Having a good product or service doesn’t mean you’re entitled to rank well in Google.
Sure, we all want those coveted page #1 rankings, but in order to achieve that you’ll need to optimise certain aspects of your website for search engines with a little thing called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.
I’ve put together a 5 Day SEO Challenge for you to improve the rankings of your website.
Before we get into that, though, here is a technical checklist for both SEO beginners and experts and a guide to keyword research that you’ll want to check out to make sure your website is ready.
5-Day SEO challenge:
Learn how to rank your website in Google search results and gain more traffic!
Here’s what you’re going to learn over the next 5 days:
- Day 1 – Common errors preventing your website from being crawled and indexed by search engines
- Day 2 – How to find what Keywords potential customers are using to find products/services you sell
- Day 3 – How to publish content that ranks for the Keyword you want to target
- Day 4 – How to build digital authority and get links from other websites
- Day 5 – How to track if your SEO effort is working
Sound good?
Let’s get right into it!
DAY 1 // 5 Day SEO challenge:
Before you get started with optimising your website for those sweet sweet page #1 rankings, you need to get your website in order.
By that I mean we need to make sure that your website is free from errors and ready for Google (and humans!) to find.
One of the most common errors I see on my client’s websites is slow page loading speed.
Load your website into a speed testing tool like Pingdom, and test to see what your load speed is from a server located in the country where the majority of your visitors come from. You want to aim for a loading speed of under 2 seconds. Check the waterfall chart in the diagnosis section to check for any bottle necks in your website. Typically slow loading times can be caused by large images or external plugins. To speed up your website, compress the image size and consider removing unnecessary plugins.
Another reason your website isn’t being found by search engines is because it isn’t mobile-friendly. More than 50% of web page views are now on mobile phones, so it is both the preference of human and search engines that your website loads well on all devices. Type your website into your own phone to see if the format works on a mobile phone and if it doesn’t, hire a developer to create a mobile version for you.
DAY 2 // 5 Day SEO challenge:
Today we’re going to talk about finding Keywords (or search terms) related to the services/products that your business sells.
First of all, you need to do a bit of manual brainstorming to generate a list of all the keywords that:
1. you want to rank for; and
2. you think potential customers will use to find businesses like you.
You will use the list you’ve created so you can use a Keyword Research tool to determine similar keywords, monthly search volume and how competitive those terms might be to rank. There’s plenty of options out there, but one great free tool you can use is called Ubersuggest. Using this tool, you can start typing in your keywords to find more keywords. You’ll be able to find loads of keywords that you can start targeting to rank for.
You want to end up with a large spreadsheet which contains all the keywords you found, with their estimated volume and competition level.
DAY 3 // 5 Day SEO challenge:
Today we’re going to talk about how to convert a keyword we want to rank for into a piece of content to publish on your website.
We hope you’re enjoying 5-day SEO challenge so far! To recap, I’ve talked about cleaning up your website errors and finding the keywords that potential customers use to find the products/services you sell.
When it comes to knowing what to write about, you’re best to check your Keyword in Google first to see what what kind of content results are already ranking. This will give you the greatest indicator of what content you should be writing.
When looking at the top 10 results, look at each one’s:
- meta title
- meta description
- header 1
- header 2,3,4,5 etc
- images (check filename and alt text)
- word count
To make your content rank well, you need to include all of these above elements, but by writing better content you can outdo your competitors!
DAY 4 // 5 Day SEO challenge:
Creating good content for your website is only part of the deal. The next step in increasing your ranking is by increasing your digital presence in terms of other websites linking to you.
External links in a way, make your website look more reputable. The more links you have from relevant, high quality websites the better it makes you look!
There’s a tonne of different strategies for getting links from other websites, with varying degrees of difficulty. All businesses should start out by securing their branded (branding agency Melbourne here) presence online by creating a Google My Business page. Not only will this give you a link to your website from Google itself, it will help your rankings in the Google Map listings which are becoming more important on search results.
Other simple links to get include top Australia business directories (Yellow Pages, True Local etc). Make sure you have also added your correct website URL to the profile of all your social media accounts.
By taking these steps you should be able to easily get your first 20 links to your website in the bank! Then start leveraging existing relationships you have in your industry to gain your next set of links. Asking your suppliers to list your business on their site is an easy way to gain links.,
DAY 5 // 5 Day SEO challenge:
With all of the amazing tasks you’ve learnt over the past 4 days, you’re probably wondering how to know if we’ve got any reward for all the effort put in!?
That’s where reporting comes in!
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that you can connect to your website to get the exact data from Google about:
- Each keyword you rank for
- How many times your site was shown (impressions)
- How many clicks you got
- What position you are in the search results
Once you’ve setup GSC, sort your data by ranking position and look for attractive keywords that are ranking between 10-20 in search results. These keywords are on page two of Google and with a little content tweaking, they will provide you with the quickest ranking gains going forward.
You should use GSC to check how well newly published content is ranking for the keywords you’re tracking!
We hope you enjoyed the 5 Days of DIY Ranking in Google with SEO!
If you have any questions or have had successes from my training, please share them in the comments below….