Website - Search engine optimization -2
Website SEO
For the unacquainted, ranking a website can be confusing, frustrating
and downright maddening.
Trust me, I’m an electrician by trade and I was in that
position not long ago.
I’ve learnt a lot about website rankings and SEO since I
started this journey three years ago.
By night I may be researching ranking websites and
optimising, but during the I’m running my own electrical install and testing
company – www.zaelectrical.com
It hasn’t been easy, and for a long my time my company
couldn’t even rank on the first few pages or even the Google map pack.
It was important to me that I do something about this. The
thing was, I wasn’t sure where to start. I’m just one man, and the idea of me
competing with established companies with dozens of staff members and
bottomless budgets exceeding thousands of pounds a month sounded impossible.
With lots of trial and error, I realised that this wasn’t
only possible, but I could do it pretty well.
I’ll be the first to admit, I was on the verge of giving up
way too many times.
I’d always wanted to try out internet retail, so I tried to
sell products on the USA version of Amazon. My listings were as follows:
9000 meters of climbing rope – 10m/ 20m /30m denominations /
unbranded
650 units of climbing chalk / branded – XLR8
400 units of unbranded climbing chalk
No matter how much I studied however, I was out of my depth
and fighting a losing battle. I mean, I barely broke even once Amazon’s storage
fees were deducted and then there were the monthly charges and then the charges
for delivering my products from their warehouses. My stock even somehow went
missing.
I’m not one to admit defeat, so I tried Shopify’s drop
shipping model combined with Facebook ads.
This was somewhat more successful – and it did make me more
optimistic regarding online sales, it seemed to me that Facebook was the
platform that was working for me as far as optimising the metrics of my
advertising impressions was going.
At long last, I managed to break even and this was enough to
motivate me to keep going. I decided to learn from these experiences and apply
them to my business in the UK
ZA Electrical Ltd
My journey went like this:
•
Watching lots of videos on YouTube.
•
Hiring SEO experts for £200 a month for 4
months.
•
Wiring up a friends house, which wasn’t
the easiest – in exchange for a website.
•
Re-doing the website again myself with
help from a freelancer on Fiverr.
•
And then having to do it again with
help from a friend I met through a work contact. (He told me that he was doing
the skeleton site after I had given him an outline explaining that I had been
let down countless times).
He pulled the site together. Amen!
I admit I was really looking forward to this, and I hoped my
website would rank immediately.
Ah, the bitter-sweetness of short-lived optimism!
I devoted myself to research. By day I was an electrician
and by night I was a student of the elusive and bewildering field of SEO and
Internet rankings.
Suddenly, the pieces of the puzzle started to come together.
I realised that reinventing the wheel would be a pointless
endeavour. Trying to think outside of the box is futile because someone’s probably
already done it anyway.
So, what are they doing and how is that working?
It didn’t take me long to realise that everything rested on
having the right weapons in my arsenal.
So:
Get a domain from Google Domains with the main
keyword in the title.
Get a domain Host from Green Geeks - the fastest Host and 24/7 Helpline.
The first thing I learnt is Google My Business – GMB.
In the UK we have a big authority for trades called
Checkatrade with unlimited budget and 2 million back links – and I’m not even
exaggerating, it really is 2 million.
You can’t outwit these big companies, so...
Imitate – and excel them.
Step 1: Cue- Moz Pie Chart
This is such an indispensable tool and it’s really what set
me on the right track. It basically gives you a % of every item on the
checklist to be completed for local and organic map situating.
Through my research I learnt that the basics are:
•
Buy a Domain on Google domains with your keyword in the title.
•
Purchase hosting on a superfast host - Green Geeks.
Links and Authority:
1.
Google Index Count
2.
Link Count
3.
Linking Domains
4.
Majestic C Flow
5.
Domain Authority
6.
Website Age
Rank Checking:
1.
Google
2.
Google Mobile
3.
Google Maps
4.
Bing
5. Bing Local
Google My Business:
1. This is claiming your business on the GMB app and building your
profile.I will elaborate further down on this blog.
On Site SEO of Your Website:
1.
Page Load Speed
2.
Robots.txt
3.
XML Sitemap
4.
Errors
5.
Internal Links
6.
URLs
7.
SSL
8.
SEO
9.
Page Titles
10.
Page Descriptions
11.
Open Graph Tags
12.
Twitter Card Tags
13.
Image.alt Tags
14.
H1 Tags
15.
Word Count
16.
Flash
17.
Responsive Design
18.
Mobile Friendly
19.
Mobile Load Speed
20.
Mobile Rendering
Content:
1.
Address
2.
Phone Number
3.
Schema.org Markup
4. Top Keywords
Something which really helped me is the
road boak Local Viking for GMB Listings.
You can find it here -Local Viking.
In order to avoid unnecessary headache,
it’s also important to find a program that is easy to navigate and understand.
Personally, I found that BrightLocal ticked all of the boxes..
Once I felt that my website was
relatively well-designed and operational, I started ordering citations on Fiverr.
The more specialised, the better.
I would highly recommend looking at
your top competitors with Brightlocal and matching or ordering more citations through them.
I also looked at Fiverr, which may certainly be the cheapest option – but you have to
research credentials and levels.
Then look at your top competitors'
keywords and optimise your GMB listing together with your website to match
those keywords and get content written for you on Fiverr/
Backlinks, well, well, well....
There are not shortcuts for this, and
whilst the citations you order will help get backlinks, the quickest way is to
ask other sites in your trade or profession to reference your site. This was my
route on my budget, but there are of course so many other ways to do this. Now,
Google doesn’t exactly approve if you buy them because this is against their
terms and conditions, so purchase them on Fiverr at your own risk.
I gave myself a little crash course about Wordpress, which is generally the easiest to
self teach with tutorials on the web. What’s more, the SEO and vast range of
plug-ins, paid and free, outweigh any other website builder by far.
I’d also try to gather reviews from each customer, and I
found that once I began approaching 70+ reviews I started to see my rank
increase in the local rankings for "near me" search terms
The image below is dated 6/6/2020 ranking me organically 3rd
on page 1 from page 5-6 - ZA Electrical Ltd.
Step 2: Study Some More - a Different Set of Tools
You tube – probably one of the best things to come out of
the 21st century.
I used it to learn more about my GMB listing and how to
maximise it.
•
Step 1 - I started on the logo,
reviews, regular photos, weekly posts, geo location and alt tag stuffed photos
•
Step 2
- Study Greg Gifford – pure brilliance.
•
Step 3 – Superior analytical tools such
as Semrush.
This tool has a free trial period, so you can give it a whirl and then cancel
before the trial expires without being charged anything.
With so much more tools at my disposal, I was feeling really
confident.
Whilst my DA is only 16, my other signals, including local
authority and citations and reviews, outweigh my competitors. This happened
after changing my rich snippets, SEO title, slug, meta description, featured
image of the rich snippets alt text, title, captions, descriptions, etc.
My rank really went way up. .
Basically, what I've learnt is that you can rank any website
by starting locally and then moving to a wider audience – you can rank any
website as long as you have the right tools.
My process looked a little like this:
1.
Buy domain with keyword in the title /
URL- Google
domains.
2.
Get hosting on a super fast host/ Green geeks/ English support for your website 24/7
/ Simply amazing service.
3.
Get WordPress, the rest are tedious but
a second option is a landing page. I recommend another builder for small one
page sites called Swipe pages.
4.
Get a GMB - Google my Business profile,
its free and from Google and can be operated from your smartphone.
5.
Get Citations on Fiverr, biggest draw card in local search - NAP being consistent.
6.
Learn Basic SEO and web page
optimization via the Moz Pie chart - this is your bible.
7.
Get a tracking software as you start
your journey – Brightlocal is $49 per month and you can help out 5 other businesses once
you've taught yourself.
8.
Use the Semrush/ Moz/ Ahreffs free trial periods to learn SEO to a higher level.
9.
Build up your portfolio and get reviews
for your GMB listing, Facebook reviews, Trustpilot reviews, and be religious
about this.
10.
Using Google analytics, free from
Google analyse your traffic and see what content - search terms are relevant to
your industry and site and add these with Fiverr to your site, so get content written on Fiverr.
11.
Level Up - Get the paid version of Semrush - search your competitors back link profile.
12.
Brightlocal has a great citation checking service you can properly check your
competitors sites and emulate their strategy, get the same back links as them
and get the same citations.
13.
Get reviews and add widgets to your
website from Trustpilot, Facebook and GMB widgets - Wordpress has all of these plugins to add widgets for free and it improves
multi platform credibility.
I did all of these things, and it
really paid off.
At the moment, I’m usually between 1-2
position on Google maps and 2nd and 2-3rd position on organic rankings on
Google.
Have fun, and I wish you all the best
on your journey to ranking your website.
This blog honestly contains everything
you’ll ever need!
Dune Mac Donald
https://connectseo.uk/seo-consultancy/
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