One of the things we are often asked is “Why is my website not appearing on the first page of Google?” and our first step is always to establish the keywords that they would like to rank for. Once these have been decided we look at the content, it is essential that your selected keywords appear in the content of the pages on your website. The act of refining your content for users and search engines is called on page optimisation and is the subject of this month’s SEO tips.
Historically writing for SEO would mean stuffing keywords into your content, adding in plurals and making sure your keyword appeared in every tag possible on your page. This approach was aimed at writing for search engines first and users second. Thankfully, writing for SEO has come on a long way since then and we now have to write with website users in mind and create a page where users can find out lots of interesting information on the subject they have searched. Put simply, Search Engines are looking to show the user the best result for their search query and in most cases, the “best” result isn’t a piece of keyword-stuffed content. Instead, the best pages cover an entire topic in-depth. With in-depth content, a searcher gets everything they need in one place and a recent ranking factors study found that in-depth content tends to rank best in Google with roughly 2,000 words on a topic.
You might now be wondering how you can add more depth to your content and the best advice we can offer is don’t assume people know what you offer or what you do. If you offer a service or product and you haven’t mentioned that anywhere in your content, it will be very challenging to rank for keywords related to this as search engines won’t be able to make the connection.
Another tip for finding ways to optimise your content is too look for keywords and phrases that are related to your desired search term. Websites like LSI Graph can be great tools for finding these as they allow you to input your keyword and will then generate lots of suggested words and phrases that people are searching in relation to your keyword.
We hope these tips are helpful and if you would like more SEO tips, why not have a read of some of our previous SEO blogs: