google only.
Let’s say you were targeting the keyword ‘best laptop cases’ for
example. Type that into Google to get the organic search results, then
open up a new tab in your browser.
In that tab visit the URL...
tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density
This is a free keyword density analyser tool. It’ll give you a list of some of
the most referred-to words and phrases in any body of text you paste
into it – along with a corresponding keyword density percentage. So let’s
use it. With each result in the top 5 of Google, click through to the page
being ranked, then copy its textual content. Making sure you have ‘Plain
Text’ selected, paste the text into the keyword density tool and hit
‘submit’.
With each website, record the keyword densities of your primary and
secondary keywords in a spreadsheet to get an average. In this example,
we’d end up with something like this…
You might think we should just copy the keyword densities of the
number 1 ranking website, but this isn’t the safest place to be. We
should weave the relevant words or phrases into our copywriting to
achieve keyword densities somewhere near the average. This keeps us
both original and safe.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
Latent Semantic what? Come again?
Latent Semantic Indexing my good fellow. Let me explain...
Having crawled billions of web pages across the Internet, Google knows
exactly what types of words and phrases it expects to see a page
peppered with for any given topic. So, if you use synonyms and relatedphrases for your primary keyword, you can hammer home the relevance
of your page to your target keyword.
If that didn’t make sense perhaps an example might help. Let’s say you
want to rank your website No.1 in Google for the keyword ‘best
vegetarian diet’ again. You’ve chosen the page within your website to
hammer your SEO on. You’ve got 1000+ words on said page espousing
the best vegetarian diets in the world ever created.
Where does Latent Semantic Indexing come in?
Google isn’t going to scan your page and just expect to see the words
‘vegetarian’ and ‘diet’ used repeatedly in different permutations. You
may have done this but it’s not the way to go. Instead Google knows
what universe of words should surround ‘vegetarian’ and ‘diet’ if an
article on the subject is to be considered thorough or definitive.
Let me underline though that Google knows what phrases should be in a
great article based on what the rest of the Internet talks about; not
necessarily because the phrases are inherently imply quality content.
So how do you know what keywords the rest of the Internet is talking
about for the topic of vegetarian diets? And once you’ve got them what
do you do with them? Great questions. First, let’s deal with how to find
them.
You can get the related-phrases from 3 sources…
• Google
• Online Tools
• Competitors
1. Getting LSI Keywords from Google Itself
Type your target keyword into Google, then scroll down to the bottom
of the search results page. Here you’ll find its ‘related search’ list…
Make a note of the list.
2. Using an Online Tool
Visit http://lsigraph.com and type your target keyword into the tool. It’ll
then return a plethora of LSI keywords. In our vegetarian diet example it
gave us…
• vegetarian diet weight loss
• vegetarian diet recipes
• vegetarian diet benefits
• 7 day vegetarian meal plan
• vegetarian diet plan to lose weight in 7 days
• vegetarian food pyramid
• vegetarian diet plan for bodybuilding
• healthy vegetarian diet plan indian
• vegetarian weight loss diet plan in 7 days
• vegetarian diet for weight loss in a month
• vegetarian weight loss before and after
• and so on...
Again, make a note of the keywords.
3. Stealing from Your Competitors
Using the online tool tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density, we’ve
already got a handle on the keyword densities of our competitors in the
top 5 of Google. But we can also use it to find out some of their most
mentioned keyword phrases. Don’t worry about mimicking density for
LSI keywords; we just want to know what kind of ancillary words they’re
using, that’s all.
What to do With Your Huge List of LSI Keywords
It doesn’t take a genius to have seen the plot twist coming up here. I
want you to make sure a healthy portion of the LSI list you gathered is
weaved into the content of the page you’re trying to rank No.1 for your
primary topic / keyword. That’s it. Don’t repeat them constantly using a
shovel, and don’t include every single one, but make sure a lot of them
are in there.
You’ll probably have included a good portion of them already if you’ve
written content that’s truly thorough and useful, but it’s the exact
wording of the ones you missed we’re interested in. Go back over your
article and retrofit them somewhere, even if they’re only fleeting
mentions.
I also want you to include some of the left-fielders. In our fictional
vegetarian diet example, you can bet your bottom dollar the author
won’t have included the keyword ‘vegetarian diet plan for bodybuilding’.
It’s phrases like these that’ll be the icing on the cake.
Image Filename & Alt Tags
When you hover your mouse over an image on any website and a little
text box pops up describing that image, you’re reading the ‘Alt Tag’ (also
known as ‘Alt Text’).
Your website will no doubt be littered with images and other media, so
these need to be optimised too. Even though the Googlebot can’t read
imagery, it can and does scan the filenames and Alt Tags associated with
that imagery. The good news is, WordPress easily allows you to append
this information to an image.
As a point of interest, Alt Tags were first created to be read by screen
readers, helping the visually impaired know what was being conveyed by
the imagery on the page. Again, Google is a Blind Five Year Old.
Action Steps
1. As far as you can, make sure the filenames are the same as the Alt
Tags. It’s just cleaner. And Google likes ‘clean’.
2. Make the filename and alt text for the first image on your page the
exact target keyword you’re trying to rank No.1 for. So, for our
fictional vegetarian website, it doesn’t matter if the image is of a
man on a speedboat holding a potato, we’d call the file and alt tag
‘best vegetarian diet’.
3. Check the rest of your imagery has populated filenames and alt tags
relevant to the page’s topic, but don’t try to be clever. For the
remaining images; just describe them in a nutshell. The first image
was the only one we wanted to optimise. For the remaining images
the SEO value is just in making sure none of them are missing
descriptive filenames and Alt Text – because again, Google likes
clean. And it certainly likes thorough.
Outbound Links
If a webpage is truly trying to add value and help the Google user, then
you’d expect it to share content and resources on the web that isn’t just
its own. For example, it’s pretty natural that any accountant’s website
worth its salt would have a link somewhere to the IRS’s website for
further reading.
Outbound links are a great way to reference external web resources that
can help expand or elaborate upon a webpage’s content, and Google
knows it. In fact, the Big ‘G’ can tell a lot about what your page is
relevant to purely by looking at the outbound links on the page.
Action Step
At the very least, include 1 or 2 outbound links to highly authoritative
websites related to your content’s topic. Of course you’ll want to have
your cake and eat it by only linking out to sites not in direct competition
to you. Don’t send your traffic away to somewhere they’re unlikely to
return from. In our vegetarian example a good outbound link would be
to a government health and nutrition page like this…
https://www.nutrition.gov/topics/basic-nutrition/healthy-eating
Topic Relevance
Imagine two websites with exactly the same level of SEO. Both are
targeting the keyword ‘best vegetarian diet’. If one was a broader
healthy living website, whist the other was dedicated solely to
vegetarianism, the latter would win in Google. It’s just more specific.
So how can we make Google think we’re as dedicated as possible to any
given topic, even if our site as a whole is pretty generic? The answer is,
by building supporting pages discussing similar topics, and thus creating
as best we can, the structure of a niche website. Of course if your
website already is niche, you’re way ahead of the game. That said,
building supporting pages that go even deeper into your primary topic
will still be of huge SEO value.
Action Step
Create 3 - 4 high quality articles on topics surrounding your primary
keyword, then publish them on separate pages.
It’s very likely these new pages will rank well on their own, but
remember the purpose of them is simply to bolster the page you’re
trying to get to the top of Google, so don’t sweat it too much when it
comes to making them perfect. The important thing is that you create at
least one internal link on each of these supporting pages to your primary
page. Not only is plenty of internal linking good for a website’s SEO; it’s
also how we tell Google which pages we deem to be the most important
on our site.
Back to vegetarianism.
If the main page is optimised for ‘best vegetarian diet’, the supporting
pages might be optimised for something like…
• ‘Weight-Loss Tricks’
• ‘5 Ways to Give up Meat’
• ‘Becoming a Vegan’
• ‘10 Famous Vegetarians’
If all 4 of these pages were linking back to the ‘Best Vegetarian Diet’
page, Google would have no question over the authority and relevance
of the primary page.
The final thing to do is make sure these new supporting pages are added
to your Sitemap so they can be indexed by Google. If you don’t know
what a Sitemap is don’t worry, because we’re going to be covering it in
the next chapter: ‘On-Page Optimisation – Crawlability’.
Chapter 16
“On-Page Optimisation –
Crawlability”
As we know by now, Google works by crawling the more than thirty
Trillion webpages on the Internet. It feeds back data from each of these
pages to its algorithm, which then sorts and categorises the information.
We the users are then delivered a search engine results page (SERP)
bespoke to the keyword we tapped into the search box.
The expense associated with maintaining Google’s servers is obviously
monstrous. I mean can you imagine the level of bandwidth required to
essentially download the entire Internet? You’d quickly meet the sharp
end of your broadband provider’s ‘fair usage’ policy if you tried that. And
if you wanted to present the most up to date search results to your
users, you’d also be conscious of how long it logistically takes to crawl
the entire Internet.
So, based on every site’s popularity and how often each one updates its
content, Google assigns everyone a ‘crawl budget’, thus limiting the
number of times every site is crawled over time. If you’re CNN, your
website’s going to be scanned and indexed every few seconds. If you’re
a Glacier Movement Update website in New Brunswick, have little
traffic, and only update your pages every time a glacier moves an inch,
you’re probably only going to get crawled every few weeks.
So, if Google rations your number of website crawls according to a
predetermined budget, you need to make your site as easy and
attractive to crawl as possible each time the ‘Googlebot’ comes a
knockin’. This is what we mean by Page Crawlability.
When it comes to SEO, Google rewards websites that facilitate their
crawls. Make your site easier to scan, and the Big ‘G’ will boost your
rankings. Simple.
Here are the 7 most important SEO factors that increase Page
Crawlability.
1. Mobile Friendliness
2. Site Organisation
3. Producing Fresh Content
4. Removing Redundant and / or Duplicate Content
5. Going ‘https’
6. ‘Noindexing’ and Submitting Regular Sitemaps
7. Using Schema Markup
Let’s unpack each one in turn.
Mobile Friendliness
“Google Search will be expanding its use of mobile friendliness as a
ranking signal.”
This statement was recently made by the Big ‘G’ itself, so making sure
your website functions properly on a smartphone or tablet is not to be
taken lightly. It’s no surprise Google announced this, because searches
on mobile devices have now officially overtaken searches made on
desktop computers. It’s a brave new world out there.
So what exactly does ‘Mobile Friendly’ mean? Well, grab your
smartphone out your pocket right now and let’s see. Visit your website.
Does it function properly? Are the fonts the same as the desktop
version? Are elements of the page overlapping where they absolutely
shouldn’t be overlapping?
I hope the answer to all but the last of those questions is “yes”, because
what you’re seeing right now is how good your website’s
‘responsiveness’ is. This means, how well it converts the page’s elements
to smaller and smaller browser containers (that’s tech talk for screen
size), because the smaller it gets, the more everything’s fighting for
attention on the screen.
If your website’s built on WordPress, you’ll likely notice that on a
smartphone you’re not just seeing a teeny tiny replica of the main
website. No, instead everything will be big and readable (or at least it
should be if it’s mobile friendly), and the page’s elements will be in
different places according to how the website’s been coded.
Action Step
Visit Google’s website mobile friendly testing tool at…
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
…and type in your site address.
Google will scan your website, and you’ll hear straight from the horse’s
mouth if it’s considered Mobile Friendly or not. If your website isn’t, put
the time into remedying this because it’s important. Get on your web
developer’s back pronto. He or she won’t thank me. But you will.
Site Organisation
I want you to take a few seconds and imagine you’ve just walked
through the doors of a busy department store. This is a different kind of
store though. Oh yes. In this store, the staff have decided to randomly
distribute the different products around the shop floor.
A range of toasters sit next to children’s shoes, sports equipment is
mingled in with bedsheets, and barbeques are being sold with the facial
moisturiser.
INTERESTING FACT
Did you know this random scattered approach is exactly how Amazon lays out stock in its
warehouses (although obviously with product location identifiers)? It’s so the workers
grabbing the orders don’t ever get them wrong. It’s easy to confuse a 50 pack of child crayons
with a 75 pack next to it, but not if its neighbouring product is a set of kitchen knives instead.
Although what a gift that would be for your 5 year old nephew!
This is fine for Amazon, but let’s go back to our fictional department
store.
The randomness is a problem, right? You’re standing in the doorway
with your shopping list in hand, and whether you’ve realised it
consciously or not, your shopping expedition is going to take far longer
and be way more complicated than originally thought.
Google’s spiders share the same fate when they arrive at the front door
of your website. If it’s an organisational mess with pages randomly
scattered around your site, it’s difficult for Google to gauge which parts
of your website are relevant to what topic.
To solve this problem and make it as easy as possible for the Big ‘G’ to
crawl your site and determine what topic/s it’s about, we must tidy up
and organise our department store (our website) into logical sections.
We need to group related pages on our website into clearly defined
sections called ‘silos’ to establish the site’s keyword-based topics.
This process is called, yes, you’ve guessed it, ‘siloing’.
There are two ways we can silo a website, and both should be adopted.
The first is ‘structural siloing’, via website architecture. The second is
‘link siloing’, via its internal links. Now, these probably sound like the
same thing, but don’t worry we’ll explore this in more detail.
Structural Siloing (Site Architecture)
I expand on the importance of website architecture in Chapter 22 – Ecommerce SEO. Because, if you’ve got an e-commerce store with 1000s
of product pages, the way you structure your site is a big deal. A really
big deal. That being said, site architecture is just as important for any
other website too, so we’re going to talk about it here just in case you
were thinking of skipping that Chapter.
What I mean by site architecture is the way in which your pages are laid
out with regards to their directory structure.
“Wait What? ‘Directory’ Structure?”, I hear you bellow with a wrinkled
nose and furrowed brows!
Don’t panic. For those of you unfamiliar with directories I’m about to
give you a crash course on, well, the Internet. It’s going to blow you
away it’s so simple. Ready?
• A website browser like Safari or Chrome simply reads code called
HTML and converts that code into a visual webpage you and I know
as a page on the Internet.
• Every page of raw HTML on the Internet is just a computer file
stored away somewhere in the world – usually by a Hosting
Company.
• These files look just like regular files on your computer, because
that’s all they are – regular files. Nothing special. They’re in folders
too, just like on your computer.
• ‘Directories’ are in essence just folders the files are stored within.
• The URL of a website tells us – and more importantly, Google – the
directory structure of a website.
• Every time you see a forward slash ‘ / ‘ in a URL it just means a new
directory (folder) within a directory. Think a smaller Russian
Matryoshka doll every time you see one.
Did that all make sense? Good. Now you’re locked and loaded, let’s chat
about an example.
Take these pages on a fictional surf shop website:
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/surfboards
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/bic-dura-tec-surfboard
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/wetsuits
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/rip-curl-omega-wetsuit
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/winter-wetsuits
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/solarez-travel-kit
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/softech-board
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/foam-boards
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/surfboard-leashes
All these URLs are located within the ‘root directory’ of the chads-surfshop.com domain. We know this because there’s only one forward slash
after the ‘.com’.
It is possible to have every single page on your website located within
the root directory like this, and from a user experience point of view it
makes little difference. But doing so makes things messy. And Google
doesn’t like ‘messy’.
You see, Google uses the layout of your site to glean critical information,
which then allows it to work out which pages on your site it should show
in the search results for different search queries. In particular, the layout
of your site demonstrates the topic theme of the keywords each of your
pages are relevant to, and also how important your web pages are in the
grand scheme of your site.
In the surf shop example, if we want to best communicate the topic of
Ripcurl wetsuits to Google, then we should really be placing it within one
or two ‘parent’ directories, or folders. These act like a filing cabinet
which make your site nice and tidy for Google to crawl it.
So, we might instead structure it like this...
http://www.chads-surf-shop.com/wetsuits/winter-wetsuits/ripcurl-
wetsuit-boots
Without even scanning the actual On-Page content, Google now can
easily determine this page is about a Rip Curl product which is part of a
family of wetsuits suitable for the winter.
Luckily this is all very easy to do in WordPress. When you come to
adding pages, just make sure they have appropriate ‘parent’ pages and
Google will love you for it. In our surf shop example, Chad might
consider structuring his site like this...
Link Siloing – Internal Links / Interlinking
Google indexes your website’s pages by following the internal links
within it, so no page should be a dead end with no internal link on it.
However, the Big ‘G’ also infers a hierarchy of page importance through
the internal link architecture of the site, so we need to harness this.
Practically speaking, we want to tactically use internal links to connect
groups of related pages together, and steer Google towards our most
important pages that we’re selling our most important products or
services on.
For example, in Chad’s surf shop, we identified three distinct categories;
surfboards, wetsuits and surf accessories. All the pages on the site
relating to surfboards should liberally link to one another. The same
goes for the pages within the wetsuit category, and the surf accessory
category respectively.
Conversely Chad should avoid cross-linking topics, which for example,
would be a page within the surfboard category internally linking to a
page within the wetsuits section.
Remember, siloing is a fairly advanced SEO technique, so don’t panic if
that all made about as much sense as using a match to see if your gas
tank is empty. I’ve created a simple video tutorial to show you practically
how this all works.
If you do nothing other than liberally linking between your site’s internal
pages without much thought, you’ll still do well with your SEO. However,
if you want to be an SEO ninja, you should consciously think about link
siloing.
Set your site’s architecture up logically, creating directories or ‘parent’
pages that separate the various topics.
Use internal linking liberally. This increases the frequency with which
your various website pages are indexed. Also, more internal links
increase the chances of users navigating around your website
thoroughly. Not only does this increase sales, but it also demonstrates to
Google people are engaging with your content through time on site and
number of internal link clicks. You’ll get an SEO boost for this.
For bonus points, only internally link between pages and supporting
pages within a certain topic.
‘Siloing’ Video Tutorial (13:33 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Producing Fresh Content
Google favours ‘freshness’ in content. It’s a simple as that.
After all, it’s logical that newer content about a topic is probably more
relevant and useful than old and potentially outdated information, so
Google favours websites that include regular page updates. This is why
the SEO explosion of creating a blog attached to your main website is so
valuable.
Google isn’t stupid though. Trying to be clever and regularly updating
ancillary items on your ranking page like date and time tags (anything
that isn’t the actual body of your content) is not going to affect your
page’s ‘freshness’. If there’s no reason to change the content, then don’t
bother. However, if the bulk of the content you once released is now
outdated and could benefit from an update, go ahead and edit it to keep
the content ‘fresh’.
Be honest with me. Do I say ‘fresh’ a lot?
Another way you can indicate that the content on your ranking page is
up to date is by linking to it with newer content pieces elsewhere on
your website (like the aforementioned blog). This indicates to Google
that the content on your ranking page is still relevant because you’re
guiding users there from your brand new content.
Removing Redundant and / or Duplicate Content
Contrary to common belief, there’s no formal ‘penalty’ for duplicate
content.
However, having two pages on your site targeting the same sort of
keywords is going to confuse Google. And a confused Googlebot = poor
rankings.
Also, we don’t want any redundant pages clogging up your site with thin
or poor-quality content. This genuinely won’t help users, and if they
leave your site quickly (which Google monitors) the Big ‘G’ won’t like it.
Action Steps
Make sure you have clear keyword targeting boundaries between your
pages. There should only be one page of content targeting a specific
keyword.
Also, delete any unnecessary pages on your site. By unnecessary I
mean…
• Pages with barely any content
• Pages with low-quality content
• Pages with no real purpose
• Pages users hardly ever visit (use Google Analytics to check which
pages)
Going ‘https’
You’ll notice on many websites in need of an extra layer of security that
the http part of the URL has an extra ‘s’ on the end. Rather predictably it
stands for ‘Secure’, and Google has openly told us it gives a (slight)
ranking boost for sites secured with https.
You don’t have to know the technical difference between http and https;
you just need to know that a site on https is more secure, and Google
will trust your site a little more if you convert your website to it.
Action Step
The process of switching can be quite involved. You can try to do it
yourself, or alternatively you can get your website’s hosting company to
configure it all for you. Unless you’re very technically proficient I’d
recommend the latter every time. Trying to DIY it will take up your
precious time and you could seriously mess things up. Just contact your
host to ask how to proceed.
Once the conversion to https is complete, go to the resources section on
the videos page of my website…
www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources
...to make sure it’s transferred correctly by running your site through my
http to https checklist.
Sitemaps & ‘Noindexing’
Google should crawl your website’s pages of its own accord via your
internal links. However, we don’t want to leave this process to fate.
Through the use of sitemaps and things called ‘noindex’ meta tags, we
can influence which of our website pages Google indexes and considers
most important.
Let me explain.
A sitemap is simply a page in a computer language format called ‘XML’.
It really doesn’t matter what it stands for, but hey, just in case you’re
completely captivated by this stuff, it stands for Extensible Markup
Language.
Happy now?
On a website, the XML sitemap page contains all the URLs of the pages
we want Google to crawl and index. We create the sitemap, then submit
it to the Big ‘G’ through something called the ‘Google Search Console’.
Just in case you haven’t set up your website on the Console just yet, you
can do so here...
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
‘Noindex’ meta tags are a different beast. They’re little snippets of code
included in a web page's ‘header’ section that tells Google which pages
we don’t want indexed. They’re particularly useful if you need to have
duplicate content on the site for human user experience reasons.
Action Steps
Make a list of all your non-important, ancillary pages. Add the ‘noindex’
tag to the header of each one. Once completed, create an XML sitemap
for your website, including all the URLs you want Google to index.
Submit this to Google through your website’s Google Search Console
dashboard.
If all this seems a bit like drinking through a firehose, don’t worry – I’ve
made a very simple video on how sitemaps and noindex tags work.
‘Sitemaps & Noindexing’ Video Tutorial (14:56 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Schema Markup
Esperanto was a language developed in the 1870s in an attempt to
create one universal way of communicating. It was meant to be easily
learnt and spoken everywhere in the world. Did it work? Well, no. But it
was a good idea.
I want you to now imagine that every search engine is a different
country with their own native languages. ‘The United States of Bing’,
‘Yahoo Republic’, ‘The Google Islands’; and so on.
Well, ‘Schema Markup’ is the coding world’s answer to Esperanto.
It’s a universal computer language developed so that all search engines
can understand important aspects of a webpage. For example, we can
attach schema markup to something like our business address, making it
unmistakably clear to the search engines that this is our business’s
contact address and not some random location.
Sound good? Well, hold your horses. Just like Esperanto, the adoption of
the language is very low. There’s only a very small fraction of websites
that use Schema, and it’s a real shame. If Google really understands the
context of an element on your page, there are many more places
available on a SERP where information related to your web page can be
featured.
In essence, you’re trying to make choice information on your page so
unbelievably clear to Google that the information is what it is, that the
Big ‘G’ feels comfortable using that information elsewhere too.
For example, we can use Schema markup to tell a search engine that
there is content on our product page giving information to the user
about the quantity and rating of the reviews the product has received.
Google will then likely show a reviews section of our website in its SERPS
listing; thus, making the listing more visible and more attractive. Not
only this, but our listing will take up more real estate on the screen.
More on this later.
Action Step
I go into a bit more detail about schema at the end of ‘Chapter 22 Ecommerce SEO’, but to cut a long story short, use schema where
appropriate on your ranking pages. Doing so will likely increase your
online visibility and increase the usefulness and effectiveness of your
website’s listings in Google.
There are different ways of telling Google that you’ll be using schema
markup on a page. I strongly recommend a method using ‘JSON-LD’, or
‘JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data’.
Have I lost you yet? Don’t panic because I’ve created a video explaining
it all for you in plain English. No framed computer degrees need hang on
your bathroom wall to understand any of this – I promise.
‘Schema Markup’ Video Tutorial (12:20 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Chapter 17
“On-Page Optimisation – User
Engagement”
The future’s here, and it’s called ‘RankBrain’. This is Google’s patented
‘machine learning’ system; and it’s one smart cookie.
Despite the quite frankly ridiculous name, RankBrain now plays a
significant role in Google’s overall ranking algorithm. In a nutshell, the
system attempts to allocate ‘in the field’ meaning to any given search
query based on the subsequent behaviour of the user typing it in.
The system will monitor how the user interacts with the search engine
results. It then uses a feedback loop so it can show even more tailored
results to the next user who types in the same query to best serve their
intentions.
Confused? Well let’s use an example.
let’s say the number one search result for ‘best vegetarian diet’ was
absolutely terrible. Let’s say It was ugly, badly written, factually
incorrect, and somehow infused ultra-extremist right wing political
agenda with diets that omit meat. Now there’s a car crash of a website!
Obviously to have gotten to the top it’s pressing all the right SEO
buttons, but without RankBrain it would reign supreme permanently
unchecked. With RankBrain, Google can see people being repulsed by it,
and will thus push the site further down the rankings.
Data considered by RankBrain includes:
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of the listings – the proportion of
searchers clicking onto your listing from the search engine results
page.
• Bounce Rate – the proportion of people who immediately click off
your site once they’ve first landed there (no doubt disgusted by
your bitter vegetable politics).
• Whether the user’s search terminates with your website or not –
ie. does the user continue looking for a solution following a visit to
your website?
Behaviour of Google users is becoming more and more important in
search engine optimisation. Anything we can do to increase the user
engagement of our web pages will have a positive impact on our
rankings.
So how can we please RankBrain? And how can we increase user
engagement? Let’s look at a list of the main factors…
• Great Meta Descriptions
• Site Speed
• Good Media
• Keeping People Reading
• 1000+ Words Please
• Put a Sock in the Popups
The following factors don’t directly contribute to Google’s assessment of
your website. However, their indirect effect on search engine
optimisation is huge. The added benefit is that getting them right will
increase the number of people buying your product or service once they
do land on your page, so user engagement is a ‘twofer’.
Let’s look at the 6 ways we can please RankBrain in more detail.
1. Great Meta Descriptions
You might not know what a Meta Description (AKA ‘Snippet’) is, but trust
me you’ve seen one. On a Google search result it’s the brief previewed
description of the website page you’re about to click through to. In the
example below, the Meta Description is what follows the URL.
Google have made it clear that they don’t look at the 160 characters of
your meta description to determine keyword relevancy. However, as this
excerpt is usually displayed underneath the page title within the search
result pages, it plays a huge role in influencing the click-through-rate of
your Google listing.
If more people are clicking on your result compared to others on the
search result page, Google sees this as a huge sign that your website is in
the right place and should be pushed up the ranks.
Action Step
Use the 160 characters of the meta description to make your listing
super clickable by including the benefits that reading your page will give
the user. Look at the meta description of competitors currently on the
first page. Is there anything you can include in your meta description to
stand out?
You may want to use the ellipsis trick at the end of the description to
entice people to read more. An ellipsis is the three dots that infer more
information follows...
E.g. ‘Download our FREE…’
Even I want to click on that... and I wrote it!
Editing your Meta Descriptions on WordPress is extremely easy using the
plugin ‘SEO Yoast’.
‘SEO Yoast’ Video Tutorial (16:26 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
2. Site Speed
I’ll be brutal here. There’s absolutely no excuse why your web pages
should be loading in more than 5 seconds. Google users will simply vote
with their ‘back’ button. They have no loyalty to your site over the nine
other organic options on the first page and they couldn’t give a rat’s ass
about your entrepreneurial aspirations. If a web page is slow, they’ll
bounce off that website quicker than said rat up a drainpipe.
And you remember what we said about RankBrain monitoring your site’s
bounce rate? And the ramifications of it being poor?
“No Bueno” my friend.
As you may be able to tell, I get very worked up about site speed. I think
making your website lightning fast is one of the most undervalued
marketing tactics you can perform on the Internet; not just for your SEO,
but for increasing website conversions.
People don’t realise how strict the correlation between site load speed
times and customer sales really is. it’s often the case that website
owners don’t realise they behave online in exactly the same way their
potential customers will. Do you yourself wait for a website to load for
ages, or do you just skip to the next option? Precisely.
I actually created a free online tool you can use to tangibly see how
much money you stand to lose / gain with a slow / fast loading website.
Armies of website owners use it. You can find it at:
https://www.3MonthsToNo1.com/speed-conversion-loss-tool/
Action Steps
This is actually the one area of SEO and user engagement I’m not going
to advocate you doing yourself. That’s right. Get your wallet out and pay
a professional.
Firstly, you need to ascertain if you have an issue. Use a site speed
checker like https://www.pingdom.com and make sure every page loads
in a faster time than 5 seconds. For most accurate results, use a checker
that allows you to select a server that’s in roughly the same location as
your target audience.
If you pass the 5 second test – great! But before you crack open the
bubbly you need to check the average site speed of your top 5 organic
competitors. If their sites are humming away at 3.2 seconds; that’s the
new target to beat. Remember, good SEO is about ticking every box until
there’s no plausible reason any website should rank higher than you.
If you’ve now decided you need to do something about your site speed,
the next step is to uncover what’s causing the sluggish performance. The
two best resources for diagnosing problems are:
1. ‘Google Page Insights’ –
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
2. ‘DareBoost’ – https://www.dareboost.com
The latter will also provide you with a downloadable report on the issues
that will prove very useful for the final step – hiring a site speed
developer.
Whatever you do, unless the website developer who created your site is
extremely proficient in speed improvements, I’d recommend you get
someone who specialises in the field to do the work. Just trust me on
this. With the right freelancer, it’s relatively inexpensive to sort, and
armed with your speed report you can track work efficiently without
fear of being rooked.
I’ve had several clients literally turn their businesses around just by
paying a freelancer less than $75 to rectify slow load times. If you’re
unfamiliar with employing freelancers for one-off jobs, I strongly urge
you to get familiar. Choosing the right people inexpensively is a critical
skill of any entrepreneur, so it’s time to break the seal.
Two of the best online portals for matching people like you with skilled
developers from around the world are…
1. ‘Upwork’ – https://www.upwork.com
2. ‘People Per Hour’ – https://www.peopleperhour.com
It’s outside the remit of this book to run you through how to get a great
freelancer, but just know that you’ll probably burn through a small
handful of them before you find one you’ll come back to again and
again. I don’t mean that specifically for site speed improvements – it’s
fairly universal.
Just like the real world, there are good, bad, and average employees.
3. Good Media
People interact with online content in a capricious and scatty manner to
say the least. Flitting and scrolling, they click with wild abandonment.
They hack away at content on various pages in a totally non-linear
format, and eventually they’ll leave the website as quickly as they came
upon it.
To be fair, this isn’t completely the fault of the reader, but rather it’s
more symptomatic of the issue with having content that’s interactive. In
physical print the reader can be guided easily; it’s a game they
understand. ‘Start here’, ‘read to here’, ‘turn the page’, rinse and repeat.
However, on the Internet the user gets to decide the journey through a
maze of internal and external links all screaming “Click me! Click me!”.
This is mostly great for the reader digesting the content, as it’s an
extremely efficient way of getting what they wanted satiated quickly.
However, for a website owner it means you’re only ever one step away
from the user clicking off your site to visit a competitor.
You may have some great stuff which gives genuine value, but you need
to remember one thing – your reader has choice. And what’s more, their
ability to exercise choice involves no effort. They just press the back
button.
It’s always frustrating to me how many business owners can’t think like a
brand new customer landing on their site. They think everything will get
poured over and appreciated with the same level of depth they do.
Ever politely smiled as you’ve been told a ‘funny’ story by someone
about their kid “doing this funny face”, or perhaps ‘hilariously’
mispronouncing a word. Oh how cute! The parent isn’t being selfindulgent. They’ve just genuinely forgotten that nobody appreciates
their baby like them. Your website is your baby. Don’t make the mistake
of thinking the world owes you anything.
Let me make this clear. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you ever
have someone’s undivided attention on the Internet. You don’t.
So how can we make the reader stay interested and trap their attention?
How can we have their informational needs met quickly but thoroughly?
The answer is good media.
Well placed regular imagery, engaging video content, and interactive
page elements; your website needs it all. We’ve reached a sad but
inevitable stage in the evolution of the Internet where people want to
be spoon-fed content. So, don’t try to change the world. Grab a spoon.
Action Steps
Go through every page on your website and ask yourself the question –
“Are there enough images?”. Break up long blocks of text or sales patter
with attention grabbing pictures.
Most importantly though, include an embedded YouTube video in your
content ‘above the fold’ (this means it’s at the top where it’s visible
without having to scroll down).
If readers are feeling lazy, they don’t want to read long articles requiring
15 minutes of solid front end attention. However, they’ll happily sit and
stare at a video for 15 minutes if the topic interests them enough.
You don’t even need to produce the video yourself. It’ll always be
preferable to do so, but as long as the video is on the topic of your target
keyword, the provenance of its authorship doesn’t matter.
It also doesn’t have to be a YouTube embed, and can in fact be
embedded using Vimeo, or any other media platform. However, seeing
as Google owns YouTube, it’s like giving an apple to teacher. You suck
up!
Once embedded, create an XML video sitemap and submit it to Google.
The Big ‘G’ will index your page so much faster if you do this. Remember,
I run through how to do this in the ‘Sitemap & Noindexing’ video tutorial
so check it out.
If you run a business website, a well-produced video introducing your
product or service will not only serve your SEO campaign, but will
undoubtedly boost the conversion rate of the site as well – it’s a no
brainer.
‘Good Media’ Video Tutorial (05:44 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
4. Keeping People Reading
If you keep people reading, you keep people on your web page. If you
keep people of your web page, Google has unequivocal evidence you’re
a useful website and will push you up the rankings accordingly.
Here are a few tips and tricks to mesmerise your target audience.
Less is More
Ever wonder why Dan Brown is such an inexplicably successful author?
Well one reason is he’s not afraid to keep it punchy with short
sentences. And I tend to agree.
In fact, just like convicted felons, I simply love short sentences. They’re
just more readable. And the more readable you can make your writing;
the more people will stay on the page and digest your text. Keep your
sentences short. Do it.
Use Whitespace
Any designer worth their salt will tell you that whitespace is your best
friend. The more you can use in your page’s structure, the more
digestible it’ll appear, so be liberal with it – especially if your content is
in the form of a long article.
Use Little ‘Teasers’
There are lots of little tricks you can use to make your content moreish.
Like what?
Like asking short questions like, ‘like what?’, before then going on to
answer it! Want to punch my smug face yet? Hey, don’t shoot the
messenger.
Vary Your Text Formatting
It may not serve you grammatically, but being liberal with the use of
bullet points, bolding, italics, text-colour etc. can make it much easier to
digest textual content.
If in Doubt, ‘Dumb it Down’
Remember English class when you were at school? Remember how it
felt like you couldn’t get a good grade without using esoteric words and
florid language? Well turns out these are the last things you should be
doing if you’re trying to sell a product or service online.
Great news huh?!
And this isn’t because your readers are stupid. It’s because the Internet
is not the place to get cute with words. Users just won’t stick around to
put any effort into the mental gymnastics required to decrypt
horrendously long concept sentences like this one which are also turgid
with service description sales buzz words like ‘passionate’, ‘unique’, and
‘experience’.
If your users read words like these they’ll want to projectile vomit over
their screen. But luckily that’ll never happen because the simple
antidote is clicking the ‘back’ button, and they’ll take full advantage of it.
Use the ‘K.I.S.S’ method for all engaging content – Keep It Simple Stupid
– and use short and simple vocabulary in your copywriting where
possible.
5. 1000+ Words Please
Thoroughness is close to SEO ‘Godliness’ when it comes to showing
Google you’re genuinely trying to add value to users.
Studies repeatedly show that on average, long-form content wins the
day in the search engine rankings game. If you’re using a lot of text, your
content will naturally keep people on your page longer, as well as be
effortlessly richer in keywords and related synonyms.
Write more. Over 1000 words of good-quality content related to your
keyword’s niche will ensure you’re considered a thorough resource for
any search word or phrase. Where appropriate, try to do this on the
majority of your pages, even if you’re not proactively trying to rank
them.
6. Put a Sock in the Popups
At the time of writing, I have a personal vendetta against
www.forbes.com. Every time I visit it, I quickly spiral into a hurricane of
rage, and I implore you to find out for yourself why.
For those of you without a computer to hand I’ll put you out of your
misery. Forbes houses the MacDaddy – nay, the Emperor – of all
welcome mat popups on its homepage.
Visit this website and you’re held at virtual gunpoint by an awkward and
slow loading ‘Quote of the Day’. As if your chest meeting the sudden
resistance of a doorman’s abrupt forearm, this almost opaque welcome
mat forces you to inhale a paid advert for several seconds before finally
allowing you access. The quote you get to read as compensation is
almost condescendingly transparent in its real intent.
As you can tell, I really hate anything which clogs or thickens the user’s
journey for clear financial motives.
Popups, welcome mats (popups shown as soon as you land on the page),
obtrusive advertising – they really take the prize for disrupting user
experience.
Second to keyword relevance, all Google really cares about is user
experience for the visitor. This has made them the 2nd biggest company
in the world (top spot goes to Apple) at the time of writing. If something
upsets that user experience, this is reflected by the page’s engagement
metrics (time on page, bounce rate etc.). These are all monitored by
Google.
Popups for email signups and opt-in offers may increase a website’s
conversion rate, but they’re also great at disrupting the customer
journey. In January 2017, Google announced a new ‘popup penalty’
which sees pages being held back in the search engines if popups are
detected on the them. At the time of writing this is only for mobile
versions of a website, but watch this space for their desktop
counterparts.
The moral of the story? Don’t use intro popups on your ranking pages.
Thank you. I can feel my blood pressure dropping already.
Reviews
As we wrap up On-Page Optimisation, the quest for great online reviews
is perhaps the perfect segue into ‘Off-Page’ Optimisation because it
straddles both camps.
Social proof, or social influence, is an incredibly strong psychological
phenomenon by which people are driven to behave or act in an attempt
to replicate the actions of others.
Social proof explains why displaying reviews and testimonials on your
ranking pages, along with Google showing reviews of your products or
services on its search engine results page, will see a far greater chance of
a potential customer interacting with your website.
There are three ways we can incorporate reviews into our online
marketing campaign: Google Reviews, Schema Reviews, and 3rd Party
Reviews. Let’s go into them in a little more detail.
Google Reviews
Google reviews primarily help local businesses targeting local searches
(e.g. ‘cosmetic dentist dallas’). Accumulating positive Google reviews will
see the search engine display a star rating on your business profile
snippet when someone searches for your brand.
The number of good reviews you have also plays into Google’s local
algorithm, meaning they’ll increase your chance of showing in the three
available map listings for a local search.
Schema Review
If somewhere on your ranking page you include information on reviews
that your product or service has received (regardless of the source), we
can implement schema markup to tell Google about them. With the
correct code in place, Google will likely feature the review information –
along with an ‘x out of 5’ star depiction – in your search result page
listing. This can dramatically increase the click-through-rate of your
website.
This canny New York Plumbing company has put Schema to good use
and now has 5 orange stars singing its praises within the search results
themselves.
Without schema in place, these 5 orange stars wouldn’t show up directly
in the search listing.
3rd Party Review Websites
Consumer review websites like www.trustpilot.com can be a great way
of gaining exposure for your business, and they certainly tick a few ‘due
diligence’ boxes for consumers. Some great sites to get reviews on
include…
Trustpilot.com
Bbb.org
Yelp.com
Once you worked out which ones are best suited to your business, make
it a matter of habit to ask customers to fill out reviews for you.
You’ve Turned up to the Race. Congratulations.
Everything up to now has been about putting your best foot forward in
the search engines, but we’re not done. Not by a long shot.
Getting your on-page optimisation right is like turning up to a street car
racing start line with a vehicle that’s clean, well-tuned, full of gas, and
sporting the best tyres for the track conditions. As we stare at the start
line through squinted eyes, rev our engines, and force engine bite
against the brakes; what’s the plan?
Onlookers are cheering and betting slips are being waved in the air, but
what now? How are you going to beat the other 10 cars looking for a
page No.1 ranking? And more importantly, how are you going to get on
the podium by securing a top 3 ranking?
Don’t do yourself a disservice of course; it takes hard work to get your
car to the start line, so well done. We just now need to know how to
guarantee success on the track.
As mentioned earlier, for less competitive keywords, we can quite easily
rank a website in the top 5 just by doing everything in this book up to
now. However, In the more competitive searches, we’re going to need
more than just on-page SEO.
Houston has just counted to zero and the gangways are thunderously
detaching. It’s time to launch the next stage of our campaign – ‘Off-Page’
Search Engine Optimisation.
Comprising Link Building, Content Marketing, and Social Media; this is
going to be the ongoing side of SEO. Ready? Let’s go.
Chapter 18
“Links”
Let’s imagine we’ve created homefurnishings.com and we’re trying to
rank a page on it for the keyword ‘chesterfield sofa’. Yes, sofas again. I
could mix it up with armchairs, but I sense you don’t really care.
We’ve made it smooth for Google to index the whole site swiftly and
efficiently, and the Big ‘G’ can now easily assess the site’s relevance to
any particular industry (in this case home furniture). It knows that the
page in question is about Chesterfield Sofas because all our On-Page
Optimisation is tight.
We’ve made our main ranking page highly relevant to the keyword
‘chesterfield sofa’. The content on the page is very engaging, and
anybody landing on the website would likely stay there digesting the
media, certainly for longer than the ten results currently residing on
page No.1 for the keyword.
Page Crawlability, Page Relevance, Page Engagement; that’s on-page
optimisation done! Give yourself a hearty slap on the back.
Just before your palm brushes the cellar cobwebs off a bottle of 1988
Krug Vintage Brut though, unfortunately there’s a catch. I’m afraid it’s
time to say “Sayonara” to the part of SEO we’ve had unequivocal end-toend control over. Yes, On-Page SEO has been good to us. Everything up
to now has been blissfully uninvolved with any external agency or
parties in the form of webmasters, but that’s about to change with ‘OffPage’ SEO.
By the way, before I continue, I should add that a ‘Webmaster’ is anyone
who owns and/or controls a website. Contrary to where your mind’s
probably going right now, they’re not the hooded overlords of some
dystopian post Internet Dark Age.
So, to business then. Let’s talk about links.
What is a Link?
Warning: ‘Patronising Alert’.
A hyperlink, or ‘link’ / ‘backlink’, is an element on a web page that a user
can click on to reference another web resource. This may be an
alternative page on the same website, or a page/resource on an external
website. No doubt you’ve clicked on thousands of links during your
personal history with the Internet. They’ve become so commonplace
that you don’t even give them a second thought.
End of: ‘Patronising Alert’.
Well, without links, there would be no Google.
This is because links facilitate the crawling – and subsequent indexing –
of the entire Internet by search engines. The robots that are deployed to
crawl any given website follow the destinations of every link within that
website. They then follow the links on the website they just got led to;
and so on, and so on. Eventually, the whole Internet is indexed by
Google through the interconnected web of links across the globe.
Why Links?
On-Page optimisation apart, Google’s organic results are essentially one
big popularity contest. Yes, it’s prom night and your website is vying for
the title of the King / Queen.
Indulge me for a moment...
Imagine Google is the Maths teacher, Mr Dexter, organising the prom.
Mr Dexter is not 17 years old, and he’s certainly not part of the intricate
social dynamics of the different teen niches and subgroups. Mr Dexter
has no idea how cool Joni Stevenson is, or how popular the Chad
Chaddington twins are. He just needs to order the whole school, from
#loser to #cool so they can announce the King and Queen on Friday. And
to do this, he relies on votes from the children.
The teenage voters in this clumsy analogy are of course other websites
on the Internet, whilst the actual votes themselves take the form of
hyperlinks (aka links). Just like voting for a prom King and Queen, it’s
essentially a system of peer graded ranking.
However, Google goes one step further and assigns a certain weight to
each vote casted by the more established cool kids. The
‘www.bbc.com’s; the ‘www.forbes.com’s; the ‘www.wikipedia.com’s
would be the cool and well-respected kids in this (rather bizarre)
fictional school.
Meanwhile, Google’s not as interested in the scruffy kids, the try-hard
kids, the liars, or the new kids from out of town. For these people, their
votes are cast but treated with resolute caution. These are the badly
designed sites, the over-optimised pages, the Russian Bride portals, and
the brand-new domains on the block.
Done with the prom analogy? Good, me too.
So, Off-Page SEO predominantly involves attracting as many votes (links)
coming to your website pages from as many reputable voters (other
websites) as possible. This in turn increases your domain’s authority in
Google – comprising the final piece of the puzzle in moving your site up
the rankings.
The attempt to increase this authority and attract these votes defines
Off-Page optimisation. At its core, it’s an attempt to improve a website’s
link profile.
What Information About a Site Does Google Glean
From its Link Profile?
The Level of Trustworthiness and Authority
This is exactly what our prom chat has been all about. The widespread
usage of links across the Internet unintentionally creates a vouching
system, whereby Google can assess the trust and authority of a website
based on the establishment level and reputation of websites that link to
it.
Popularity
If there are a relatively high number of trustworthy sources pointing to a
website, then Google can safely assume that the destination pages
contain valuable content its users will find useful.
Topic Relevance
Let’s say we have a page dedicated to the Chesterfield Sofa and the
home furnishing niche; what kind of websites would you expect to link
to it? Those based around vintage automobiles? Financial comparison
websites maybe? Ultra-marathon blogs perhaps?
Of course, the answer you’re booming between two amplifying hands is
“No!”. Although not impossible, these websites would be slightly bizarre
champions and companions of the homely page in question.
If, however, the linking sites are known by Google to be relevant for
topics such as home furnishings, sofas, interior design etc. then this is
consistent with the topic on our actual page. In essence, the rest of the
Internet is corroborating and backing up what our On-Page SEO is telling
the search engine the page is all about.
The congruence of the two means Google will increase our ranking for
keywords like ‘chesterfield sofa’, and other related keywords.
Keyword Relevance Through Anchor Text
Not only does the content of the link’s source website (the website that
is linking to our site) indicate the topic relevance of our page, but so too
does the link’s wording.
In other words, to a certain set of keywords, the actual link itself gives
Google a huge relevance indicator that it can feed back into its
algorithm. This is in the form of something called ‘anchor text’.
Anchor text is simply the visible wording of a hyperlink. When you click
on a link it may be sending you to a webpage with a long URL, but to
keep it simple, the site owner had to write what anchor text to append
to it.
For example, the anchor text ‘chesterfield sofa’ is just the underlined or
different coloured text that houses the link destination URL – such as
http://www.greaveshomefurnishing.com. Writing the whole web
address would be cumbersome in a body of text.
WordPress creates links for you easily with a simple interface, but it’s
worth knowing the html code behind a hyperlink.
To create our example link in html, it would be written like this:
<a href="http://www.greaveshomefurnishings.com">chesterfield
sofa</a>
On a website, this would render as simply chesterfield sofa .
If you saw a link on a webpage with the link’s wording (anchor text)
being ‘chesterfield sofa’, you could hazard a guess at to the topic of the
content which is being linked to. Google uses the same logic, so it reads
a lot into the relevance of the page being linked to by the link’s anchor
text.
So why am I telling you all this? After all, I very much expect that you
already knew what anchor text was. Well, Google monitors every piece
of anchor text linking to your website across the whole Internet, and
subsequently builds an anchor text profile of your website. It knows
what proportions / ratios you have particular anchor text keywords
linking to your site from other sites, and it uses this information to build
a picture of what you’re about.
For example, if your website is about fluffy kittens, but 48% of inbound
links to your site have the anchor text ‘attack dogs’, Google will get
confused won’t rank you particularly well for the keyword ‘fluffy kittens’.
Equally, if 74% of your inbound links have the exact anchor text ‘fluffy
kittens’ Google will smell a rat and penalise you for over-optimisation.
After all, the chances of a percentage this high is pretty low if you
consider the likelihood that each website linking to you will have
independently come up with this exact anchor text on their own.
Back in ‘the good ole days’, before Google got more advanced,
webmasters could easily abuse links and anchor text ratios without fear
of retribution from the Big ‘G’. Like a free coffee machine in an Italian
office; it was open season.
Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of these ranking factors
could, and would, take full advantage of the search engine to gain
position No.1 results.
It was the Wild West.
Webmasters would purchase automated computer software which
generated thousands upon thousands of links back to them – all created
on an array of questionable websites.
Each link would feature anchor text exactly matching the commercial
keyword targeted. The links would usually be placed in the footer
section of the website so the link could be replicated across every page –
resulting in sometimes hundreds of links from just one source.
Google would almost instantaneously rank these low-quality websites at
the top of their search results, where various monetisation strategies
would then earn their Webmasters small fortunes.
Well not any more.
Thankfully, Google has become an algorithm of sophistication and guile
which rewards online properties who genuinely add value to the web,
and indeed the world, through their quality content. To accomplish this,
it’s released various algorithmic penalties and updates along the way
which banish sites engaged in shortcut optimisation practices. We’ll
discuss these later in Chapter 23 – How to Stop Google Penalties
Wrecking Your Livelihood.
Yes, Google’s all grown up now, and we need to treat our backlink
profiles and anchor text ratios with the appropriate deference.
For more information about how to work out your own anchor text
ratio, as well as the ideal ratios, just watch the upcoming video about a
tool called ‘Majestic SEO’. It’s only a few pages away so this will all still
be fresh in your mind.
Keyword Relevance Through Link Placement
As Google’s algorithm has been developed over the last couple of
decades, much more weight has been given to the value of a link based
on its placement within a page. A contextual link on a website
demonstrates much more relevance and value of the page being linked
to, than a link peripheral and extraneous to the content on the page.
Did that cumbersome sentence make sense? Probably not, so let me
explain.
For example, a link located in the first paragraph of an article holds
greater SEO weight for its recipient than the same link buried in a
sidebar or footer. This isn’t because it’s intrinsically more powerful, but
rather that Google’s able to easily attribute topic relevance via the body
of text surrounding the link.
How We Should Build Links Today
If we’re being honest, when we talk about off-page optimisation, we’re
mainly talking about obtaining good-quality links to our website. As you
know by now, these links vouch for a website’s credibility, and as SEO
practitioners we hope this credibility leads to Google’s algorithm placing
our site as high up in the search rankings as possible. So, what’s the ideal
link?
What is the ideal link?
When we talk about ‘good-quality’ links, what do we mean? Well, most
people would be able to take a guess.
A link from the New York Times? That’s good quality.
A link from Wikipedia? That’s good quality.
A link from Cambridge University? You get the idea.
If it’s a household brand or reputable organisation, we can safely assume
the website behind it is powerful and trustworthy. Sadly though, these
obviously high quality links make up 0.00001% of domains (yes, I made
that statistic up!).
What about all the websites we haven’t heard of? Remember, Google
isn’t a human being. It can’t judge the calibre of websites by brand
awareness or an intrinsic nose for quality. It can only judge them by
what the rest of the Internet is saying about them, and how it’s saying it.
If we understand what constitutes an ‘ideal’ link, we can measure any
link opportunity that we come across in the future. By doing this, we can
work out if it’s worth putting in the effort to try and acquire any given
backlink.
The ‘RAP’ Human Method of Judging Links
You’re a human. Congratulations – you’re cleverer than Google.
No really, you are a great judge of link quality, so use your bloodhound
nose and flex your common sense muscles. Based on what we’ve been
discussing so far, I like to use the acronym RAP to judge the quality of a
link – Relevance, Authority, and Placement.
Let’s look at each one quickly.
‘Relevance’ – Does the website offering the link opportunity relate to
the same topic of the keywords we’re targeting? The more related to
our site’s niche (judged by content and the type of websites linking to
that site in turn), the higher the SEO benefit for us.
‘Authority’ – Like most terminology adopted by the SEO industry, the
word ‘Authority’ is very hazy and esoteric, and can bamboozle
newcomers! It basically means the SEO strength of a website measured
by the ‘power’ of the links pointing to it.
‘Placement’ – Links that are contextually placed on a page are rewarded
by Google. These are links surrounded by a body of topical content
within a page.
So, we know what a relevant, authoritative and well-placed link looks
like, right? But is our opinion always the same as Google? After all,
you’re not the one deciding what goes where in its index.
It’s time to don your white latex gloves and fire up the thermal imaging
camera, because we’re about to get serious. Yes, to Google every link
profile is a potential crime scene.
How to Forensically Judge Links – Majestic.com
Let me introduce you to my favourite SEO tool – Majestic.com. It’s a link
analyser, and it’s very, very clever.
Just like Google has software ‘robots’ which crawl the Internet, so too
does Majestic. However, whereas Google decides not to share its
assessment of a website (wouldn’t life be easier if it did!), Majestic does.
This means we can gain tremendous insight into the quality of most
websites’ link profiles by using this tool. Majestic’s assessment of a
website’s SEO strength is far more accurate than the mostly subjective
opinion we humans form based on visual content and design.
You can get most of what you need with their free version, but I’d
recommend signing up for their free trial of the upgraded edition so you
can get even more metrics. I’ve created a video tutorial of Majestic to
walk you through it, which includes the interface you’ll see in the
upgraded version.
So, let’s take a look at how it works. Let’s plug a random home and
design magazine website into it to show you what kind of information
Majestic gives us.
NOTE: I’ve obscured the actual domain name for obvious privacy
reasons.
The three main metrics we need to pay close attention to are:
1. Primary Topic (Upgraded Version Only)
Based on the links coming into the site, this is what Majestic’s
software (and therefore Google) thinks the website is primarily
relevant to. In this case, it thinks ‘Business’ is the primary topic
(which is obviously wrong), so it would be beneficial for this
particular website to get more links from Home orientated sites.
2. Trust Flow
Again, based on the inbound link profile, this is the website’s trust
grade. It’s out of 100, but it’s a logarithmic scale so use the
following range classifications as a general guide:
Trust Flow
0-10
11-20
21-30
31-40
40+
Google's Trust Level
Poor
OK
Good
Very Good
Exceptional
3. Referring Domains
This is the number of different websites linking to the site. Providing
the links are of a satisfactory quality, the more the better. Note that
the 16,394 referring domains in this example is indicative of a
website so large it’s likely a household name. Most sites won’t have
a number anywhere near this.
Armed with this ‘whistle stop’ tour of the Majestic results page, we can
now use the tool to help us assess the SEO benefit of any potential, or
existing link coming to our website. Please note though that this is a very
basic overview of Majestic.
Luckily for you I’ve created a quick video that guides you through
Majestic.
‘SEO Majestic’ Video Tutorial (15:58 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
So, in summary...
Using our ‘RAP’ (Relevance, Authority & Placement) acronym, the ideal
link to your website will be:
• Highly relevant (the primary topic is in your industry)
• Authoritative (coming from a website with a plenty of links and a
high trust flow)
• Placed contextually within the website’s editorial content.
What Do We Need to Consider When Attracting Links to Our Site?
So, we know why we need good links. We know what an ‘ideal’ link looks
like. But I’m afraid before we suit up and pull the ripcord, we need just a
pinch more theory.
Yes yes I know. You’re already feeling bored to the point of being
lobotomised. SEO will do that to a person. But just trust me; the
following information is really important.
Just stick with me for the next section, and I promise we’ll pull the
trigger on how to actually get links yourself straight afterwards, when
we’ll be looking at the 5 most impactful and inexpensive methods for
attracting links to your website.
Link Diversity
I’m not a mind reader, but I think I know what you’re thinking by now:
‘Well this is easy. I just get links coming to my site which are relevant,
authoritative, and placed within the main content body.’
Yes, and no.
Your absolute focus should be on trying to acquire high-quality links with
these attributes. There’s no doubt there. But to give your website the
best possible chance of dominating Google’s first page, you’ll need to
give off the same signals any naturally authoritative website would
(whether you are one or not!).
A natural authority website has all kinds of links pointing towards it:
• Blog post links
• Social media links
• Forum links
• PDF links
• Directory links
• ‘.gov’ links
• Press release links
• Article biography links
• ‘.edu’ links
• Comment & profile links
• ‘No follow’ links
• ‘Do follow’ links
And so on...
A lot of these may harbour no real SEO ‘power’ so to speak, but they are
naturally acquired links that one would expect to see point to an
authority site.
I’m making this point because I don’t want you to become a link snob
and only put the effort into acquiring a certain type of link. If it’s relevant
to your industry, don’t be afraid to get it, regardless of its SEO strength.
As long as it’s a link from a genuine website – and clearly not spam –
then getting it will increase and enrichen your link profile’s diversity to at
least some degree. And that’s just as important as the base quality of
the link.
A link profile swollen with any one type of backlink can make Google
very suspicious. It’s just not natural, and you can easily get charged with
trying to game the system.
For example, if Google sees 100 links coming to your site and 87% of
them are from comments on various industry forums, you’ll be heading
straight for a ‘Penguin’ penalty. If that sounds fluffy, cute, and fun – trust
me it ain’t. This penguin doesn’t waddle adorably round the Antarctic.
This one tanks successful businesses overnight.
We’ll talk more about penalties in Chapter 23. But for now, just make
sure you don’t have an overwhelming majority of any one type of link.
As a rule of thumb, no single link type should constitute more than 15 20% of your entire profile.
Got it?
Good.
‘No Follow’ / ‘Do Follow’ Links
We can’t always influence the inbound links we receive, but we can
certainly control our outbound link profile. In fact, we can go one step
further by filtering which outbound links Google pays attention to and
which it doesn’t. There are many instances where we might want to link
out to an external website but don’t want Google to consider it in its
algorithm.
For example, if you own a forum about haircuts for kittens and you allow
your users to have links in their posts or profiles, you could run into a
problem. Google might penalise you for having a highly skewed ratio of
outbound links.
So how do we pick and choose? The answer is the humble ‘No Follow’
link.
A webmaster can add a little snippet of code to any link to tell Google
not to follow it. In HTML code, it looks like this:
<a href=http://www.example.com rel="nofollow">Example Link</a>
When we talk about getting links to our site for SEO, we’re talking about
‘Do Follow’ links, or links that don’t have the ‘rel=”nofollow”’ attribute
added to them. If you got a link from CNN.com and it was a ‘Nofollow’
link, it wouldn’t have much SEO impact at all.
There’s great debate on whether getting trustworthy ‘Nofollow’ links
still carries some SEO benefit, and I’m a firm believer that it does.
However, a ‘Dofollow’ link is always going to count a lot more.
How to Check if a Link is ‘Nofollow’
So, let’s say you’ve negotiated a link from another website. How do you
check if the link on their site is giving you the appropriate SEO link juice?
There are several methods, but the quickest for a Mac is just to press
‘Command’ + ‘Option’ + ‘c’ all at once in the web browser Firefox.
This little shortcut will summon something at the bottom of the screen
called ‘Inspector’.
Relax. Palm the half-snorted cocaine back onto the mirror table. Not
that kind of inspector.
No, this Inspector shows you the website code behind elements on any
page. Simply hover your cursor over the link to be inspected, and the
corresponding code will be highlighted in the Inspector. Simply check the
code doesn’t include the rel=“nofollow” code like the example link I
showed you earlier and you’re good to go.
For Windows users, you can access the same thing by pressing ‘F12’ to
summon the developer toolbar, then pressing ‘Ctrl’ + ‘b’.
How to Make One of Your Own Links ‘Nofollow’
With a simple plugin, this is very easy indeed. Just install a plugin by the
company ‘WPKube’ called ‘Title and Nofollow For Links’.
Once installed, every time you want to make a link nofollow you just
need to tick the box that says ‘Add rel=”nofollow” to link’ as per below…
Consistency
Google doesn’t like link building as something you proactively go out
there and try to do. Look at one of the first few sentences in its
webmaster guidelines regarding links:
“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google
search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”
‘PageRank’ is the algorithm created by, and named after, one of
Google’s co-founders, Larry Page. It’s part of Google’s overall ranking
algorithm which estimates the importance of a page based on the
quality and quantity of links coming to it. Every page was given a score
out of ten, and usefully the Big ‘G’ used to share this information with
us. But not anymore. They keep it more secret that a Big Mac’s secret
sauce now.
(which incidentally is mainly just mayo, mustard, paprika, garlic, and
vinegar. Try it at home!)
Anyway, this algorithm is what we’re trying to appease in our quest to
get good-quality links coming to our site. With this we can achieve
wallet-bursting rankings.
Simple, right? Just get links?
Well, yes get links, but remember, the whole point of actively getting
links instead of letting them naturally build up over time, is in essence a
violation of Google’s terms and conditions. If we try to acquire them
with the sole intent of increasing our site’s search rankings, we’re
participating in a ‘link scheme’ and are therefore vulnerable to a Google
penalisation.
Before you throw this book across the room in outrage because you
think I’m trying to coerce you into some questionable online practices,
let me say this:
If you read Google’s webmaster guidelines, apart from falling asleep,
you’ll realise that Google doesn’t like SEO that much!
Read between the lines here and understand that Google is just trying to
guard against poor-quality, ‘fly-by-night’ websites that offer no value to
the user, manipulate the algorithm, and take profit using cheap, shortterm tactics.
That’s more than fair enough.
Former Head of Search Matt Cutts has said that Google encourages
websites to put their best foot forward by making it clear what their site
is about, and formulating a long-term strategy to attract genuine and
trustworthy vouching signals (links) from across the web.
So how does all this tie into the idea of consistency?
Well, one easy way Google can spot cheap tactics is a combination of
poor-quality links and a ‘boom & bust’ timeline of link acquisition. Look
at the backlink growth of any large site, and you’ll see that it gradually
gains links at an increased rate over time.
Unnatural sites often get a lot of links in a short period, followed by a
sudden decrease. Relatively small peaks and troughs coupled with an
overall growing link accruement over time is natural. However, hundreds
of links built during one week, followed by three months of relatively
small backlink growth looks as fishy as a loitering Halibut wearing dark
glasses at night.
As with most things in life, the key is consistency. If you can sustain the
habit of building links to your site through the methods and strategies
we’ll discuss later, Google will see your business as a deserving authority
within your industry, rewarding you with great rankings.
Think SEO Tortoise, Not SEO Hare
If you’re just starting your website or business, then listen up. Ranking
young or newly-formed websites must be done delicately.
Like the father who doesn’t trust the new boyfriend his daughter just
brought home for dinner, Google doesn’t trust new websites. If you’re
brand new, your link profile will be under much scrutiny in the
beginning.
This is all very much connected to the previous idea of consistency in link
acquisition. It’s completely unnatural to launch a website on day 1, only
to have Google discover 500 links on your site a week later. Google
crawls Billions of sites a year, so it gets to know very well the link
patterns of ‘natural’ websites not trying to game the system.
The key takeaway should be this – it’s always best to start building links
slowly in the beginning. Think SEO tortoise and not SEO hare.
Building Links – The Exchange of Value
If you’ve read this chapter up to here, you’ll no doubt have become
frustrated at how free and easily I use the phrase ‘link building’. Like it’s
a task as simple as making a cup of tea, or cleaning out a kitchen draw.
‘Oh, I’ll just pop out and get some links shall I?’ you may be thinking
sarcastically.
Well, it’s about time I add some substance to this phrase, and shed some
light on all the effective ways to get high-value links pointing at your site,
thus communicating authority to Google.
Hand on heart, I only truly became good at link building just a few years
ago. Previously, I’d spent years trying to work out shortcuts and use my
time as efficiently as possible. It’s a rite of passage for every SEO, but
using the latest ‘clever’ techniques to pull the proverbial wool over
Google’s eyes is sooner or later discovered to be a waste of time,
money, and effort.
Yes, I was as guilty of this as the next man at trying to get more for less.
But today, you’re at an unfathomable advantage in reading this book
before you’ve cut your teeth on link acquisition. You’re in fact standing
right now on the mountainous smouldering embers of all my failures,
and I welcome you to take the wormhole route to one simple fact:
The ‘trick’ to SEO, is that there is no trick.
Getting high-quality links coming to a website is nothing more than a
value exchange.
If a link is worth getting, you can bet your life you’ll need to deliver some
kind of real value in exchange for it. Whether it’s time, money, a favour,
expertise, or content/information; you’re going to ‘pay’ for it one way or
another.
That may not seem very profound, but it really changed my way of
looking at off-page optimisation. I accepted that thinking I was going to
outsmart thousands of extremely well paid software engineers in
Google’s Search Team by using a trick I’d seen on an SEO forum, was, at
best, a little naive. At worst, it was just plain arrogant.
Please learn from this. You might as well re-appropriate all your time
and energy into thinking about the potential value you could offer
webmasters in exchange for quality links to your site.
I’m about to list the five main currencies of value you can approach
webmasters with to exchange for links. I’ll be honest though. Out of the
five, there’s only one strategy I believe delivers enough return on
investment to engage in it as a long-term strategy; and that’s content
marketing.
The other four should be considered, and could give you some great
(short-term) results depending on your personal circumstances.
However, if you’re short on time, and want to know what to focus on to
build a super successful website, then head straight to number 5 and its
ensuing devoted chapter: Chapter 19 – Content Marketing.
1. Your Time
This is the least effective form of value you can offer in exchange for a
link to your site. It’s an all-encompassing category that includes any
activity where your time is the asset you’re using to attract a link with. In
the following examples, you’re using your time to create slivers of value
you can then approach a webmaster with.
Example 1:
Find grammatical errors or inaccuracies in the content of a website
you want a link from. Contact the webmaster offering this
information and kindly ask for a link to your website in return.
Example 2:
Just straight up contact webmasters directly asking for a link. This has
an extremely low hit rate, but hey, it’s free. Note that you’ll have far
greater success if you call them rather than emailing.
Example 3:
Run their website through a broken link checker like
www.brokenlinkcheck.com and let them know about all the links on
their site which lead to a 404 Page Not Found error (i.e. nowhere). Ask
for a link.
2. Your Money: Paid Links
Did I just say Paid Links? I can almost hear the thunderous wrath of the
Google Gods from across the Atlantic Ocean! Yes, you approach the
webmaster of a website you want a link from, and you offer money to
have a link placed on that website.
Paying for links is a real ‘no-no’ for Google, and if they find out (which is
very unlikely), they could penalise your whole site.
However, that’s not to say it doesn’t work. Cold hard cash is an extreme
motivator. As the Colombian Drug Lord Pablo Escobar once said:
“Everyone has their price. The important thing is to find out what it is”.
Yes, I’m as surprised as you are that Pablo Escobar can teach us a lot
about SEO, but in this albeit somewhat dystopian statement there lies a
certain truth. Almost without exception, for the right price, you can get a
link on any website in the world.
Now, there’s clearly an almost infinite sliding scale to this.
Want to get a link from an uninspiring teenage blogger? I’d say about
$20 - 30 would do it. Want to get a link from www.whitehouse.gov?
We’re talking millions, if not billions in government donations. But, it’s
definitely possible.
Before you lose all faith in humanity, there is one caveat to the success
of acquiring paid links. People will disproportionately raise their price if
your site’s content isn’t in line with their values and goals, and they’ll do
this to a level where the ROI simply isn’t worth it.
In other words, when you’re approaching webmasters with a cash
proposal, don’t waste your time on sites that clearly wouldn’t naturally
link to yours.
Outside of just contacting website owners cold, there are a couple of
formalised avenues for paid links. This is where there’s already a system
in place to purchase the links and you won’t have to take the time
organising the placement in a bespoke email exchange. Make sure you
do your research here (use the Majestic tool) and be certain that, if
you’re going to purchase one of these paid link types, the trust of the
website in question is high.
Examples of Formalised Paid Links
Directories
There are thousands of online directories showcasing different business
information. Some are free to submit your website details but some,
usually niche-specific directories, charge a small annual fee. You’ll be
able to set up an account, punch in your details, and checkout online to
complete the transaction. Your generated link will then appear almost
instantly.
Don’t go too crazy with directory links though. A small number of goodquality directory links is far better than hundreds of questionable ones
which shine a big Google spotlight on your business. Get a listing in the
larger national directories (we’ll discuss these later in Chapter 21 - Local
Area SEO) and then stick to niche-specific directories with high trust.
Paid Placements
These exist on sites that may include a ‘support’ or ‘donation’ page. They
may even offer banner advertising. No matter how it’s sugar coated
though, you’re purchasing a link here. Having made certain the SEO
quality of the site is good in Majestic, make sure you check the actual
page you stand to get a link from doesn’t look like a spammy crack den
full of hundreds of paid links
Sites like these would be easy for Google to spot and identify as a ‘link
farm’, so be careful.
Press Releases
You probably associate press releases with something like a roaring
1930s Los Angeles. Your imagination no doubt runs wild with romantic
imagery of a bygone era.
Against a frenetic backdrop of camera flashes, a mob of journalists in
trilby hats flail note pads and scream attention provoking questions at a
disgraced Hollywood starlet. Or perhaps you imagine a nuclear family
huddled anxiously around a mahogany radio as a news presenter with a
transatlantic accent glibly announces war.
Either way, you’re imagining something pretty untainted by financial
interest I expect.
A press release is an announcement (basically a piece of content) which
is distributed across many influential channels, including journalists and
reporters. They were traditionally used to make writers aware of
interesting news or themes to create stories and articles around, but
today they’re steeped in marketing and promotional intent.
There are handfuls of online press release companies – such as
www.prweb.com – which boast access to vast news networks, bloggers,
and high-authority websites. And for a price, anyone can leverage their
connections and the backlinks they can give.
Using companies like these to build links to your site over the long term
is unsustainable in terms of time and money. However, when you’re first
launching an SEO campaign, the value of a backlink from the news feeds
of these high authority sites is well worth it.
A couple of press releases about your website and the services /
products it offers is a good way of creating a short-term ‘buzz’ around
the brand. Yes, I just used the word ‘buzz’, and yes, I want to punch me
in the face now too. Nevertheless, this buzz has the ability to translate
into a handful of links, a temporary traffic spike, and a chance for some
fleeting social media activity.
So what should you actually be telling the world about in these press
releases? What do you write? Well, anything really. It’s up to you. It
could be that you’ve just hired a new manager. Or perhaps you’re doing
a charity event. Or maybe you’ve just had a website redesign. Whatever
it is, just make it as interesting as possible – embellishing as much as
possible.
The releases serve to bolster the speed in which Google indexes your
pages, as well as help create associations with high-quality syndicate
sites. Some great press release companies include…
www.newswire.com
www.prweb.com
www.ereleases.com
Be prepared to part with a little cash, but it can be well worth it.
We’ve spent quite a while talking about paid links, so it may be worth
reminding you that I’m listing the top 5 things you can exchange for
links. Let’s move on from exchanging your money for links. What else
can you leverage?
3. Your Community: Asking Favours
This is a strategy with an admittedly short life-span. It’s also not scalable.
But hey, it’s free. It’s calling in favours from anyone you know who has a
semi-decent website that wouldn’t mind linking to your site. This could
be friends, family, or anyone that wouldn’t mind helping you out.
If you do do this, make sure you don’t link back to them. Reciprocal links
carry no weight in Google because it’s obvious that you’re helping each
other out just for SEO.
4. Your Expertise
I’ll scratch your back if you…
...link to my site?!
That’s right, this strategy involves offering your skills and expertise,
whatever they may be, to a webmaster in exchange for a link. For
example, if you’re a plumbing website in Queens NY, you’d do well to
offer to fix those leaky taps at the local community centre in exchange
for a link from their site.
This is a great little strategy often overlooked by the SEO community.
I’ve acquired some great links over the years from doing ‘pro-bono’ SEO
consultancy. I’d then ask the organisation if they’d be kind enough to
link to my site from theirs, and to this date I’ve had 100% success rate
with this.
The reason this technique works so well is that people can feel
somewhat affronted when offered money for something they’d never
considered selling. Offer them a service instead and they can taste the
benefits already.
5. Your Information: Content Marketing
In the next chapter, we’ll be talking about the fifth, and undoubtedly
most effective and scalable strategy to build high-quality, relevant web
links to your website – building great content.
Ready? Deep breath.
Let’s go.
Chapter 19
“Content Marketing”
So, what is – quote, unquote – Content?
I may as well have said something as generic as stuff, because that’s
what the word ‘content’ feels like right? Let me break it down for you;
digital content refers to any information communicated in one of many
different forms on the Internet.
A few common examples of digital content are...
• Blog Posts
• Text
• Videos
• Infographics
• Imagery
• Lists
• Reviews
• Case Studies
• ‘How To’ Guides
• Podcasts
• Frequently Asked Questions Lists
• eBooks
Using Content for Off-Page Optimisation
Underpinning everything of real value on the Internet is content. After
all, that’s what the Internet is; a global computer network providing
informational content. Google has become an online behemoth by
sifting through all that information and delivering us the most valuable
content available on the web, relevant to what words we put into their
search bar.
Google has rightly concluded that if a website’s content is genuinely
useful, people will start to talk about it socially. Furthermore,
webmasters are likely to link to that content from their sites because,
doing so augments the content that they’re producing.
For example, if you were reading this on my website right now, I’d likely
add a link to an article by Nathan Ellering called ‘SEO Content Strategy:
How to Skyrocket Your Traffic By 594%’ (how’s that for a clickbait title!),
which would complement and expand on the point I’m trying to make
here.
This link would then give real SEO benefit to the website I was linking to,
and that website would consequently move up in Google.
Simply put, creating high-quality content and housing it on your website
acts like bait. It gives webmasters a reason to link to you. As I mentioned
in the ‘Paid Links’ section, through association, webmasters are placing
their reputation on the line by linking to us. If our site content is poor,
it’ll reflect badly on them. If it’s good, they’ll be happy to associate
themselves with us and it.
Have you ever recommended a movie or product to a friend or
colleague, and it turned out they didn’t like it? How did that feel? We’re
social animals, and if something like this happens we’re disappointed
because we know that the friend or colleague may have judged us
negatively as a result.
There are various techniques to utilise content to attract links to your
site, but I’m going to discuss the main ones I’ve had the most success
with over the years.
Creating Content
Since content marketing’s rise to popularity over the last decade, there’s
been an emphasis within business’ marketing departments to religiously
add crap to their websites come what may. This has resulted in an
obscene amount of generic ‘filler’ pieces being regularly published in
various industries.
However, the effectiveness of generating and publishing content for
improved SEO is predicated on one main factor – quality. If the content
we create and subsequently promote on our website is genuinely not
useful, interesting, or shareable; we might as well not bother.
So, what constitutes ‘good quality’ content?
For the most part, good quality content is any totally unique piece of
text or media which delivers value to an audience. This means that as far
as SEO is concerned, before we create anything at all, we must have a
clear grasp of who our audience is – which in turn illuminates a way of
promoting that content to them later.
Coming Up with Content Ideas: The 5 Questions
The biggest stumbling block to engaging in content marketing for SEO is
working out what on earth to write or produce. Don’t panic. Block out
some quiet time and consider answers to the following 5 questions to
come up with a list of content topic ideas.
1. What’s the Zeitgeist?
If we can work out which articles and blog posts within our industry or
niche are being talked about, shared, and highly engaged with online
already; would that be helpful in working out the kind of content to
produce?
Thought so.
All we’d then need to do then is put a unique spin on a certain topic – or
present the same information in a different way – to have a welltrodden road to producing something that will most likely cause a stir on
the Internet.
So how can you find out what the players and haters are playin’ and
hatin’ about your industry? Thankfully it’s pretty straight forward. Just
visit the online tool…
www.buzzsumo.com
Punch a topic keyword or domain into the search bar to discover the
most trending content in that space. And of course, by ‘trending’ we
mean the most shared and talked about content within social media.
2. What Questions do Your Customers Consistently Ask?
If you’re stuck for ideas surrounding content, just look towards the most
frequently asked questions in your industry. If you’re new to your
particular niche, just search for online forums surrounding your
website’s topic to see what people are asking. Create the best quality
answers to those questions within your articles.
3. Is There Anything Nobody in Your Industry Wants to Tackle?
Being guided by what’s currently trending is very useful insight.
However, unless you put a unique spin on it you run the risk of just
regurgitating and rewording articles. Don’t fall into this trap just for the
sake of producing words on a page. Believe me, it won’t do you any good
when the time comes to promote your content.
One way to ensure you’re a unicorn amongst horses (is that a saying?
Well It bloody well should be!), is to look at what content other people
are publishing, and do the opposite.
Yup. The opposite.
What are people in your industry afraid to talk about? Is technological
advancement changing your industry and most operators are scared of
this change? Embrace the uncomfortable topics within your niche
because these are the themes a lot of people would be very interested
in.
4. Is There Any Viewpoint You Hold in Your Industry That is Contrarian?
Have you been in your industry a long time? Do you have any insight into
your niche which is different from the ‘same old stuff’? If so, share it.
Write articles about it. Produce a video on it. Generate an infographic
about it. Start a podcast through a unique viewpoint. Simply put, just get
your thoughts out there.
5. What Would You Enjoy Reading About?
One of the most straightforward ways of coming up with content ideas is
‘scratching your own itch’. What facets of your industry interest you?
Once you’ve identified them, explore them in your content.
How to Promote Content
So, you’ve got some killer article ideas for your blog or website. What
now? How are you going to get people linking to them?
Good question. Let’s discuss the ways in which we can promote content
to attract industry-relevant links.
Manual Link Outreach
Link outreach is perhaps the most common form of off-page SEO. The
premise goes like this:
1. Create a valuable content piece on your website (usually on a blog)
2. Identify high-trust and authority webpages relevant to your
industry
3. ‘Outreach’ or get in touch with anyone with administrative accesses
to those webpages (site owner, article author etc.)
4. Include a link to the content piece in your communication asking
them to take a look and consider linking to it.
Here’s an example email we could send to build an initial relationship
with a blog post author. A dialogue could be opened with them along
the lines of this...
To: karen@trustworthywebsite.com
From: willcoombe@mywebsite.com
Subject: Karen, you’re going to love this!
Hi Karen,
Hope you’re well.
I just stumbled upon your post at trustworthywebsite.com about the latest SEO tactics.
I’ve just spent the last 4 weeks putting together the ‘Ultimate Guide to Off-Page
Optimisation’ and I think there are a few SEO ‘hacks’ in there that your audience will go
crazy for!
For example, did you know that if you put ‘…’ at the end of your subject line on your
outreach emails, you can increase their open rate by 36%!
Anyway, you can read the full article at https://www.willcoome.com/off-page-optimisation.
Let me know what you think.
Will
You’re probably thinking sending emails like this won’t be all that
effective. And it’s true, for all the emails you send the overwhelming
majority will get ignored. But if your content is genuinely valuable,
you’re not rude, and you use proper spelling and grammar, it can be very
effective. You just need to send it to enough prospective webmasters.
My flagship advice with all manual outreach is to make sure your emails
are as bespoke and genuine as possible. Let me repeat that. Make your
emails bespoke and genuine.
If you’re going to spend your precious time manually writing emails in a
template format then you may as well use email marketing software like
www.mailchimp.com, because otherwise you’re missing the point. When
it comes to outreach emails, putting in the extra effort to increase your
conversion rate wins every time.
The more elbow grease you invest in learning about the prospect you’re
contacting, the higher the chance they’ll read and reply to your emails.
It’s so easy nowadays to learn about the interests and previous work of a
blog owner or article writer. You can check them out on social media
(without stalking them of course!), and include nuggets of bespoke
information in the email intended to pique their interest. Do this and I
guarantee your response rate will soar.
Automated Link Outreach
There are a plethora of software options out there to manage a more
hands off approach to email link outreach if you want. The general gist
of them is to send the emails en masse, then give you a user-friendly
interface with which to keep on top of all the replies.
As I mentioned earlier, if you’re going to perform email outreach,
putting in the effort to go bespoke will win every time. I really wouldn’t
recommend signing up to generic email marketing platforms. However,
there is one exception to the rule. And that’s www.Pitchbox.com.
Pitchbox is what our SEO Agency uses for every single client outreach
campaign, and it’s a formidable piece of artillery. It essentially allows
you to add bespoke words and phrases within templated emails.
It’s the perfect ‘have your cake and eat it’ solution that toes the line
between being bespoke and being efficient. Really, I haven’t done it
justice in this small section, so I’d recommend you watch the short
explainer video on their homepage for a whirlwind tour of just what this
software can do. Be warned though. At nearly $200 / month It doesn’t
come cheap.
Other Forms of Outreach
There’s no ‘one-size fits all’ outreach method that works best. It’s
entirely up to you to consider how you go about contacting a link
prospect (emailing, messaging through social media, phone calling,
sending a gift etc.), and what you then say or write to that prospect for
best results.
Remember, be polite, make sure the content you’re promoting is as
good as it possibly can be, and you’ll start to see great links coming to
your website.
The Broken Link Method
Broken links are links on a website which are pointing to a webpage or
web resource which no longer exists. They come about for many
reasons, including a domain expiring or a web page being moved to a
different address. Whatever the reason, the outcome is the same; the
user is met with a ‘404 Not Found’ error on their screen.
Broken links are bad news for a website’s SEO because non-existent web
resources will interfere with Google’s scan of your site. If you have a
broken link on your website, you’ll want to know about it as quickly as
possible to either remove that link or update the web address of it so
Google can seamlessly crawl your content again.
Remember, to scan any site for broken links, just visit
www.brokenlinkcheck.com.
So, what’s the broken link method then? Sounds like a faddy West Coast
diet, right?
Remember how we chatted about contacting webmasters in order to
alert them to their broken links in the hope to be rewarded with a link to
our site? Well, the broken link method goes one step further in a rather
clever way.
Before we contact the webmaster with any broken link information, we
need to understand what resource that broken link was originally linking
to when the webmaster initially created it. If we can then recreate that
content on our own site, we have the perfect crime in just 3 easy steps...
1. Contact a webmaster alerting them to the fact they have a broken
link on their site.
2. Give them the address of a page on your site that, in terms of
quality and context, has almost the exact same content their page
was linking to in the first place!
3. Ask them to consider linking to your page instead, and optionally
you can offer them $20 to pay for their administrative time.
Who wouldn’t entertain that? The Webmaster will have to login to their
website to address the broken link anyway so it’s no skin off their nose
to link to your newly-created content instead. In fact it’s more effort for
them to edit out the broken link or find an alternative that’s not you.
So how on earth do you find out what the original content looked like? If
it no longer exists what chance do you have of emulating it in a familiar,
yet new and unique form on your site?
Ready to have your mind blown?
Visit something called the ‘Wayback Machine’ at
https://archive.org/web. This thing is like the CIA archives of the
Internet.
Here we can enter the broken link to see exactly what the non-existent
page used to look like. If it’s something we can recreate on our website
fairly easily then we’re in business.
Once you’ve resurrected the content, this is an example of the email you
might then send...
To: karen@trustworthywebsite.com
From: willcoombe@mywebsite.com
Subject: Annoying Broken Link on Your ‘SEO Tactics’ Page…
Hi Karen,
Hope you’re well.
I also operate in the SEO industry, and I come to your blog regularly to keep myself updated
in the latest SEO news and tactics.
I was reading your ‘SEO tactics’ post, and when I went to click on a link to the ‘101 SEO tips’
infographic, it went to a 404 error!
Thought I better let you know before it’s flagged up in your Google search console!
I created a very similar infographic a few weeks back you can find here –
https://www.mysite.com/blog/seo-tips-for-business - if you wanted to update your link
with a working resource?
Anyway, keep up the good work.
Will.
P.S I’ve given your post a quick shout out on Twitter as I thought it was great!
At this point you may be wondering what if they don’t take the bait?
That was a hell of a lot of work for just one link? Fear not, because here’s
the good bit. If you enter the broken link’s URL into Majestic, it’ll reveal
every website on the Internet linking to that same broken bit of content
– all of whom don’t have a clue it’s no longer working.
Neat huh?
Tool Recommendation
If you want to automate finding broken links across the web based on commercial keywords,
our agency uses www.brokenlinkbuilding.com. It’s quite pricey so if you’re just starting out, I’d
try finding broken links manually first. Once you’ve built up confidence in the method, this
software will let you go ‘pro’.
To start with you can find the broken links manually simply by choosing
websites in your industry you’d like to get a link from, then running their
site through brokenlinkcheck.com.
‘Broken Link Building’ Video Tutorial (12:50 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
News and Media is big business. There are just under 1,500 daily
newspapers in the US alone, and they’ve pretty much all got an online
presence. Add to this the huge amount of online media outlets and
magazines in operation, and we can begin to get an idea of the demand
for stories and articles.
Journalists are therefore desperate for good sources of information and
content they can include in their online articles to make their content
appear more thoroughly researched. They’re always on the hunt for
experts in various fields to provide soundbites, snippets and insider
advice. Therefore, websites like www.helpareporter.com (HARO for
short) and www.profnet.prnewswire.com have been created.
These sites form the middleman between writers, who want quality
information on an article topic, and experts in the topic field who can
provide insight.
Journalists and reporters from various online publications will pitch a
query to HARO’s database. Anyone interested in being featured in that
publication can then submit a response to that query. The journalist is
left with a list of responses from which they can choose one, or several,
to include in their article. The successful contributors are usually
referenced in the article with a link back to their website. This represents
a huge opportunity for us as we try to attract good quality, relevant links
to our site.
Let’s say we run a real estate agency website. How would using HARO –
my preferred portal – work in practice?
Well, firstly we sign up at www.helpareporter.com and fill out our
biography, positioning ourselves as an expert within the property
industry. Everyday we’ll receive an email from HARO with all the latest
journalist requests for soundbites and info surrounding our industry
topic.
This is an example of a HARO opportunity that would be emailed to an
active account:
Summary: Estate Agents! What are your predictions for the housing
market this year?
Name: Bill Jones from HousingTimes.com
Category: Real Estate
Email: query-6onx@helpareporter.net
Media Outlet: HousingTimes.com
Deadline: 5:00 PM PST - 27 April
Query: Estate agents, mortgage brokers or financial advisors – what
are your predictions for the housing market for the rest of the year?
Are we in a bubble? Will the government’s lack of supply of affordable
homes support the ever-growing rise of national house prices?
Requirements:
An answer to the above questions in 100 words or less, a 1 or 2
sentence bio. Bonus points for Los Angeles or San Francisco/Bay Area
residents.
If we think we can write a good response, we just need to do a quick due
diligence check on Majestic.com first to make sure the publication is
worth our time. You may have noticed an ongoing trend with Majestic,
but it really is our sentinel guard dog when it comes to sniffing the
quality of a link opportunity. Use it to interrogate any website you want
a link from.
In this particular example of HARO, if we think a link from
www.housingtimes.com is good enough, we can reply to Bill Jones’
query with our response to query-6onx@helpareporter.net.
Check us out! Contributing to society and getting a link for it!
It’s a great way of acquiring links from good quality sources around the
Internet. Better yet, the links coming to your site via HARO are usually
contextual, meaning they’re located within the heart of the body of text
within the journalist’s article.
However, before you get too excited, of course the downside is that
you’re competing with other people to get featured, so the result can be
a poor return on your time investment if you don’t put systems in place.
Without a carefully considered system, you’ll potentially be spending a
lot of time writing, and not a lot of time getting links.
Systemising HARO
The key to successfully systemising HARO for link building (which
incidentally is the same for successful email outreach in general) is to
strike the perfect balance between automation and personalisation.
What follows is a system I’ve developed that’s given me the best
possible results for as little time and energy invested as possible.
Step 1 – Cut Out the Noise
When I first started using HARO to build links to my agency, I diligently
signed up for an account, subscribed to the ‘Business & Finance’ and
‘High tech’ query emails, then awaited my first opportunity. That very
evening, just as the HARO website promised, I received my first couple
of emails summarising the day’s topic-relevant queries.
I trawled the emails excitedly, but alas there were no listings related to
my area of expertise. The next morning, another couple of emails, and
still nothing to sink my teeth into. That evening two more emails. Still
nothing.
Even when the first legitimate opportunity did arise, the constant
barrage of HARO emails flooding my inbox had triggered negative
association with the whole process, and severely impinged my
enthusiasm to respond.
The answer? Why, email filters of course!
I should add that although HARO is free to use, you can directly filter
opportunities by keyword with a paid account. However, at $20 / month
you can only search for one measly keyword. For $50 / month, only 3.
And for what we really need – which is an unlimited number of
keywords – you’ll be stung for an eye-watering $150 / month. Ouch!
See; this book has already saved you $1,800 / year!
Just set your email filters to automatically delete any emails from HARO
which don’t contain your Industry Description. In my case, only emails
which had the exact phrases ‘SEO’ or ‘search engine optimisation’ would
get through.
On the occasion I now receive a HARO pitch roundup email, I know it’s
almost certain there’s a query in there which I can engage with.
Bonus Tip
For the best chance of getting a link, you’ll need to use your company hosted email for
legitimacy. For example, johndoe@doeconstruction.com. However, filtering with host emails
isn’t always the easiest thing to do. To combat this I use something called Google Suite
(gsuite.google.com), which is Google allowing you to use Gmail but with a personalised
domain email address. It’s very cheap, and amongst other benefits, will allow you to filter
emails easily.
Step 2 – Be Selective
Remember the ‘RAP’ rule when it comes to links?
Relevance. Authority. Placement.
Well, it’s time to judge the RAP of the prospective HARO link to
determine whether it will be worth getting. If I’m going to invest my
precious time into generating a response to a HARO query, it better be
worth it.
The ‘Placement’ part of RAP should intrinsically be sorted with a link via
HARO, because nearly all writers will place your soundbite within the
body of content. But is the link relevant? What about authoritative?
Look no further than Majestic.com to find out.
Using Majestic for RAP Link Assessment
1. Visit the website where the article will be housed.
2. Find a comparable page you suspect your link might end up on. For
example, if it’s on the housingtimes.com blog, we can select a fairly
recent blog post. Note that if it’s too recent though, the Majestic
robots might not have scanned it yet and therefore it will return no
data.
3. Put that URL into the Majestic.com explorer.
4. Look at the first couple of Topical Trust Flow categories. Are they in
similar niches to the keywords we’re targeting?
5. Look at the Trust Flow. Is it higher than 10?
If the answer to either (4) or (5) is ‘No’, then you should consider giving
this one a miss. The link quality just isn’t good enough to warrant your
time creating the content to secure the link.
Step 3 – Template as Much as You Can
The first two steps in my HARO for SEO systemisation process should
disqualify a huge percentage of queries already, leaving the cream of the
crop for our attention and time investment. We’re now ready to write
some responses.
But even at this stage, we still want to reduce as much of the work as
possible to make building links through HARO scalable. So, any content
that will likely be repeated on numerous HARO submissions needs to be
templated.
All reporters and article writers will usually want to prequalify you as an
industry source. This means they want to do their due diligence to make
sure you’re not just a 15-year old in your bedroom (no offence to my
nephew). Of course if you actually are a 15 year old in a bedroom, try to
omit your age and location from the template!
Many writers will ask for links to your social media profiles, and perhaps
request a short bio of yourself. This means we should save an email
template ‘bookended’ by pre-populated sections. That way, you’ll be
ready to pounce on any HARO email you want to follow up.
For example, I have a template email that I copy and paste for every
HARO submission:
Hi {NAME},
By way of introduction, my name is Will Coombe, and I am one of the co-founders of a
successful search engine optimisation agency based in Central London, UK.
Our company has been operating in the SEO space over the past 9 years, consistently
innovating and achieving our clients (mostly SMEs) exceptional 1st page results in Google.
Anyway, I saw your question about {ENTER INFLUENCER’S QUERY} on HARO and thought I
could definitely add some value to your readership by sharing my thoughts and experience.
{ADD CONTENT}
Hopefully, the above has provided some useful insight surrounding {TOPIC/QUESTION}, and
if you’d like some clarification on any of the points above, please don’t hesitate to get in
touch.
Kind Regards,
Will
P.S Please feel free to check out my personal website: http://www.willcoombe.com/ for
more content.
Step 4 – Re-appropriate Existing Content
Have you noticed all these steps are trying to make sure we expend as
little energy as possible? This is because if we’re going to scale anything
well, we need to take the ‘grind’ out of the equation. Anything worth
doing (especially in SEO) requires a certain amount of effort, but
minimising the pain of bespoke work is essential.
As a business, if you’re not creating good content on a regular basis,
then you should be. Doing so, coupled with effective outreach, is one of
the best ways to build links (and traffic!) to your site. When you start to
accumulate a healthy number of content assets, you’ll find that you can
repurpose a hell of a lot of that content for other activities.
For instance, I regularly receive HARO queries regarding SEO Tools. It’s
weird; it seems when people run out of ideas about what to write about,
they’re compelled to write about SEO tools. Ironically, I already have a
great little post on my favourite SEO tools, so whenever I see a HARO
query on the topic, I head straight for that. I’ll copy and paste the
relevant sections into the template email discussed above, throw in a
few extra bits bespoke to the specific question, and I’m done.
If appropriate, take existing content you’ve created elsewhere and use it
as the bulk of the HARO response. There’s no point duplicating your
work. The only exception to all of this is if the reporter is writing for a
powerhouse link website such as BusinessInsider.com or Forbes.com. If
you’re going to win big, you’ll need to really think about your reply here.
Step 5 – Stand Out
Take a few minutes to consider what the influencer is really asking
within their query, and see if you can think of unique angle to take.
Remember, if it’s a desirable link to acquire, there will likely be hundreds
of people putting in submissions too. If you can be unique and offer true
value, then you absolutely should.
Also, try to ‘think’ like the journalist, and be very quotable in the reply.
After all, that’s all they’re really after – a quote or soundbite. So don’t
make your response overly long. The influencer is going to have to sift
through submissions and formulate an article based on them. Any
response that doesn’t get to the point quickly, and specifically answer
the question posed will likely be discarded. Make sure you read the
question and answer it as concisely as possible.
Once you’ve put all that effort into writing a response, don’t forget to
save it in a word document where you can reference it later. If you’re
proud of the content, you should have it on hand in the future to use it
again when yet another person asks you for same kind of insight.
To help illustrate everything we’ve talked about, I’ve created a HARO
video tutorial for you.
‘HARO’ Video Tutorial (18:51 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Guest Posting
Although an older SEO tactic, guest posting still carries weight as an offpage optimisation technique. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s exactly as
it sounds – you write a guest post article for a webmaster on their site
(usually a blog).
The recent popularity of content marketing – creating and sharing online
material to stimulate interest in one’s service or product – means that
webmasters are churning out articles and media at a faster rate than
we’ve ever seen before. Everyone knows Google loves updated fresh
content on a site, but after a while webmasters run out of intellectual
and creative steam.
As SEOs, we can take full advantage of this trend by contacting websites
who are actively involved in publishing content. We can offer to write an
article, make a video, design an infographic – the list goes on and on.
Of course, we’re going to offer it for free. But, all we’ll ask for in return is
to be able to include a contextual link (within the body of content) back
to the page we’re trying to rank ourselves. If they run a website whose
success is predicated on how engaged it keeps an audience, then they’ll
likely welcome any help they can get with content creation.
There is an element of outreach to this technique. We not only need to
identify the sites we feel would be open to us creating content for them,
but we also need to be able to contact them, and present an offer
enticing enough for them to buy into the arrangement.
Like everything that works in SEO, this tactic has been taken advantage
of in the past. There are unscrupulous vendors across the Internet who
offer paid guest posting opportunities on websites that are all part of the
same network. Essentially it’s just one big link farm in disguise!
As long as you’re resourceful and careful though, guest posting is still a
great way of building links. My advice is to be very selective with the
websites you approach. If the prospective website is worth it, generate a
great piece of content for them and their audience.
An ancillary benefit of guest posting, apart from the SEO value for your
site, is that you’ll likely get a lot of direct traffic from the post itself too.
A Quick Word on Content Quality
Take it from me, the time and effort you need to invest in getting links to
your site without having good content to leverage, just isn’t worth it.
I remember years ago sitting in a New York SEO conference as the
speaker rattled on about “content is king” and how everyone should
focus on generating “great quality 10x content” relevant to their
industry. At the time, I thought it was a load of baloney and all I needed
to actually do was concentrate on getting backlinks.
Boy was I wrong.
It pains me to dwell on how naïve I was. After years of resistance, our
marketing agency decided to overhaul the entire service we offered our
clients, making content creation the cornerstone of our SEO campaigns.
And the results? Well they’ve been little short of remarkable.
From an SEO perspective, we’ve been able to build links, increase page
engagement and boost rankings for our clients, faster and easier than
we’ve ever done before.
Not only this, but the content itself has boosted conversion rates of our
clients’ products and services directly.
Suggested Reading
For the definitive guide to content marketing, I can thoroughly recommend ‘Content Machine:
Use Content Marketing to Build a 7-figure Business with Zero Advertising’ by Dan Norris.
One of my biggest tips here is to not fall into the trap of throwing up
random articles for the sake of it. Adding to the tide of crap polluting the
Internet is not helping anyone (including yourself).
So, before you begin to curate content, you should ask yourself:
• Who is this content for?
• What is the aim for the content?
• How do I make my content better than what currently exists on the
web for this topic?
If you think about these 3 things before you start creating content, you’ll
have infinitely more success in your off-page SEO efforts.
Chapter 20
“Using Social Media for SEO”
When business owners and marketing managers contact our agency to
enquire about SEO, one of the most frequently asked questions we
receive is: “Do you include social media?”.
This question troubles me.
It does so because the vagueness embedded in the question lays bare
the fact that the enquirer doesn’t really know what they’re asking. The
online marketing industry has done a great job of persuading the
average business owner they need to ‘do’ Social Media to succeed in
business.
Heavens to Betsy. This really frustrates me.
Or to be more down with the kids, let me put it another way.
#eyeroll.
Without understanding how social media applies to your industry and
business (if it does at all), using social media as a means of directly
attracting sales is quite misleading.
Social Media Marketing
Let’s get back to basics people.
Once and for all I’m going to clear up how on earth social media applies
to SEO. In fact, I’m going to lucidly explain how it applies to anything
when you’re trying to market a product or service. To understand it all,
we need to compartmentalise social media into 3 distinct cash camps:
• Organic Social Media Marketing
• Paid Social Media Marketing
• Social Media for SEO
Organic Social Media Marketing
Whenever I get asked if our SEO packages “include social media”,
whether they realise it or not, the enquirer is talking about organic social
media marketing,
Organic social media marketing is the unicorn of social media that you’ll
find discussed and touted ad nauseam in various online articles with
catchy titles like…
‘10 Ways to Grow Your Business’
‘How Facebook Can Scale Your Company’
‘Does Your Website Have a Social Presence?’
Business.com; Entrepreneur.com; they’ll all littered with them.
So, what’s being sold?
Well, it’s the idea that a business develops a social community of loyal
followers across various social media channels. Said business then
interacts with that community, sharing posts and responding to
customer comments. This then builds brand loyalty which results in
more sales for the business.
Does that sound realistic to you? Me neither.
Unless you’re a Goliath brand already, like Apple or Coca Cola; or you
have something incredibly exciting and innovative to sell, like Tesla, the
idea that you will be able to…
1. Build a large following to your business’s social media pages
naturally
2. Effectively sell to this audience
...is absurd (in my humble opinion).
Who the hell ‘likes’ a Los Angeles Steel Contractors’ Facebook page?
Who ‘tweets’ on the Twitter profile of an e-commerce store selling
camping equipment? When’s the last time you had your car serviced,
and found yourself compulsively reaching for your smartphone to start
intertwining your social life with your auto servicing needs? I mean
really.
Look. I don’t want to rain on your parade; quite the opposite. I simply
want to make sure you’re pulling all your time and resources in the best
direction that’s all. Put simply, unless your product or service lends itself
to explosive social media buzz – which 95% of business models don’t –
you’ll be wasting your time.
Social media isn’t popular because it connects consumers to producers.
It’s popular because it connects friends, family and loved ones. So please
don’t expect your customers to ‘follow’ or ‘friend’ your business because
they bought something from you or used your service.
The only way you’re going to get people to ‘like’ your business page is if
there’s something in it for them. And more importantly, if there’s
something in it for them regularly. To create an organic following, think
of social media as a conduit to offering…
• Competitions
• Discount Codes
• Free Product Tests and Tasters
• Physical Coupons
Go ahead and offer a ‘25% off’ coupon on your product in exchange for a
‘like’. Announce a free prize for 10 lucky followers of your business page.
Things like these are the only way you’re going to see engagement from
an organic social media audience. Don’t think for one second this
audience will be interested in your business when you stop offering
things that essentially reduce your bottom line profit.
Unless you have a heady mix of exceptional content unavailable
anywhere else on the Internet, a tranche of pre-existing loyal followers,
and pure luck, get the words ‘business’, ‘social’, and ‘viral’ out your
head.
Thanks for understanding. Now, shall we look at the more actionable
and positive sides to social media?
Paid Social Media Marketing
Paid social media is different. This has nothing to do with ‘tweeting’ or
interacting with your business’s existing group of followers. This is where
we use all the demographic and behavioural data a social media channel
has on its users to laser-target ideal customers. We then serve those
users carefully considered adverts from within their very own account.
It’s unbelievable really. You sign up for a Facebook account, and in the
spirit of social expression amongst your friends and family, you fill out
your profile in great detail. You volunteer information regarding your
occupation, your age, your gender, your nationality, where you live, your
hobbies, your interests, your education, your salary level, your race,
what brands you like; the list goes on.
If a company I own decides the target demographic for a new product is
black men over 40-years old, living in the San Francisco Bay area, with a
keen interest in motorsport and DIY, then Facebook will allow us to
display adverts in the social feed of those exact users.
Not similar. Exact.
If organic social media marketing is dead, paid social media marketing is
energetically dancing on its grave. As the graph below shows, a
staggering 81% of the American population has a social media profile.
Further still, nearly 2 Billion people worldwide use social media
platforms of one type or another.
These numbers are still growing.
Any medium that captures the attention of 2 Billion people on a daily
basis is going to be mouth-wateringly exciting to marketers. Especially if
you can target segments of that population based on their interests.
Paid social media marketing is, and will continue to be, huge for
businesses.
Social Media For SEO
Finally we’re here. Social Media and how it actually relates to your
website’s optimisation. Ready Freddy? Why don’t we kick off with
something that’ll jolt the needle off the record player in a loud screech...
“Social media marketing doesn’t directly help SEO”.
Yup. I said it. Have you spat out your morning cereal of ‘Ess - Eee - Ohhh-
s’? It’s a Search Engine Optimisation themed cereal brand I really think
could sell like hotcakes. Don’t steal the idea okay?
Ahem.
So why am I talking about social media in a book on how to get your site
higher in Google if social media doesn’t directly help you? It’s because
marketing aside, Google has made it clear that it does include social
media signals in its ranking algorithm.
Note the word ‘signals’.
What does this mean? Well luckily for us it means we just need to do a
few things right, and give off just that – social media signals. Now
doesn’t that sound more manageable than dedicating weeks of your life
to fruitlessly attempting a viral organic social media campaign?
Social media signals can be broken into 3 groups
1. Building a Brand Through Social Media
2. Freshness
3. Social Links
Let’s go into some more details on each.
Signal No.1 – Building a Brand Through Social Media
Google always tries to show its users reputable, trustworthy websites
when they’re searching for products or services. It’s looking to discount
‘fly-by-night’ operations in favour of proven entities; and one common
trait that established businesses share is well populated social media
accounts cementing their brand name online.
To have success with a business that has online presence, first and
foremost, you need to make Google undeniably aware of your business
identity – making sure you rank at the very top of Google for your brand
name keyword.
If someone ‘Googles’ your business. You want to be damn sure you
dominate the majority of the organic search results with entities other
than your website itself. Signing up to as many social media platforms as
you can stomach will help achieve this.
In the final SEO Blueprint section of this book I’ll guide you through
which accounts to create and how to create them, but for now, just
make sure you understand that all we’re trying to do is secure your
brand across the Internet, as well as show Google your fingers are in as
many ‘online pies’ as possible.
Signal #2: Freshness
You know when I said that organic social media marketing – interacting
with a community, sharing posts and responding to customer comments
– was useless? Well, that was only partly true.
If you’re trying to increase sales and add money directly to your bottom
line through organic social media, then forget it. However, regular
interaction with a community through social media can give off
‘freshness’ signals that your business operations are well and very much
alive. All thing being equal, Google will favour a business which appears
to be ‘breathing’ over one that seems to be atrophying, and one way it
can deduce health is social media activity.
Further still, if you’re releasing posts that link back to your ranking
pages, you’re signalling to Google that the content on those pages is still
fresh and relevant.
Before you get carried away with 25 tweets an hour and 150 Facebook
updates a day though, think of the goal as just to have activity rather
than meaningful process. Like the movie ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’, we just
want to pass your site off for alive with some basic activities, not make it
perform ballet. Google doesn’t care.
When our SEO Agency takes on clients, we concentrate on keeping three
main social profiles (usually Facebook, Twitter and Google +) active.
We’ll schedule industry-relevant posts, promote content from the
company’s website, and try to nurture a following where possible.
If we do this as a minimum, Google will think the company is always
operating at full steam. And that’s all we care about.
Signal #3: Social Links
Even though we only concentrate on activity within three social
platforms, I like to set up as many other fully-populated social media
accounts for the brand as possible. We might not be active on platforms
like Reddit and Tumblr, but we still want them because most accounts
will allow a ‘nofollow’ link from their domain to our website within the
profile page.
Even though they give a nofollow link, Social media domains are usually
extremely high in authority – so it’s a great way of diversifying your
website’s link profile.
Chapter 21
“Local Area SEO”
When we place a geographical location next to a commercial keyword in
Google – for example ‘construction company manchester’, Google gets
to work in a slightly different way than a regular non-geo targeted query.
The Big ‘G’ will speedily return a local search engine result page.
If your business is very much locally based, we need to make sure we
cater our SEO for this.
Your Website’s Content
Foundationally speaking, for Google to think your business is highly
relevant to a specific location, your site’s content will also need to reflect
this.
For example, if you’re an architect in New York City, you’ll want to have
more than just an address in the Big Apple. You should be building out
pages and content totally targeted to the city and the city alone. Perhaps
a news feed page on the latest municipal projects. Or a guide to the
evolution of New York’s skyline. Whatever you think will work.
All things being equal, if Google crawls two architect websites, and one
is littered with keywords specific to the location, that business will rank
higher for that location.
Local Search Engine Results Pages
A local search engine results page in Google (local SERP) is characterised
by the inclusion of map listings. The map has taken many different
guises over the years, but at the time of writing, it’s currently a
rectangular, ‘letterbox’ section.
Underneath, there are three business listings featured with their contact
information on show. Known in the SEO world as the ‘Snack Pack’, these
are the businesses Google deems to be most relevant to the location
entered.
The most important thing for me to mention here is that to feature in
the local maps you must have created a Google ‘My Business’ profile. If
you haven’t, stop immediately and go to…
https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/business
Or if you’re reading this in the U.S.A:
https://www.google.com/intl/us/business
Set up an account pronto. It’s intuitive to create, and I’ll be here waiting
for you when you’re done. I won’t go on without you.
[AUTHOR WHISTLES AS HE DILIGENTLY WAITS]
Done it? Good – let’s continue.
Don’t Underestimate the Google Map Listings
When the 3 local map business results are displayed on the page, clickthrough-rates (the proportion of people clicking on a listing) for these
websites are significant. In fact, they almost equal that of the normal
organic listings shown below the Snack Pack.
Luckily, if you’re a local business, you can have your cake and eat it here.
If you’re featured on the map listings and the organic results, you can
steal two areas of ‘real estate’ on the results page and totally dominate
your local industry. In fact, if your business also engages in Google Ads
pay-per-click advertising, there’s the potential to list a website in three
different places.
How’s that for a monopoly?
So how do we get our website smothered all over the map listings? The
answer lies in prostrating yourself to a Demi-God – Google’s ‘Local’
Algorithm.
Google’s Local Algorithm
There are a few different ranking factors for the maps which see us
divert briefly from the SEO you no doubt bought this book for.
All the ranking factors we’ve discussed up to now do contribute to the
Google map rankings, but not as much as a few other, seemingly
unrelated signals. These are:
• The quantity of mentions of your business name, address, and
phone number (NAP) across the Internet. We call these ‘citations’.
• The consistency of your ‘NAP’ information across the Internet.
• Your number of 5-star Google reviews.
Let’s look at each one in a bit more detail.
Getting Directory ‘Citations’
Business directories are simply online portals which list reams of
companies’ industry and contact details under the guise of it being a
place of reference. Well, I say ‘guise’; they are really there. It’s just that,
to be honest, they’re a bit of a cash cow for the companies who produce
them.
Whereas once upon a time something like the Yellow Pages was
genuinely useful, when produced in an online format, the advent of
search engines has rendered them of questionable value. However, we
must play the game here because links from directories are usually quite
powerful.
When focussing on building a certain type of link – be it directories,
comment links, guest post links, and so on – we need to make sure we
don’t overdo it and create an unbalanced, unnatural link profile. We
should therefore restrict our directory submissions to location specific
and niche / industry specific ones. The focus is on quality not quantity.
There is a fair bit of debate regarding how quickly one should acquire
directory submissions. Should we batch our productivity and sign up to
100 directories all at once? Or should we spread them out? The simple
answer is to go with the latter, because remember, when in doubt go
with what’s logically the most natural to Google.
A good rule of thumb is to submit your site to 10 directories per week
manually. Yes, I’m afraid some elbow grease is required here. There is
automated submission software out there which can submit your
company information automatically, but I’d strongly advise against
them.
Most directories will require email link verification before your website’s
profile goes live, and some will even drop your listing if they suspect
automation has been used to submit your details. So it’s time to cancel
your lobotomy with the doctor – you’re going to self-medicate instead
by filling out directory submissions.
In case you hadn’t guessed, they’re really boring to do.
To get even more SEO value you’ll need to sign up to 2 other groups of
listings as well – local, and industry specific. To accumulate a list of
directories for both, simply search online by typing ‘{insert industry}
directories’ and ‘{insert industry} directories {insert location}’ into
Google.
Aim to submit to 10 national directories for the first week, 10 local for
the second, 10 niche / industry specific for the third week, and then 5
national / week for the next 3 weeks after that.
Finally, a word of warning.
Be prepared for upsells that will make you want to slam your head
repeatedly against a brick wall. As you submit your site to each directory
you’ll notice a running theme – they all want you to opt for their
‘premium’ listings under the premise of increased exposure. Remember,
we’re only after the backlink, so couldn’t care less (or should I say ‘could’
care less, if you’re my American cousin), about a bigger feature for your
company on the directory page.
Ignore all attempts to make you go ‘pro’, which I'm afraid will be
solicited via phone and email. Trust me, they eventually die down after a
few weeks, but you’ll just have to grin and bear it until then.
It’s All About the N.A.P!
‘NAP’ stands for Name, Address and Phone number. There are countless
places on the web where these crucial nuggets of info on your local
business are, or could be, mentioned. These ‘citations’ can be located on
websites including:
• Business Directories
• Forum Signatures
• Blogs
• Social Media Platforms
• Press Releases
• Guest Posts
• Q & A Platforms like Yahoo ‘Answers’
• Image and Video Descriptions
• etc.
If you sat down and thought long and hard about where your business’
name, address, and phone number are right now, I bet you could come
up with a list as long as your arm. Practically speaking though, it’s the
business directories that will comprise the lion’s share of your NAP
citation locations.
So why does this matter?
Well, it matters in exactly the same way consistency in your personal
details across various agencies matters when your credit is scored.
Consistent, aged, and plentiful mentions of your NAP displays to Google
you’re trustworthy and established.
If you’re trying to get a mortgage approved, and you’re known as Mr.
James Pilsner to your bank, but Mr. J. M. Pilsner to your utilities
companies, that’s a tiny inconsistency. Yes it’s small. Yes it’s against all
common sense that this means you’re unlikely to keep up with your
monthly repayments, but it’s nevertheless something that doesn’t quite
add up. Remember, we’re dealing with computers and algorithms here –
not people.
The more places Google sees your business referred to in exactly the
same way across the web, the more Google is confident you’re a real
and trustworthy enterprise.
It also makes sense on a practical level as well – if your business has
inconsistent contact information, Google will become confused as to
who you are and where you’re located.
So, let me hammer this home one more time, because I can’t emphasise
it enough. Ready?
Make sure your NAP is exactly, character for character, word for word,
number for number, the same across the Internet.
You might think this is easy to assure, but for example ‘Orsino’s
Restaurant’ is NOT the same as ‘Orsinos Restaurant’.
That’s right, the inclusion or exclusion of something as trivial as an
apostrophe means Google may think these are two different businesses.
45 Bedford Rd, Benton, Newcastle. NE4 5DX
is not the same as...
45 Bedford Road, Newcastle NE45DX
Yes – spaces, abbreviations and the exclusion / inclusion of extra address
info can confuse Google as well. Sobered up now? What about phone
numbers?
+44 1737 766 292
is not the same as...
01737 76 62 92
The ‘+44’ and spaces in different places deem the information different
in Google’s eyes.
The more trust The Big ‘G’ has in your business, the higher your position
in the map listings will be. It’s as simple as that. Not only this, but your
positions will rise in the regular organic results as well.
So, next time you’re plucking up the courage to ask for that guy or girl’s
phone number in the bar, why not make sure they’re legit– ask for their
NAP and citation locations.
Don’t do that.
Your Business Category
We can’t mention the importance of NAP without talking about Google’s
categorisation of your business. Along with your name, address and
phone number, directory websites will usually assign you an industry
category in order to help visitors find and understand your services.
Be very careful when choosing the right service in the drop down list for
your business.
Your Google My Business page needs to coincide with the categorising of
your company around the web, so choose the right one.
We’ve had many clients whose categories are ever so slightly
mismatched, and the poor results in Google locally were noticeable.
Google seems to keep updating its list of business categories as well, so
keep making sure your business is listed in Google under the correct one
for your product or service. If your business is listed in many different
business categories across many different websites – even if those
differences are only contextually minor – it sends red flags out to
Google.
How to Check Your NAP Citation Locations
You’re probably feeling overwhelmed with how many NAP citations you
need to now check and potentially amend. But where do you even start?
How do you know where on the Internet you’re mentioned?
Good news, because there are a number of different companies out
there that will swiftly check the quantity, quality and consistency of your
website’s NAP. My personal favourite is...
www.whitespark.ca
Once you familiarise yourself with it, you’ll have access to a wealth of
information concerning how your business is being listed on the
Internet. It’ll also provide you with websites and directories where your
site is not listed but your competition is. You can then build a list of
citation opportunities that you can submit your business to later.
5-Star Google Reviews
The final piece of the local SEO puzzle is the accumulation of positive
Google reviews.
Simply put, the more genuine, highly-rated Google reviews your online
brand receives, the more Google will be willing to show their users your
business over others.
The 6 Steps to Get (Natural) Google Reviews for Your Business...
1. Visit www.pleper.com's Google review link generator (located in
their tools section).
2. Enter your business name and select your business (you must have a
Google My Business profile already generated for this).
3. Click on ‘generate URL’.
4. Copy the generated short URL.
5. Share this link with any existing customer who would be willing to
leave your business a good review.
6. The link will take the user directly to a pre-populated 5-star review
for your business. All they then need to do is click on the ‘submit’
button.
If you don’t have that many happy customers yet, ask people in your
network (family and friends) to leave your business a good review. As
long as they have a separate Google account and a unique IP address,
the review should be accepted. Be sure to randomly stagger their
submissions over a period of weeks to appear natural though.
‘Local Area SEO’ Video Tutorial (30:04 Mins)
Visit www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources for a more detailed tutorial.
Summary
1. A website with relevant content to the location you’re trying to rank
in Google maps for.
2. As many good quality citation listings as possible.
3. Meticulously consistent ‘NAP’ information associated with those
listings.
4. The correct business category in your Google My Business and
directory submission listings.
5. As many authentic, high-rated Google reviews as possible.
Chapter 22
“eCommerce SEO”
For most websites, we’re granted the luxury of focus when it comes to
off-page optimisation. An SEO campaign is usually built around a handful
of keywords that relate to the site’s core offering – which is usually just a
few specific products or services.
In this instance, we can create a manageable number of pages on our
site, optimise them for our keywords and then focus all our off-page
optimisation efforts on those pages.
But what if you run an eCommerce website? What if the more pages and
the more products you offer the better?
You’ll likely have hundreds, maybe even thousands of different product /
category pages on your site, which can clearly represent an
insurmountable task to give special SEO attention to each and every one.
Therefore, we need to take a different approach and ensure the correct
structure is in place to maximise the website’s success.
Is eCommerce Too Competitive for the Newcomer?
Before we get ‘into the weeds’ about how to approach eCommerce SEO,
let me start out by telling you upfront – selling multiple products online
is competitive. Really competitive.
You’ll likely be up against huge brands; companies with vast product
lines and the ability to freely undercut you in price. Amazon, eBay,
Walmart, Best Buy, Tesco, to name but a few. Not to mention a plethora
of other small-to-medium eCommerce stores built by entrepreneurs like
yourself.
DID YOU KNOW
Amazon invites 3rd Party vendors to sell their products on their website for a commission.
Nothing ground breaking, right? But did you know, Amazon is notorious for analysing the
sales data created by this 3rd party inventory, then using that data to undercut and compete
with vendors like you directly? It’s like welcoming you into their home, working out the most
tender parts of your body, then eating you!
I’m not going to lie, competing in the eCommerce marketplace will see
you up against websites with very high domain authority and trust in
Google. Their consumers will have probably purchased from them in the
past and so will be comfortable engaging with their sites. It’s also very
likely they’ll be dominating the first page of Google for the products your
site is trying to sell too.
So before I have to talk you down from the ledge or unplug your toaster
next to the bath, what’s the good news? Is eCommerce too competitive
for newcomers?
Ready for an answer about as satisfying as miso soup? Here it is...
“Yes and no”.
I’m afraid it’s the dreaded ‘d’ word again – yes, it ‘depends’.
Remember, first and foremost Google wants to show the most relevant
search results to its users. Let’s pretend you have a relatively new
eCommerce website dedicated to selling, say, camping equipment.
CampingStuff.com we’ll call it. And let’s say one of your products is a
‘Yellowstone 2-man tent’.
It goes without saying that we’d like our Yellowstone 2-man tent product
page to rank at the top of Google when someone types that keyword
into the search bar. But of course, a lot of larger, more general
eCommerce stores with high domain authority websites are currently
ranking on the first page.
It’s hopeless right? Wrong.
Even though campingstuff.com is a new website with much lower
domain authority, if we’ve correctly optimised it, Google will know that
campingstuff.com is much more relevant to the camping industry than a
general vendor like Amazon.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re in for a fight; and a tough one. We’ll have to
do a great job with our off-page optimisation to grow domain authority
as much as possible, but we do have a chance of getting on the first page
in front of our customers.
If you’re thinking of becoming the next Amazon, ranking highly for a
generalised online inventory across various unrelated niches, forget it.
You’ll need an astronomic marketing budget (both online and offline)
and several years to even get close! But if you can specialise, you have a
fighting chance.
If in Doubt, Niche Down
The moral of the eCommerce story is:
You can become a very profitable online store if your product offering is
niche enough.
If in doubt, become the specialist store. If I had tents to sell, like the
above camping example, and I wanted to be an online success as quickly
as possible, I wouldn’t stop at specialising in camping, I’d go one stage
further and sell only tents, positioning my entire site as the number one
online supermarket for tents. Hell, I’d probably go one step further and
become the only eCommerce site specialising in ‘kids backyard tents’.
The important takeaway is this – I’d let the market and my ability to
compete in it decide what inventory I sold. Most people do it the other
(and wrong) way round by negotiating specific inventory deals, then they
worry about selling it.
eCommerce Site Structure
The structure of an ecommerce website is very very important. Sensibly
organising it not only gives Google the best chance possible of grasping
what industry and keywords your pages are targeting, but it also conveys
the importance of your pages.
Do you remember in Chapter 13 when we chatted about siloing websites
and Chad’s surf shop? Well, recalling the theory behind that will put you
in good stead for understanding how we need to structure eCommerce
sites.
Remember that the further a page is from the root directory, the less
SEO weight it carries– as seen through Google’s eyes.
For example, from an SEO perspective,
http://campingstuff.com/childrens-shoes
will be viewed as more important than...
http://campingstuff.com/camping-clothing/footwear/childrens-shoes
In fact, going overly ‘deep’ with your site architecture with URLs like…
http://campingstuff.com/camping-clothing/footwear/childrens-shoes/timberlandbrand/leather/classic-lace-ups.html
...will see your product page so far away from your homepage that –
forget Google – your actual visitors won’t want to climb into the Russian
MIR submersible required to dive down there.
And yet, having every single page on the root directory, or close to it, for
uniform importance of your products across the entire site will result in
an incredibly messy and illogical architecture that will confuse Google.
We must balance these seemingly conflicting factors to organise the site
sensibly, whilst giving the pages on our site as much SEO power as
possible.
Even for sites selling thousands of products, I’d recommend the lowest
number of subdirectories as possible, whilst still maintaining a logical
site architecture. For me, I would never have a page on my site further
than 2 subdirectories away from the root directory. For example...
http://campingstuff.com/camping-clothing/children/classic-lace-ups.html
This makes for a good compromise between ‘deep’ and ‘wide’ URL
structures.
Keyword Research For eCommerce
In an eCommerce website we’re going to need to conduct keyword
research for both category pages, and deeper product pages.
So what’s the difference? What kind of keywords are we trying to hunt
for?
On the whole, the category pages will be targeting the broader, shorter
keywords with more search volume, and the product pages will be
targeting longer keywords related to the specific product. In fact, these
will include all kinds of ‘long tail’ keyword variations of that product.
Remember, a long tail keyword is just that – long.
An example of a long tail keyword would be: ‘timberland hiking boots for
kids camping in the summer’.
On-Page Optimisation For eCommerce
We need to make sure the On-Page optimisation for any ecommerce site
is absolutely flawless if we’re going to give the big competitors a run for
their money.
Everything you’ve learnt about On-Page SEO up to now is exactly the
same for an eCommerce store, but there are a few differences.
Namely the page title and meta description should be treated slightly
differently based on the Google user’s attitude to purchasing particular
products online.
What do I mean by that?
Maybe I don’t even know? Maybe our whole conversation has been an
illusion? Maybe you’re just a brain in a jar? I mean, what is reality?
Ahem. Ontology aside, let’s say I live in Toronto. And let’s say I’m looking
for a service-based business like a physiotherapist for example. I’ll type
something like ‘physio in toronto’ into Google, and from the ten results
I’ll likely click on a couple of websites to peruse.
I’ll take the time to read their content. I’ll likely weigh up the services
offered and the skill sets / experience of the practitioners, before then
making a decision on who to choose.
However, if I’m buying a commoditised product, I’m going to have far
less patience.
Let’s say I’m going camping and I’m just your average Joe (of course we
all know I’m “...kind of a big deal” and I have “...many leather-bound
books”), but let’s just say I am indeed your ‘meat ‘n’ potatoes’
everyman.
I’ll likely already know what I want to buy, and punch something like
‘best 2 man tent under $50’ into Google.
When presented with the results, I’ll have far less time and patience for
any real judicious consideration. All I want to see is an acceptable
website that sells the product I want for as cheap a price as possible, and
maybe one that offers free shipping too.
This is true for most Google users.
The distinction means that eCommerce sites battle it out in the SERPS
via the ‘click appeal’ of the search result itself, just as much as they do
from straight up website quality. Consequently, you need to really think
about the elements which make up the text and sales patter of your
website’s search result – the title and meta descriptions.
Page Titles For eCommerce
You have 60 characters in which to include your primary keyword whilst
also making sure your listing is total ‘click bait’.
The best way to marry the two together is to add keyword ‘modifiers’.
Sounds like a fancy lingual mathematics term, right? It just means we’re
going to add a spicy sales word or two to a primary keyword to
transform it into conversion fodder, whilst making it more long tail.
For example, let’s say your target keyword is ‘2 man tent’. The modifiers
might be…
• ‘best 2 man tent’
• ‘cheap 2 man tent’
• ‘2 man tent free shipping’
• ‘2 man tent reviews’
• ‘2 man tent deals’
So, an example page title with a modifier included could be:
‘Best 2 Man Tent With FREE Shipping | CampingStuff.com’
Meta Descriptions For eCommerce
Just like the page title, this is your chance to call out all the benefits of
buying the products from your website. Remember, we have to grab
their attention, so use words like ‘FREE’, ‘Discount’, ‘On Sale’, and ‘Deals’
within your meta description to appeal to that subconscious urge the
average consumer has to grab a bargain.
An example meta description might be:
‘Click for amazing deals on 2 man tents! For the whole of this month, get
15% off your order. All our tents come with FREE shipping as standard’
Using Google Ads to Steal Page Titles & Meta Descriptions
If you’re at all unsure about what to write for each page’s title and meta
description, look no further than the top of Google where the paid
adverts are housed.
The Google Ads Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising platform is – for any given
search keyword – filled to the brim with companies who’ve spent a lot of
money split testing numerous adverts with various marketing and
keyword angles.
Grab a ladder, hop on their shoulders, and straight up copy what they’re
doing with their page titles and meta descriptions.
Be sure to only do so with big players like Amazon.com or other
household names though. This is because you can be assured they’ve
spent the right time and money evolving their ads to a final form which
optimises conversions. Your average small to medium business Google
Ads campaign owner won’t necessarily have done anything more than
slap up any old Ad.
Schema Markup for eCommerce
Yes, it’s schema again. I know it’s technical, and I know we couldn’t care
less about the difference between JSON-LD and Resource Description
Framework in Attributes, but there’s one big reason we should be using
schema markup on our eCommerce web pages – rich snippets.
Schema markup allows us to tell Google the context of certain elements
on our webpage so they can display rich snippets to the user in the
search results to enhance their search experience.
What Are Rich Snippets?
Rich snippets are the wonderful extra bits of information we see on
Google’s search result listings which help the user infer what’s on the
destination website without having to actually click on it. Things like
ratings & reviews, product photos and prices, and even videos; can all be
added to search results.
Why Do We Want Rich Snippets So Much?
Rich snippets can significantly increase the number of people clicking
through to your website, make Google place you higher in the rankings,
and also increase the quality of that resulting traffic.
Any advantage you can gain over your competition (like a star rating
displayed on your listing which makes it more clickable) needs to be
taken in order to succeed.
What Rich Snippets Do We Want to Consider Including on Our
eCommerce Site?
Our website’s product pages are the main locations for placing the
Schema required. This will give us the best chance of Google showing
the rich snippets.
The four kinds of snippets most important to an eCommerce website, in
my opinion; and in order of potency; are:
1. Reviews & Ratings
Implementing schema to display product or service reviews and
ratings usually generates a pictorial ‘star rating’ next to the product’s
SERP result. The visible star rating, if depicting more than 4 out of 5
stars, has been proven to significantly increase a listing’s clickthrough-rate.
2. Product Name and Pricing
If you’re specifically competing just on price for a particular product –
and you’re one of the cheapest options out there – it’s a great idea to
add the schema code which displays the name and price of that
product from right there in the search engine result page. Your
potential customers will overlook the fact that they’ve never heard of
your brand if they see a nice juicy discounted price.
3. Limited Time Offers
The use of scarcity in sales is very powerful. You know what I’m
talking about: ‘Offer Expires in 2 Hours!’, or ‘30% Off if You Order in
the Next 4 Minutes 22 seconds’. You see it everywhere in marketing.
And you see it everywhere because it works.
If you’re running a deal on a product, or even if you’re not, using a
‘limited time offer’ rich snippet can work wonders when it comes to
installing a sense of subconscious urgency in your prospective
customer's mind before they’ve even clicked on your website.
4. Product Availability
You may consider using the schema code which generates the
‘product availability’ rich snippet if the product you’re selling is in
high demand or not that easy to get elsewhere. The little ‘in stock’
sign underneath your page title tells your customer you’re locked,
cocked and ready to sell them what they want.
Chapter 23
“How to Stop Google Penalties
Wrecking Your Livelihood”
Crime never pays kids.
Criminals are constantly developing techniques and tools to keep them
one-step ahead of – and away from – the long arm of the law. Equally,
the police and authorities strive to educate themselves in the latest
underhand tactics, putting procedures in place to detect crime and serve
justice to the perpetrators.
This very much reminds of me of the relationship between certain
‘shadier’ SEO practitioners, and Google.
The temptation to break the Big ‘G’s terms and conditions to manipulate
its algorithm and gain superior results is great. Many SEO practitioners
indeed develop and use tactics on their websites that clearly violate
Google’s terms of service to gain an advantage.
To combat this, Google has a huge – and I mean huge – department
dedicated to learning about these mis-practices. Their findings go on to
influence algorithm updates.
This ‘cat-and-mouse’ game has been played for the last 15 years, and
continues to this very day.
Even if you vow never to partake in any obviously underhand tactics
with your SEO, you can still fall prey to the collateral damage of a Google
update by innocently trying to be ‘clever’.
There’s no list of things I can say you shouldn’t be doing, simply because
there are so many different permutations of bad practice. Instead, it’s
safer to have a firm grasp on the types of Google penalties a site can pick
up, so you can be your own judge and jury as to whether what you’re
about to do is a good idea or not.
Remember my Golden Question in Chapter 7 you should always ask
yourself:
'If I was a Google Engineer, would I reward, punish, or be indifferent to
the SEO about to be performed?'
Live by this, and you can’t go wrong.
I mean sure. Maybe it doesn't’ necessarily apply to love, health, and the
meaning of life. But certainly for your SEO, it’s the question you should
ask yourself each and every time before you lay down any commitment
or money to an optimisation technique.
What We Mean By ‘Google Penalty’
The word ‘penalty’ is banded around the SEO community like air
fresheners in a sewage dump, and quite honestly it can sometimes be
misleading.
What most people are actually referring to by the word is essentially one
of two things:
• An ‘Algorithmic’ Penalty – A significant update to Google’s
algorithm which causes an overnight impact on a website’s
rankings.
• A ‘Manual’ Penalty – A failure to pass a manual review of your
website by a member of Google’s Search Team.
How to Tell if You’re Affected by a Penalty
Good question. Well, let’s get the easy one out of the way. With a
manual penalty, all you need to do is check your website’s Google
Search Console.
If you haven’t already set up your website on Google’s Search Console,
you should. It’s got some great information about how The Big ‘G’ is
currently crawling your site, and whether any technical issues have been
detected – including whether you’ve been manually penalised or not.
Algorithmic penalties on the other hand are much harder to diagnose.
This is because Google releases very little public information about
changes to its algorithm at the time they roll them out.
One way of checking if you’ve been hit by one is to plug your domain
into SEMRush, make sure ‘Domain Overview’ is selected, then press
‘Search’. Scroll down to the paid and organic traffic graph and you’ll
notice small Google ‘G’s along the time axis.
Clicking on these ‘G’s will reveal the algorithmic update pushed out.
Thus, transposing your website’s traffic against the timeline of historical
algorithm updates can sometime explain traffic drops.
However, if you’re trying to diagnose the impact of a non-historical
algorithm change – that is, a brand new update – the only way to tell is
by a huge and sudden drop in rankings.
You’ll of course need to check your Google Search Console for a manual
penalty, but if there isn’t one, batten down the hatches; we’re going to
need to spend a lot of time diagnosing the problem.
There are so many moving parts in SEO, with such a delayed feedback
loop (the time from when you implement an SEO technique to seeing a
resultant shift in rankings), that diagnosis of why you’ve been penalised
can be very difficult.
If you’ve misdiagnosed the penalty, any changes you make to recover
could compound the problem and cause further ranking drops, as well as
making the real issue even more difficult to see.
Convinced you’ve got a penalty now? Try to relax. Trying to diagnose a
drop in rankings can be as dangerous as consulting WebMD. Got a
headache? Cancer. Got a tingling elbow? Cancer. Got stiff muscles?
Cancer.
If you follow the On-Page and Off-Page optimisation principles laid out in
this book, you shouldn’t ever have to worry about penalisation. That
being said, becoming as knowledgeable as possible about the historical
algorithmic updates will help no end. You’ll become a better SEO
practitioner, as well as gain the ability to troubleshoot your site if you do
ever take a big hit in rankings.
The ‘Big 6’: Google’s Algorithmic Penalties
‘Panda’
This was one of the first algorithmic penalties released (circa 2011) to
target spam websites. The purpose of the Panda algorithm update was,
and is, to keep low-quality or ‘thin’ content from showing up in search
results.
Low quality content can broadly be described as...
• Poorly written content.
• ‘Spun’ content that’s pretending to be unique. ‘Spinning’ software
automatically swaps words in an article for synonyms whilst
maintaining the contextual integrity of the original. Sneaky!
• Content that’s very short in length. If there’s hardly any content on
a page, how can it be useful to a Google user? Exactly.
• Content that’s been plagiarised / copied directly from another
online source.
All pages on your site will be sniffed by this – not so cuddly – Panda, so
make sure it likes what it smells.
‘Penguin’
Penguin is an algorithm update which tries to safeguard against the
abuse of Google’s biggest ranking factor – links. If the algorithm suspects
unnatural or spammy links are pointing to your site, it will hold you back
in the rankings.
As per this book though, if we’re building a natural and diverse link
profile, we shouldn’t have any dealings with the ‘Penguin’.
‘Mobilegeddon’
No I didn’t make that word up. It’s really called ‘Mobilegeddon’, I
promise you.
This update is Google’s penalisation of websites which are unfriendly on
mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. By ‘unfriendly’, I really
mean ‘bad user experience’.
This penalty only affects the mobile search results and is avoidable by
making sure you have no mobile usability issues listed within Google’s
Search Console for your site.
‘Top Heavy’
This was an update penalising websites which were affecting the user
experience by putting large amounts of adverts ‘above the fold’ (the
visible section of a website seen before you must scroll down).
If you’re not flooding the top of your website pages with obstructive
web elements, you’ve got no need to worry about this one.
‘Payday’
There are a handful of ultra-competitive online industries which produce
an eye-watering amount of money if you can rank a website at the top
of Google for them.
Some are examples are:
• The Payday Loan Industry
• Casinos
• Viagra
• The Weight Loss Supplement Industry
Because of their revenue potential, many search engine optimisation
practitioners have operated in these industries over the years using
every possible tactic to manipulate Google and get their site onto the
first page. The Big ‘G’ is well aware of these heavily fought after niches,
so it decided to bring in the ‘Payday’ penalty in 2013, which was then
further updated in 2014.
Simply put, this algorithmic penalty casts more scrutiny on websites
targeting these morally questionable or highly profitable industries. Site
owners in these industries need to be extra ‘clean’ with their on and off
page optimisation to avoid being penalised.
‘Pirate’
Based on copyright reports, websites would be served a ‘Pirate’ penalty
if their content violates piracy laws by giving their visitors stolen,
copyrighted material. The penalty specifically targeted ‘torrent’ websites
which allow the sharing of media and software.
Unless you’re directly stealing protected content, you don’t need to
worry about this penalty.
Google Manual Penalties
As mentioned earlier, a manual penalty will be issued after a human
being (Google employee) has physically reviewed your site with their
eyeballs, and decided that something is violating Google’s Search
Guidelines.
Unlike algorithmic penalties, once you’ve identified and rectified the
cause of a manual penalty, you can then submit a reconsideration
request to Google. For example, if you had a series of spammy links
coming to your site, you could stop Google taking them into account by
using its Disavow Tool.
If Google’s satisfied you’ve ‘cleaned up your act’, it’ll lift the penalty, and
your rankings (and traffic) should go back to normal.
Here are the main reasons people get manual Google penalties:
Unnatural Links
If the reviewer suspects the links coming to (or from) your website aren’t
natural, and have been artificially created through a link scheme or
network, then you’ll see this penalty in your Search Console dashboard.
Spam
Spam is an all-encompassing word for anything related to your site
which is very low-quality or questionable in intent. For example…
• Poor quality links to and from your domain.
• Excessive or malicious cloaking (showing the site crawling
‘Googlebot’ something different than what the visitors are seeing).
• Scraped (copied) content.
• Automatically generated (spun) content.
If the manual review flags up spam associated with your site, you’ll see a
spam message in your Google Search Console. Easy huh?!
Thin Content
Even though there’s a specific algorithmic penalty for this (Panda),
there’s also a manual penalty targeting it. If Panda doesn’t penalise you
for poor content on your site, then a manual review of it may do.
Local Penalty
A quick word on local listings if I may. If you break Google’s guidelines
for local businesses, then your company’s map listing will be removed.
It’s as simple as that.
For example, if you’re using a PO Box with a virtual office address to
represent your business (i.e. you don’t actually have an operational
office there), Google will likely penalise your map listing.
4 Generally Naughty SEO Techniques to Avoid
• Keyword stuffing by using an excessive amount of target keywords
in your content.
• Using something called CSS styling to hide keyword-rich text from
the human eye.
• Owning Personal Blog Networks (PBNs) which have the sole purpose
of linking to your website.
• Linking to a site in exchange for one back to you.
When you begin to understand how Google works, you may start to
consider different tactics in order to get the best results possible with
your website in the search engines. Again, I know I’ve hammered this
home more than a hammer literally sprinting home, but no matter what
SEO technique you’re about to use, always ask yourself the common
sense question:
'If I was a Google Engineer, would I reward, punish, or be indifferent to
the SEO about to be performed?'
If you think the tactic you’re considering passes this question (and will
continue to do so in the future) then go for it. You’ll likely avoid any
existing, or future, Google penalty by using a bit of common sense like
this.
In online industries worth going after, there’s no such thing as a fast
buck from quick SEO. As you’ve seen in this book so far, the SEO
practices that get results are the ones you need to think about and take
a bit of time and effort to implement. Do them well, and you’ll never
need to worry about the destructive wrath of a Google penalty
PART IV –
THE 3 MONTH SEO BLUEPRINT
Chapter 24
“Accessing the Free Video
Accompaniment Series”
For those of you who may have skipped right to this section of the book,
let me quickly explain about the accompanying video series.
For those who didn’t, and already know about it, please open your
computer, go to YouTube and type in ‘hilarious cat videos’; I’ll be with
you in a minute.
Whenever you see the following camera icon…
...that means there’s an accompanying tutorial video to what I’m
discussing, and you should grab your computer or tablet for a more
detailed run through.
Just go to www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources and you’ll find me. Note
however that you’ll need the receipt number you got when you bought
the book. If you purchased it from Amazon it’ll be the order number you
were emailed.
Chapter 25
“How to Use the Week-By-Week
SEO Blueprint”
This is it. 12 weeks of your time. Your website. SEO.
This is what you’ve likely been waiting for if you bought this book based
on its title; a real world three-month SEO plan to give your website the
best possible chance of reaching the top of Google.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve now benefitted from my nearly a decade
of experience in trawling SEO forums, attending SEO conferences,
working on hundreds of clients’ websites, and generally reading
absolutely everything I can on the topic of SEO. And, if I’ve done my job
properly, you should be refreshingly convinced that SEO really isn’t hard,
as long as you take a common sense approach.
As we discussed earlier in the book, there’s no ‘magic bullet’ in SEO. The
best anyone can do to get their site to the top, is to use their knowledge
and experience to apply the best practices. You’ve leveraged my
experience. Now it’s time to put your newly gained knowledge into
practice.
With this in mind, I’m going to lay out exactly what I’d do if you gave me
your new website and asked me to get you page-1 results on Google
within three months.
Just before I do though, let me be brutally frank with you.
Ready?
You might not get the results you want for the work you put in.
Welcome to the frustrating world of SEO my friend. If you follow
everything in this book that shouldn’t be the case. But it could be. SEO
can change the fortune of a business, but If you’re just too risk averse,
stick to Google Ads and other pay per click advertising.
Now, before you try to work out the best way to lawfully document all
your SEO activities so you can sue me if you’re not in the number 1
position of Google in exactly 12 weeks for any keyword you choose, let
me state some obvious disclaimers.
Firstly, I’m aware of the limits in volunteering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ SEO
plan for a website. I’ll be basing the following plan on a local, service
based business website as this will be as all-encompassing as a possible.
But whoever you are, as long as you use the common sense rule and
apply some bespoke planning to your site, you’ll do well.
And of course, no one can guarantee results in Google. Following this
plan is the best possible foundation I can advise. Depending on the
competitiveness of your industry, getting to page No.1 may take more
than 3 months, or it may take less. Like all things with SEO, commit to a
good long-term strategy and you will come out on top eventually.
Lastly, a quick note on the time you dedicate to all this. The blueprint is
broken up into week long chunks, but that doesn’t mean you’ll to be sat
at a computer Monday to Friday mainlining coffee into the night. No,
quite the contrary. Many of the tasks can be completed in only a few
hours, but it’s important to not overload you so each week consists of a
series of bitesize SEO chunks.
There’s also a secondary reason behind such a chronological spreading
of the work – it’s natural in Google’s eyes. For example, the last thing we
want is dozens of links coming to your site at once. Plus, we want to add
content to your site over a sustained period to tick the freshness box
with Google.
Ready?
Alright, let’s get going! Oh, and you’ll find a PDF version of the SEO
blueprint in the resources section of
www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources so you can print it if you want.
Good Luck!
Chapter 26
“3 Months to No.1 Blueprint”
“Week 1 – Keyword Research & Penalty
Checking”
End of Week Goals
• Choose 1 x primary keyword per topic page (service page).
• Catalogue a minimum of 20+ ancillary keywords to scatter throughout each topic page’s
content.
• Create a spreadsheet of the average keyword density for the top 5 websites on Google
for each primary keyword.
• Set Up Google Search Console.
• Check your site for no clear indications of a Google penalty.
Reference Videos:
‘Keyword Research’
‘SEO Majestic’
This first week kicks off by using two online tools – Google’s Keyword
Planner Tool and UberSuggest (https://ubersuggest.io) – to spitball some
‘common sense’ keywords based on the services you offer.
For example, if you have a local Chiropractor business, you could plug in
seed keywords like…
• ‘chiropractor chicago’
• ‘sports injury chicago’
• ‘sports massage chicago’
• ‘back problems chicago’
Create a list of all the keywords related to your service which represent
high commercial intent and have reasonable traffic numbers, then
allocate one primary keyword to each service / product page you’re
trying to get to the top of Google for. You should end up with a small
handful depending on the range of your offerings.
Now, It’s time for a quick due diligence session. It’s time to check out the
websites in the top 5 of Google for each primary keyword to make sure
the competition’s surmountable. Using Majestic SEO, compare their
sites’ number of backlinks, referring domains, Trust Flow, and Citation
Flow to yours.
This is by no means definitive, but be prepared for an SEO fight if they
have…
• 150+ more referring domains than you
• A Trust Flow >20 points greater than yours
• A Citation Flow >30 points greater than yours
Once you have your list of approved primary keywords, again using
Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest, note down at least 20 ancillary
keywords surrounding the primary topic keywords. These will be used
later to pepper your content with.
Now, using http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density, note the
keyword densities for each of the top 5 ranking websites in Google for
each primary keyword. We’re after the average, so creating a small
spreadsheet will help.
Finally, check your site doesn’t have any clear Google penalties imposed
on it, because we want to make sure you’re not starting with a filthy or
warped canvas. If you haven’t already, set up Google Search Console and
check for any manual penalties. If all clear, do a more circumspect check
of algorithmic penalties by using the traffic graph on SEMRush.
“Week 2 – Set up Keyword / Traffic
Tracking, and Structure Your Site”
End of Week Goals
• Set up a Serpfox.com account and add your keywords, or create a spreadsheet if
manually tracking.
• Set up a Google Analytics account to monitor your traffic.
• ‘Silo’ your website.
• Audit the site structure to ensure short URLs for key pages.
• Place primary keywords within the URLs of key pages.
• Create brand new pages if applicable.
Reference Videos:
‘Siloing’
‘URL Structures’
The last item in this week’s goals – ‘Create brand new pages if
applicable’ – needs a little explaining. As you look at your website now,
it’s very likely you have a totally generic services page which details what
you do. For example, if you’re a plumber it's probably just a page saying
you’re a great plumber!
However, depending on what the keyword research yielded, you may
need to create brand new pages to become the contenders for being
number one in Google. Remember, websites don’t rank in Google.
Website pages do. So, we need to make sure you have a separate page
for every primary keyword you’re going after.
Note that we only need to create the pages in your overall URL structure
at this point, rather than building the content to go on it. That comes in
week 3.
“Week 3 – Adding Content and Performing
On-Page Optimisation”
End of Week Goals
• Have each service page 1000+ words long.
• Add 2 outbound links to authority sites on each ranking page of your site.
• Pepper your content with keyword synonyms.
• Ensure keyword density on ranking pages is similar to the other sites ranking on page
No.1.
• Where appropriate, include internal links to other services/pages on your site.
• Set up SEO Yoast WordPress Plugin.
• Optimise all ‘H’ tags, ‘Alt’ tags, IMG filenames, and ‘Title’ tags.
• Create page titles which include primary keywords.
• Write SEO Meta Descriptions.
• Audit your website’s load speed.
• If still left over from week 1, register your website to Google Search Console.
• Submit a standard XML sitemap, and a Video XML sitemap to Google through Search
Console.
• If appropriate include an embedded YouTube video.
• Create Rich Snippets using Schema Markup.
Reference Videos:
‘Siloing’
‘SEO Yoast’
‘Title Tags’
‘Header Tags’
‘Sitemaps & Noindexing’
‘XML Video Sitemap’
Brace yourself because this week is a big one. There’s a lot to fit in, so be
prepared to work hard for the next 7 days. If you need the work to bleed
into week 4 a little then no problem.
You’ll need to perform all the tasks for each of the pages you’re
targeting primary keywords for (homepage, individual service pages,
category pages, product pages, and so on).
“Week 4 – Issue Two Press Releases”
End of Week Goal
• Issue 2 x Press Releases. Simple!
Just in case you’ve had any work spill over from last week, the next 7
days are deliberately quite easy. There was an awful lot to cover in Week
3, so it’s time to relax a bit or tie up any loose ends from having added
content and performing the On-Page optimisation.
Daiquiri cocktail anyone?
Before you get too drunk though, don’t forget to submit at least 2 press
releases this week.
You can choose from…
www.newswire.com
www.prweb.com
www.ereleases.com
That’s it!
“Week 5 – Establish Your Business Entity &
Online Brand”
End of Week Goals
• Set up a Facebook.com Profile.
• Set up a Twitter.com Profile.
• Set up a Linkedin.com Profile.
• Set up a Google My Business Profile (business.google.com).
• Set up a YouTube.com Profile.
• Set up a Pinterest.com Profile.
• Set up a Tumblr.com Profile.
• Set up a Blogger.com Profile.
• Set up an About.me Profile.
• Interlink all social accounts.
• Add social media schema markup.
• Set up social media post scheduling on www.hootsuite.com (optional).
We’re getting social this week, and to do this we’re going to create a
handful of interconnected social media and online properties. We’ll then
tell Google, through schema, that these online properties all represent
the brand relating to our website.
Setting up each profile is very intuitive and won’t require any specific
input from me. Don’t try to get clever – instead just set them up totally
naturally as if you would for your own personal social media. The only
departure from the norm for SEO purposes is to interlink the accounts.
That is, make sure each one has a link somewhere in it to the other 8. It
doesn’t matter where.
Of course it’s very likely you’ll already have a Facebook or Twitter profile
for your business and you regularly post / tweet. However, once you’ve
created the other 6 social media accounts it’s time to mention how you
interact with all 8.
On average, it’s a good idea to post on Facebook and Tweet every other
day. For the rest, twice weekly updates will suffice. As for what you’re
doing on these sites, remember that for SEO purposes it really doesn’t
matter. It’s only to do with the signals any activity on them sends to
Google.
To aid you in the somewhat laborious task of constantly updating these
social media accounts, a great tool to use is www.hootsuite.com. For
about $25 / month, it allows you to pre-populate and automatically
schedule activity on your accounts, so to me it’s very much worth it.
“Week 6 – Submit Your Site to Directories”
End of Week Goals
• Set a schedule over the next 3 weeks to submit your website to 10 national, 10 local,
and 10 niche directories.
• For this week, submit your URL to the 10 national directories.
• Set up reminders to submit your site to 5 national directories per week thereafter for 3
weeks.
Reference Videos:
‘How to Get on Google Maps’
Directory listings are important no matter whether you’re a local or
national business, but if you are local, they’re an even bigger deal
because of the map listings. This week is all about embarking on the (I’m
afraid mind numbing) task of submitting your website to online
directories.
Set yourself reminders and schedule the following...
Week 6 – 10 x National Directories
Week 7 – 10 x Local Area Directories
Week 8 – 10 x Niche / Industry Specific Directories
Week 9 – 5 x National Directories
Week 10 – 5 x National Directories
Week 11 – 5 x National Directories
I would only recommend continuing to build directory links to your
website beyond week 11 if you’re trying to compete for the very top
position on the Google Map Listings.
In this case, you’ll need to carry out more surgical research into the
competition, and in particular the citations associated with their sites, by
using Whitespark (https://whitespark.ca). Reference the tutorial video
called ‘How to Get on Google Maps’ for more help with this.
For a list of suggested national directories to submit to, download the
‘National Business Directories’ PDF in the resources section of
www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources.
“Week 7 – Set Up a HARO Account and
Systemise it”
End of Week Goals
• Set up an account with Help a Reporter Out (www.helpareporter.com).
• Systemise and filter HARO’s email delivery.
• Write an email template HARO response.
Reference Videos:
‘HARO’
This week we’re setting up HARO so it can run on autopilot. Well, I say
‘autopilot’; the goal here is to minimise work and filter out the noise, so
it’s not going to be completely hands off.
Once you’ve completed this week’s tasks, you’ll have a sustainable link
generation model that’s totally free to use.
“Week 8 – Review Accumulation”
End of Week Goals
• Solicit Friends & Family for Google reviews.
• Sign up to Yelp.com, Trustpilot.com, and one other industry specific reviews website.
• Use Schema Markup for existing reviews.
• Systemise a post-sales request for reviews.
Reference Videos:
‘Schema Markup’
You may have noticed last week was a fairly light one. I’m sure you
completed all the HARO tasks in record time and had the rest of the time
off lying on a beach in the Cayman Islands.
Well, week 8 is similarly chilled out, because from next week onwards,
the work is going to ramp up. So enjoy the next 7 days sorting your
review accumulation.
The first thing to do this week is get in touch with all your friends and
family to leave you a Google review. However, make sure you don’t ask
everyone at once – ending up with a barrage of reviews from nowhere,
followed by tumbleweeds. Google will smell a rat immediately if you do
this. Instead you must stagger asking for reviews.
Once you’ve done that, you should sign up to at least 3 online review
portals. I recommend Yelp.com, Trustpilot.com, and one other industry
specific site (for example, if you own a restaurant, FourSquare.com
might be a good choice). For all your existing online reviews, you should
then implement Schema to increase your chances of the reviews
showing up in the SERPS.
Finally, you need to systemise the accumulation of online reviews. There
are many ways to do this, but the simplest method is to print a specific
set of business cards which ask for a Google review, and then hand them
out to every customer or acquaintance. The important thing is to
remove as much friction as possible for anyone good enough to leave
you a review by walking them through the process step by step.
So you can see what I mean, I’ve included an example of a business card
asking for a Google review in the resources section of
www.3MonthsToNo1.com/resources. Please note this card is in addition
to your existing business card. Not instead of.
“Week 9 – Content Research and Editorial
Calendar Creation”
End of Week Goals
• Using Buzzsumo.com as a muse, come up with at least 15 content ideas (e.g. articles,
videos, audio, imagery).
• Perform keyword research for every piece of textual content.
• With an aim to produce a high quality piece of content every 2 weeks, attribute
publishing dates to each content idea (starting from week 10).
• Produce your first piece of content in preparation for promotion and outreach beginning
next week.
• Create a spreadsheet detailing each piece of content’s title, primary keyword, ancillary
keywords, completion & publishing dates, and any further notes on the piece’s angle.
Reference Videos:
‘Good Media’
This week we’re getting all our ducks in a row for a content marketing
campaign that will run on rails. We want everything in place to avoid
having to ever think in the moment about what to write or how to write
it.
I’d like to expand upon the second task this week – ‘Perform keyword
research for every piece of textual content’.
It should be noted that the primary objective of creating high quality
content on your website is to solicit backlinks from people who identify
with and like said content. Nothing more. However, that doesn’t mean
we shouldn’t at least try to make them rank organically in order to boost
exposure.
For every article you write, perform some basic keyword research in
order to establish a primary keyword to integrate into the title, as well
as uncovering at least 20 ancillary keywords and synonyms you can
pepper throughout the main body of text.
Of course, it goes without saying that you should perform the same OnPage SEO with these articles you’d do for any other piece of content on
your website.
“Weeks 10, 11, and 12 Onwards – Content
Promotion and Outreach”
End of Week Goals
• Cut your teeth with the Broken Link Method of outreach – try it at least once.
• Release content according to your Editorial Calendar.
• Coincide social media posts with every content release (using hootsuite.com if possible).
• Perform manual outreach with every content release.
• Perform automated outreach using Pitchbox.com (budget permitting).
• Solicit bloggers in your industry to allow you to guest post on their sites.
• Perform a press release with every content piece being published (budget permitting).
Reference Videos:
‘Broken Link Building’
If you’ve made it all the way to week 10, you’re a superstar. Give
yourself a hearty slap on the back and write yourself a credit note for
success, because you’re already way ahead of what your competition
are doing.
This week onwards will form the backbone of your Off-Page SEO
campaign. You’re going to constantly be releasing useful and fresh
content, which not only pleases your users and generates links, but
courts Google’s algorithms too.
I’d like to mention at this point, that if you can afford to, you should
ditch all manual outreach and go with Pitchbox.com. Every. Single. Time.
Due to its exorbitant price tag of nearly $200 a month I can understand if
you choose to do manual email outreach instead. But you’d actually be
leveraging your time better if you did some overtime shifts at work, or
generally moved finances around to help free up the money to pay for it,
because manual outreach takes a lot of time.
And time, my friend. Is money anyway.
A Final Word of Advice for Week 10
Onwards
To come full circle as I set you off in the blue yonder, I’d like to end this
SEO blueprint by reminding you of something very important.
‘There is no certainty that the time, effort and money you invest in
generating good-quality content will return a reward in a short
timeframe.’
‘Ouch!’ right?
I talked about this at the beginning of the book, but It’s a common
theme with search engine optimisation, and indeed building a business
in general. In fact, it’s the primary reason many people quit SEO early.
They may intellectually understand that results will eventually come, but
several weeks in, their emotions get the better of them and they get
disillusioned by the apparent lack of progress of their bank balance. They
start revising their original strategy, or worse, give up the quest for
organic rankings altogether to concentrate on the next ‘shiny’ form of
online marketing.
What I’m getting at is, you need to have faith.
If the content you’re creating is good, and you have channels to promote
that content online, links to your site will follow, and so too will
rankings.
I’ll say that again, because it’s important: If the content you’re creating is
good, and you have channels to promote that content online, links will
follow, and so too will rankings.
Paid advertising is different. You create your advert on Google Ads or
Facebook or Twitter. You pay your money and traffic lands on your site
immediately where, hopefully the traffic makes you more money than
you’ve paid out.
However, with this certainty comes more cost and less reward. Why?
Because everyone’s doing it. Anyone can throw up an advert and feel
the sugar rush of an immediate website conversion. However, there are
relatively few people willing to put the consistent work in to generate
great content when there are no immediate, tangible results.
Unlike other forms of online marketing, we need to be patient and have
faith that if we keep creating valuable content which people within our
industry engage with, links and rankings will follow.
And with rankings, comes money.
Chapter 27
“You Just Gave to Charity –
Thank You!”
You don’t realise it but you just gave to charity!
Thank You!
10% of all proceeds from this book are going directly to an organization
very close to my heart – Unicef
There are so many charities out there all doing wonderful things for
people, but it’s my firm belief that when a person gives to another, they
should to start with the basics of human needs if that’s what’s
desperately required – and that’s what Unicef do.
They provide clean drinking water, vital medicine & vaccines, food, and
emergency shelter equipment – to name but a few critical forms of aid –
to people who otherwise would be in severe need.
So why am I talking about this?
Well, if you can spare it, I’d really appreciate it if you’d donate just $10
to Unicef to help support their work. If everyone who buys this book
does that, it’ll make a huge difference.
And your $10 contribution to that big impact, might not sound like
much, but as you’ll see from the example Unicef budgets below,
everything makes a difference.
Donation
Sanitation Provided
$3.11
Collapsible 68-ounce water container
$5.00
Simple, sanitary hands-free tap
$5.73
Bucket with tap
$81.51
Safe drinking water kit for one family
$414.70
Hand pump for well water
$753.83
Water distribution kit with 6 taps
$1,430.06
Water tank kit for 1,000 people
If you can afford to give more than $10 then fantastic! But even if you
can give less than $10 please please do. As you can see from the
examples above, even a $5 donation will buy a sanitary hands-free tap
so don’t think it won’t make a difference.
Thank you!
And on the subject of the little things adding up to make huge
differences, if you can spare an hour and eight minutes of your life, a
man called Darren Hardy can change your life forever.
Just go on YouTube and type in…
‘Be Successful: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy’
You’ll be met by a video which will change the way you look at doing
little things like giving $10 to charity forever.
Seriously, watch this video. It’ll make you more successful in health,
relationships, and finances than you ever thought possible.
Chapter 28
A Fond Farewell
Well this is it.
We’ve laughed. We’ve cried. We’ve done some SEO. We’ve watched
some videos. We’ve donated to charity. We’ve done it all basically. And
all that’s left for me to do, with genuine lament that our time together
has come to an end, is to wish you good luck.
I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading this book.
I hope you’ve gained valuable knowledge from the video tutorial series. I
hope you’ve garnered insight from the PDF resources. I hope you’ve
built confidence that you can do SEO yourself. And most of all, I hope
you’ve set yourself the goal of tomorrow being your own personal
‘Week One’ of the 3 Month blueprint.
Take action, and results will follow.
Now, you paid for all of that when you bought this book. Sure, the video
series might have been above and beyond what you expected, but you
don’t owe me anything. I get that. We’re even stevens.
But I want to mention reviews quickly, because once you turn the last
page of this book, I’d be beyond appreciative if you’d review this book
on Amazon.
I don’t expect you to leave me a review – good or bad – unless you’re
genuinely compelled to. And I’m not conceited or naive enough to think
that just asking you to will make a difference. You’re either the sort of
person who would naturally leave a review, or you’re not.
But for anyone who doesn’t normally leave reviews, or maybe leaves the
occasional one, I’d really appreciate it if you’d take just a couple of
minutes to give other Kindle readers your honest opinion of my work.
You don’t even have to write more than one sentence!
In just a moment when your Kindle asks you to rate this book, I’d really
appreciate it if you’d tap on your device to cast your vote of what you
think.
“Pretty please?!”
Anyway, I leave it up to you. Back to my fond farewell!
Whatever your website or business model is, SEO is going to
supercharge it faster than a Tesla supercharging station – which, is in
fact rather slow compared to just filling up with gas at the local Texaco.
But it does give me a fitting analogy with which to leave you.
If paid advertising is Gas. SEO is Electric.
It’s not fast. It’s not sexy. But it is sustainable. And even better, the
return on investment is eye-wateringly high. What you forgo in
convenience, you gain in massive returns. So, as we part ways I urge you
not to get distracted by flashing gas stations. Stick with SEO, and your
business will go further than any vehicle on the street.
If you ever need any help, or just want to connect, please feel free to
email me at will@willcoombe.com.. I can’t promise to get back to you
quickly, but I will get back to you. It’s my name after all.
Anyway, Good Luck!
Will
‘3 Months to No.1 – The No-Nonsense SEO Playbook to Getting Your
Website Found on Google’
By William. L. Coombe
Copyright © 2019 by Will Coombe
All rights reserved.
Published in the United Kingdom
3 Months to No. 1
is a trademark of Will Coombe and is used under licence.
ISBN: 978-1546370673
V1.
2nd Edition
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
All information given in this book ‘3 Months to No.1 – The No-Nonsense
SEO Playbook to Getting Your Website Found on Google’ is based on
individual research and does not constitute financial advice. William
Coombe and the author are a registered trademark and cannot be held
responsible for the consequences of actions taken, or any consequences
through inaction, as a direct or indirect result of the information in this
book. All information is used at your own risk. SEO results can go up as
well as down. Whilst all content is checked for accuracy, no information
contained within this book or in any of its links is to be used without
taking professional business and marketing advice first. Anyone seeking
advice should consult an Independent Advisor. The author of this book is
not liable or responsible for any other websites or services linked to or
from it. It is forbidden to reproduce any part of this book in any form or
medium. Reselling is prohibited.