A professional Google business listing is important to your business!
You can spend a fortune on a website with all the latest design trends, great content, videos etcetera, but if no one can find you online you’ve just wasted a lot of time and money. This can be a very hard reality for most small business people.
By consulting with an SEO professional you will be able to get the traffic you need but more importantly the right kind of traffic. You want people who have a high buying intent to find you because they are ready to make a purchase.
Understanding the Content Side of On-Page Search Engine Optimization
What doesn’t work is lengthy poorly written keyword stuffed pages filled with 2500 words of “nothing burger” will get you nowhere. It actually hurts you ranking.
What works is content that is informative, engaging & relevant having been properly identified and positioned in the source code. This is the kind of content that Google’s algorithm works hard to find and when it does, rewarding it with a position on 1st page results.
Why Give Google and the other search engines what they want?
We give Google what it wants because Google wants what you want. Google knows that if you don’t like using their search engine and don’t find the information you want you’ll go somewhere else.The point being is to use content that you yourself and visitors to your site would find engaging and informative & perhaps willing to share.
Understanding the Non-Text Side of On-Page Search Engine Optimization
Here is what the experts at Google are saying … “Once Google discovers a page URL, it visits, or crawls, the page to find out what’s on it. The Googlebot renders the page and analyzes both the text and non-text content as well as the overall visual layout to decide where it should appear in Search results. The better that Google can understand your site, the better we can match it to people who are looking for your content.” Here is a link to Google’s How Google Search Works page.
Six Things You Should Do When Optimizing Your Page
- Optimizing for ‘search intent’ you want people to find you that are ready to buy.
- Use descriptive URLs
- Strategically place your target keyword in the title, meta description, and H1 tags
- Make sure your page loads quickly. Both visitors & Google hate slow loading pages.
- Use descriptive alt tags for images and add descriptions
- Use Schema markup where it makes sense to increase your click through rates.
Five Things You Should Not Do When Optimizing Your Page
- Keyword stuffing. Use your keywords and variations of the keywords strategically, don’t just stick them anywhere.
- Don’t just scrap copy from another site and paste it in yours.
- Don’t use auto-generated content software when creating text content.
- Don’t hide text in the HTML code. Guidelines say that both human visitors and bots should see what on your page.
- Avoid duplicate content on the pages of your website. Have one page per topic.
Which Pages Should I Optimize on my site?
You don’t need to optimize all the pages on your site. You only want the pages that are relevant to the keyword phrases people use who need your products & services.
For example if you are a plumber in Oakville Ontario you want to optimize your “Emergency Plumbing Services in Oakville” page. You don’t need to optimize pages like About Us or Contact Us etc.
Three Factors that determine how much on-page SEO Costs
- The number of pages you want optimized.
- The amount and type of content you have on the page.
- The level of competition for the search terms the page is trying to rank for.
On-page optimization is an ongoing process. There are only ten organic positions on search engine results 1st page and your competitors are always trying to push you off. For local small business on-page optimization is part and parcel of your monthly fee.
Why Optimize your pages for google?
You want to optimize your pages for Google because it owns 91.68% of the search market in Canada. Search volumes are important when it comes to optimizing your site. Optimize your site for the Google algorithm it has the most people using it by far. You will find that if you are ranking on Google you will rank on the others as well so concentrate your efforts on Google.
Canadian Stats for PC Searches
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
Canadian Stats for Mobile Searches from Statcounter.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
On-Page SEO Summary
In a nutshell, on-page seo is unarguably the only way to get your pages on the front page or 1st page of Google’s search engines results.
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