We’ll help you survive Google slaps and Google updates
Google is an innovator, which means they constantly test, then change things. That’s usually to improve the search engine results from the user’s point of view.
Sometimes those changes mean we need to adjust or edit what Google wants to see in your website.
Keeping up with those changes and understanding how to use them to your advantage is OUR competitive advantage. Our mission is to quietly work behind the scenes, so no one ever notices.
Meanwhile, your competitor using less-than-above-the-board tactics to get to number one on Google will sink without a trace.
Google Ranking and SEO Explained
If you’ve read this far, we know you’ve done your homework and understand what to expect from an SEO Services company. So here’s a small peek behind the scenes revealing what we work with when it comes to getting you to the top of those valuable local searches.
Successful SEO starts with proper website design
Ugly websites and pretty websites have nothing to do with Google ranking and SEO
A pretty website may be your worst enemy! Some of the sites we have been asked to renovate have looked lovely… but don’t perform when it comes to search results. Search engine optimization starts with the right plan behind the scenes. With proper keyword hierarchies that match your business’ offerings and the types of clientele you value the most.
We won’t begin by trying to show you flashy carousels, video-banners, or fancy imagery. None of that contributes to getting you noticed by Google – quite the opposite, it could bury you on page 9!
If you already have a website that isn’t ranking, this could feel demoralising. Or you might even feel unwilling to change, given what we call sunk costs. But don’t worry! We’ll take a look over it and, in most cases, making the changes won’t involve an entire overhaul.
And if it does, we’re just the folks to help you turn things around.
Google page speed measurements (they’ll downrank sites that don’t load fast)
In recent years, Google has been measuring how fast sites load. You can check yours here: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
If yours is too slow… boom, there go the rankings. Google wants to satisfy its customers and it knows that a slow site is a frustrating site.
And that’s another good reason not to bog down pages with heavy images or videos auto-running behind the scenes.
Google rewards lightning-fast loading, and we know how to achieve that with a light, superior, customer-friendly design.
This is one area where web design and SEO expertise absolutely need to work hand-in-hand.
Responsive design and mobile friendly
“Responsive” is the industry term for websites that respond to the screen size (called the “viewport”) of the device in use. With many customers now exclusively searching on mobile or tablets, it’s no longer enough to design a website that looks great on a desktop or laptop – it has to perform well on mobile devices.
What does this have to do with SEO? Simply put, Google will deprioritize the search results of any page in its index that is not responsive. So making sure your SEO includes highly functional mobile-friendly pages and navigation is non-negotiable.
Needless to say, we test all our designs extensively to make sure they perform correctly no matter the device in use.
Keyword research and website structure
At the heart of your SEO strategy and the very first thing we start with (after understanding your business) has to be thorough keyword research.
Not only is this essential to help you rank well in Google, those keywords must be used in a natural language fashion.
They must also make sense to the visitor and your potential customer.
And they must inform the hierarchy of your site and its navigational structure.
Keyword research is both a science and an art! It takes time to do well, but your website and business will reap the rewards by getting it right and by tweaking and testing over time.
Semantic structure and correct use of html hierarchy.
Think of your website as a book with its chapters and pages laid out for all to see. Headlines and subheaders should all make sense, be appropriately grouped, and chunked together at similar levels of understanding.
The basic premise is to go from big to small, ie. Important keywords go in your topline headers, and what we call “foundational and worker keywords” can be scattered throughout in subheaders and highlighted text. That’s a massive oversimplification, but we have a proprietary method we use to align all of this so that what the customer sees on your site just makes sense and flows.
Effectively integrates with your content marketing to get noticed by Google.
Google loves to show its searchers great content… and fresh content. So any search engine optimization works even better when it’s boosted by regular new content added to your website.
It goes without saying that this content is organized to a hierarchy; has keyword-driven headers etc.
What a technical SEO specialist does
Just as you’d call a plumber or an electrician if you had problems in your physical business premises, there are technical behind the scenes actions undertaken by your local SEO agency that require specialized, trained personnel.
Here are some of them:
Link building
Google loves websites that many other sites also cite or refer back to with links. A well-executed SEO strategy includes link-building with other sites (posting guest articles; gaining citations; directory listings etc) to help position you in the “web of links” so you’ll be noticed by Google.
But not just any old links. In fact, the wrong kind of links can actually penalise your rankings! So beware: a reputable SEO firm knows how to identify good targets and carry out your linkbuilding organically.
Ongoing monitoring of analytics and mining of Google analytics (GA4) and Search Console
How do you know if your search engine marketing is working?
Look under the bonnet!
Fortunately Google has two great tools: Search Console and Google Analytics 4 (“GA4”). An SEO specialist knows how to interpret these complex reports, identify opportunities, and plug any gaps.
They are also a great source of ideas for new ways to find customers and increase organic traffic by targeting underserved search terms.
Internal links
Getting links back from other sites helps strengthen your website in Google’s view, as well as help your customers find you through the internet’s rabbit holes, but an SEO consultant will also make sure your site links well internally. Customers can want more information than exists on the first page they land on, so it’s our job to make sure it’s obvious where to click next!
Ongoing keyword research
While your SEO expert will build a comprehensive keyword plan when they structure and design your site, smart SEO practices require ongoing keyword research. This can reveal fresh opportunities with developing trends and making sure that no matter how the marketplace and customer intent changes, your SEO consultants can keep you close to the top of the rankings.
The SERPs
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s at the very heart of SEO. Google actually doesn’t rank websites, it indexes “pages” (or urls) and then prioritizes those in relevance, authority, helpfulness, expertise and a whole host of factors.
Our job is to make sure as many of your pages are not only correctly indexed, but that they appear in the SERPs.
Indexing
As explained above, indexing is the method by which Google’s “bots” crawl the internet looking for web pages to add or update in their index. It’s a giant, interconnected database.
On-page and off-page SEO
On-page SEO is us getting all the keywords, headers, semantic structure, image file names, tags, metadata… and more correctly rendered so that Google can’t mistake what that page or post is about. There are more technical elements we’ll happily chat with you about if you want to geek out sometime…
Off-page SEO we referred to above: this is building a place for your site on the web. By using backlinks and creating compelling content, we use natural and organic techniques to find as many ways as possible to get customers clicking through to your site.
So anything that happens outside of the website structure and content SEO-wise is called “off-page SEO”!
Sustainable SEO techniques…
You may have received calls from companies guaranteeing you #1 on Google. But it’s often not sustainable and may even employ the use of underhand practices (called blackhat SEO in the business). You’ll pay big money for the privilege… and your rank will disappear in a puff of smoke the day you stop paying, or… the day Google bans whatever shady techniques are being used.
Quality SEO demands sustainable techniques that survive Google’s algorithm changes precisely because they are not built on exploiting technical loopholes, but by crafting an organic, well-through-through strategy that fits customer desires and behaviours.
And if it’s helpful to your customers, it’s helpful to Google.
Images
Smart SEO practices don’t just use images to help attract the visitor and help them stay. Behind the scenes, we use images to strengthen your search engine results by aligning every technical aspect of your site’s structure, from file names to captions and titles. Which brings us to…
Alt-text
Alt-text is what shows on any website page if you disable image rendering. It’s also used for screen readers for those visually impaired. Missing alt-text means Google doesn’t really know what that image is supposed to mean in the page’s context.
Even though you personally may never see alt-text visible on a site, any SEO expert worth their salt knows every single image must be optimized in context. And that means knowing exactly where to place it in the site’s backend coding.
Hidden behind the scenes, under the hood, the invisible magic
While a smart SEO company never uses any blackhat techniques, there is a lot we can do under the hood to give you a competitive advantage. Smushing images, minifying css and javascript… caching pages, lazy-loading. You name it, some computer whiz somewhere has figured out how to make it work better.
It’s our job to keep up with this and make sure we’re continually fine-tuning your site to use the latest and greatest tech that Google loves to see.
Meta descriptions and snippets
You’ve probably seen them: you run a Google search for an answer to something (“how to descale a kettle”) and right there at the top are a few sentences of actual text with the exact answer! You don’t even have to go to the site for the thing you most needed to know. But it looks like a great site, so you go there anyway…
What we’ve just described is a “snippet” and is Google’s way of saying to the searcher, “This site is THE most authoritative when it comes to what you’ve just searched for.”
A good SEO expert will do everything they can to get a snippet!
But without a good metadescription, even a great ranking in Google may not get the click you want.
What is a “metadescription” you ask?
It’s text in a hidden code that Google looks for in your page’s background html that describes the page’s content. Like a teaser if you will. A well-written appropriate length meta description will be used in its entirety by Google just below your site’s url in the SERPs.
Without one, Google will attempt to extract the right content from your page to represent what it thinks it’s about. And often this won’t be enticing.
A search engine technician is also a good copywriter: we know how to write shortform sales copy for metadescriptions that gets that click.
Call us on 07 5391 1266 or click the button below to talk with our friendly team members now!
