You see competitors or hear stories of others flying high in search rankings and want your site to be among them but don’t know where to start? SEO is one of those things that it is very possible to learn but hard to master, so let’s focus on the easy part. Your website is not ranking in Google for the search terms important to your niche/location/vertical. So what do you do?

The following are our top 10 tips for ranking success:

1. Know Your Target Audience

What words are your potential customers searching with? What ‘intent’ are they searching with? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research?
Understanding the customer ‘intent’ is more important than most realise and not as complex as many first think. For example if someone is searching for informational purposes they will type in broad terms like “nose job”. If however they have got past the informational stage and are searching with real intent to get the procedure done, they will type in “nose job, location”. This is because you will naturally be looking for a reputable company near your home to actually have the procedure carried out i.e. ‘Transactional Intent’.
Pick terms that match up with your service, that you think will convert well and have good search volume. To get an idea of search volume use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool which can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Having researched your target list of keywords you are now able to move to step 2.

2. Update Your Page Titles

The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.
Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general, keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. And if your website developer tells you these are really hard or expensive to change, get a new website developer.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique

It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:
If its relevant you should also make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service within their location.
It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the h1 tag, which is typically the headline of the page. You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links

The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages.
Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “nose jobs” use the words “nose jobs” in the text of the links that go to that page.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page

Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. It would probably be a good idea to list as many location names as possible on the home page too.

6. Use Google Places, Yahoo Local, etc.

There are a huge number of directories and yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sort of sites tend to be highly SEO friendly ranking well. You should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site. You may be surprised at how much business you can get from these free listings.

7. Video Creation and Promotion

Not only is YouTube now the second largest search engine but using more interesting methods than just the written word enables you to engage with your customers and demonstrate more personality about your company, products and services.
This does not have to be expensive. Explain your service and try to be interesting, entertaining or funny. Mention your website. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (e.g. “nose job explained”). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

8. Blog

A blog enables you to add interesting content, relevant to your site. Once it’s up, start writing. USE KEYWORDS. Not in a weird way like “nose jobs are great, the best nose jobs are those nose jobs done by our specialist nose job surgeons” or people will think you’re weird. However if you want to rank for “nose job” write a blog post called “Nose Job: The Best Surgeons, Right Under Your Nose”. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blogsearch engine. Now every time you write something on the blog it will instantly be added to Google, and each of those posts has a chance of ranking for the term you are targeting.

9. Technical Foundations

This is really foundational to good SEO. If you have technical issues that are preventing the major search engines from indexing your site or are diluting their ability to present your site for relevant searches then you may waste valuable time and effort. It is good to get someone who really knows the technical requirements for good SEO to take a look at your website and spot and offer recommendations in how to fix or better optimise your site.

10. Links, Links, Links…..

Very important in your ability to rank is having links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust.
There are hundreds of ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing, like running any marketing campaign is not a set and forget strategy. It’s understanding that this is where consumers are looking for your products and services and you need to continually maintain work to optimise and refine how they find you. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. So get familiar with it today so you can master it tomorrow.

Tags: keywords, optimisation, seo, tutorial