Hi All,
I am going to show you how I plan to get us to number one on Google for the term “SEO Canary Wharf.”
To caveat, this article isn’t an all-encompassing SEO guide. I know that it doesn’t include everything. This article is simply an abridged version of an SEO guide to get people started.
Here is a short explanation of how Google works:
Google doesn’t work in real time. At least, what I mean by this is that you aren’t searching the internet; you are searching an indexed version of everything that Google has ever crawled. Google crawls websites via links.
To check the index of a page, you should use the site: command as shown below:
If you click on the small green arrow and click on ‘View cached version’, it will give you this (below), which shows the date when Google last crawled the page.
How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Allintitle.
Let’s start by choosing the keywords – you can use many tools for this. There’s Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and many more. For the sake of argument, let’s say that you already know your target search queries (i.e. keywords). I’ll explain how to do keyword research another time.
Now, using Allintitle, I can see that there are only 9 websites on Google with “SEO Canary Wharf” as a phrase in the title, indexed on Google at present: https://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle%3A%22SEO+canary+wharf%22&rlz=1C1CHBF_enGB798GB798&oq=allintitle%3A%22SEO+canary+wharf%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.7944j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8. I updated this two days ago; we were already 2nd, and we stayed in 2nd. Prior to this point, the title mentioned both SEO and Canary Wharf, just not at the beginning. This may have resulted in an increase in other situations and may have contributed in this case, but not quite sufficiently to increase position.
Next, using AllinURL, I can see that there are only 5 websites with the phrase used in the URL: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enGB798GB798&ei=gip6XZzUJebjkgW3l4LQBg&q=allinurl%3A%22SEO+canary+wharf%22&oq=allinurl%3A%22SEO+canary+wharf%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3…51860.53175..53320…1.0..0.96.643.9……0….1..gws-wiz.LLGEHZJnNaA&ved=0ahUKEwicnZ7ZlcvkAhXmsaQKHbeLAGoQ4dUDCAs&uact=5, so I’ve proceeded to change the URL from /london-seo to /seo-canary-wharf.
I choose to do so because of the following…
By selecting the page filter and choosing the London-seo page and then clicking on queries, I can see that during the last three months, there have been very few other queries contributing significant search traffic to the page.
I then clicked on filters and added…
and then clicked on ‘queries’…
I’m making a judgment call here to replace the current URL with the new URL on the basis that we aren’t generating anything related to SEO-London or related search queries to this page. For any London-related search queries, we are currently ranking rather low (around position 50 or so), and thus keeping this as is certainly isn’t going to result in any increases any time soon.
As you can see below, for the page, during the past three months, we haven’t really performed well for anything other than the Canary Wharf search terms. My aim, therefore, is to unoptimize the page for anything not related to Canary Wharf, as the poor CTR is possibly dragging down the page’s performance.
Here’s an example of the London-related search queries:
How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Rankings
It is better to move from 2nd to 1st for a search term than it is to move from 60th to 50th.
With a higher ranking comes a high CTR on average, but in truth, it is CTR that influences ranking more so than the other way around. Let me explain.
CTR is a massive influencer in the success of SEO. If you’re getting a higher CTR for the less competitive search queries, then Google will likely deem your website relevant and increase your position in the search results for the more competitive search queries when it sees your website performing better.
If you are in position 7 and getting a higher CTR than the competitor in 6th, why should you be kept in position 7 when you are clearly more relevant to the searcher? Makes sense, right?
How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Algorithms and Metrics
With Google, your website is being compared to and benchmarked against every other website. With this in mind, start with easy wins! Get there for less competitive search queries that have sufficient volume to warrant going for.
It’s all about ratios; if you manage to find a high search volume keyword with low competition metrics, then it’s going to be worthwhile going for it. Let’s say you found a keyword with 1,000 searches per month and 9 allintitle instances. All things being equal, and let’s just say there was one metric in the Google algorithm, this being Allintitle. If there were 9 other websites and your website was brand new, then surely you’d position in number 10 at a minimum. This is an easy concept to understand. In another example, let’s say that the AllinURL metric was the only metric in the Google Algorithm and there were 5 websites with the search query in the URL, then you’d position 6th at a minimum.
Then let’s say both metrics had equal weighting in the algorithm, 50% for allintitle and 50% for allinurl, therefore you would be safe to say you’d position somewhere between 6th and 10th, let’s say 8th.
This gets you some way to understanding how the Google algorithm works. In truth, it is much more complex than this, but all in all, it’s simply a lot of box-ticking. There’s on-page SEO, off-site SEO, and the user experience part, which I’ll get to.
If you need an example of ratios, here’s a video explaining the Golden Keyword Ratio: https://www.google.com/search?q=keyword+golden+ratio&oq=ksywodd+holden+ratio&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l3.4283j0j4&client=ms-unknown&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Here are the TL;DR takeaways from the video:
AIT is the number of websites indexed on Google with the search query in the title.
We target high-volume, low-competition search queries.
Ideally, the keyword is one at the purchase phase; otherwise, you are just chasing the search volume and not sales.
AIT is only one metric of thousands, but it is a simple and easy measure of how competitive a search term is.
We then create content targeted to this search query with the search query in the title, meta, header, and URL.
We do so to ensure that the page shows higher on Google more quickly without the need for other SEO activities. This only works if the ratio is exceptional; otherwise, you are just creating content for the sake of it.
Personally, rather than capping at 250, I’d opt for over 1,000 search queries per month and aim to get under 50 allintitle. I say this as most of the websites that we work with already have a strong presence. It is only when working from a starting point that I would recommend looking at less than 20 and between 250 and 1,000.
How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Keyword volume.
Let’s now look at the volume…
As you can see, it’s not great. With that said, I’m not simply after the aforementioned search traffic; I’m after this search traffic as well.
You should always be chasing the search terms that are going up on Google Trends rather than those that are going down.
How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – On-Site SEO
Back to the page itself. I’ve corrected all of the Yoast issues, excluding the fact that there is no image. I weighed up the negative of having a slow-loading image vs. the absence of an ALT tag and deemed it worthwhile.
Here’s a breakdown:
I fixed this by implementing the following:
Putting full stops at the end of titles and headings.
Shortening and separating sentences.
Following the instructions! (insert facepalm emoji)
How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Links
Next, on to links, we should be winning on this front based on these scores, so what I’m going to do is find some further links and get the page indexed ASAP now that I’ve made the changes.
Now using Altavista, the world’s leading search engine (no wait… sorry, that’s Ask Jeeves), I’m going to search for a free backlink checker.
My Bing result came back with this option: https://app.neilpatel.com/en/seo_analyser/backlinks?domain=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.webace.eu%2Fseo-canary-wharf-london%2F&mode=domain
As you can see, there are many links from newspapers; these are generally created using centralindex.com (is my understanding). Choosing just two of the links as follows (https://ittrainingtips.iu.edu/uncategorized/seo-a-basic-guide-for-mastering-search-engine-optimization/11/2015/) and https://local.standard.co.uk/company/960239001501696, I can see that the first link is from a blog comment and the second is a directory listing.
Let’s just quickly check the DA on these links. I can see that these are great links!
So I proceeded to create links from both websites (the first didn’t work due to a broken web form, which is a real shame); however, the latter should provide more than one link, so it’s certainly worth the few minutes to get it up and running.
Lastly, in an effort to get the page indexed promptly and to show Google that it has relevance with regard to the website and customer journey, I’ve added a link to the page from our homepage.
I wouldn’t normally go for a search term with such little search volume; however, this worked well as an achievable example in a short timeframe, hence why I’ve used it.
Finally, I’ve just run the word SEO through this website: https://answerthepublic.com/reports/98e4b8c8-97af-43f3-accc-7581f8e12a96 and it’s given me these search queries (I’ve created a specific shortlist), so I’m hopeful that this article is beneficial for anyone looking to answer any of these questions (if not, I’ve also included some further answers below).
How to do SEO? Other useful SEO information.
There are a number of aspects to SEO that I haven’t covered in this guide. I shall summarize these concisely below:
SSL – You need to show visitors that your website is secure. SSL is a certificate that changes HTTP to HTTPS.
Pagespeed – Use https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to help improve page speed.
Alt Text – This is the alternative text that shows to accessibility readers and helps Google tag images.
Navigation and Internal Linking – These are links to other pages and help Google crawl pages. The more internal links from
Domain Authority – a 0 to 100 scale created by Moz.com to rate your website in terms of SEO factors.
PageRank – A 0 to 10-point scale for Google to rate your website.
Questions – This section I entitle, “99 questions but PPC ain’t one”:
Which SEO is best for the long run?
Which SEO tool is best?
Which SEO plugin is best for WordPress?
Which SEO techniques are popular?
Here are some SEO techniques that are currently in trend:
Which SEO plugin for WordPress?
Which SEO is best for WordPress?
Which SEO company should you choose?
Which SEO company is the best?
Which SEO research?
SEO: which meta tags?
Which businesses need SEO?
Yes, SEO keywords can be phrases.
Can SEO be automated?
Can SEO help your business?
Can SEO be guaranteed?
SEO can be leveraged by an organisation.
How can SEO help my business?
Here are some ways SEO can increase web traffic:
Can you SEO a Wix website?
How can SEO improve sales?
How can SEO be done in the easiest way?
Where SEO is used.
SEO: Where to Start
SEO: Where to Put Keywords
SEO: Where to Begin?
SEO: Where to Place Keywords
SEO: Where to Get Backlinks
where is typically set in the ”
Where is SEO in WordPress?
Where is SEO in Shopify?
Where is SEO done?
Where are SEO settings in WordPress?
where to learn SEO
Where to put SEO keywords in HTML?
How will SEO help my business?
Will subdomains affect SEO?
Will HTTPS affect SEO?
Will redirects affect SEO?
Will AdWords help SEO?
Will redirects hurt SEO?
Will 404s affect SEO?
Will 404 hurt SEO?
Will CSS affect SEO?
who seo works
Who needs SEO?
who invented SEO
Who does SEO?
Who uses SEO?
Who does SEO work?
Who is an SEO expert?
Who created SEO?
Who needs SEO services?
search engine optimization
What SEO means.
What SEO keywords should I use?
What SEO principles are you familiar with?
What SEO is.
What do SEO specialists do?
What SEO includes
What SEO services?
What SEO companies do.
What SEO experts do.
What are any grammatical errors?
What SEO can do.
What SEO plugin for WordPress?
What SEO techniques are you trying to use to attract?
When SEO started.
SEO when redesigning a website
SEO when building a website
SEO when changing domain name
When did SEO start?
When was SEO invented?
When did SEO begin?
When was SEO introduced?
When should SEO be used?
When to use SEO
When to update SEO plan
When to do SE
When to stop SEO
When should you do SEO?
how seo works
How SEO is done.
How SEO works in 2019
How SEO helps.
how SEO keywords work
How SEO-friendly is my website?
How an SEO company works.
how SEO has changed
How SEO works in Google
How SEO benefits businesses.
How SEO works on YouTube
How SEO is important?
how to optimize a website
How SEO is used.
How SEO improves business
How SEO marketing works.
How SEO helps in digital marketing
who is the best SEO company
Answers – Here are a few answers in no particular order:
A. SEO is constantly evolving and will never cease to change. I cannot tell you the weightings of the metrics within the algorithms; no one can, nor will they ever be able to. If they did, Google wouldn’t have its market advantage and it’s never going to give that away!
A. SEO wasn’t invented or created; people just started doing it when search engines became more popular.
A. SEO is complex; it has many metrics, which all have variable weightings in the Google algorithm. No single metric is more important, and each metric contributes differently at any given time. What metrics are more important differ from industry to industry and keyword to keyword.
A. SEO helps by providing you with higher-quality, more relevant visitors to your website who are more likely to purchase your products or services.
A. SEO should be used to provide higher-quality results to the person searching on Google.
A. Basic SEO starts with links and content. Get more high-quality, industry-relevant links to a website that has value-added content which provides high-quality information to the reader.
A. Novi.Digital is the best SEO company, obviously!
A. You should stop doing SEO only when you want to shut down your company and cease trading. SEO doesn’t stop. When you stop doing it, everyone else overtakes you; it’s like a continual race.
A. A sitemap can be XML or HTML (this is the page version). The XML sitemap sits on your server in the root folder and can be edited from the control panel, via FTP, or using a CMS plugin.
A. Yoast is a good SEO plugin for WordPress, but there are many, and this is a constantly evolving field. Create a test website and try the best plugins for you.
A. There are many SEO software options out there; the best software depends on what you want to do. As SEO is a rather complex topic.
A. Keywords aren’t something you edit. This is a common beginner mistake. This is why we call keywords either ‘search terms’ or ‘search queries’.
A. SEO experts learn how to make websites more search engine friendly. Fundamentally, it’s not about tricking or manipulating Google; it’s about providing a better customer experience!
Here’s the list of SEO/websites I used:
AnswerThePublic.com
Yoast.com
Neil Patel Backlink Checker
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google Trends
WordPress
Search Console
DA Checker
Thanks for reading my SEO guide, and I welcome your comments and feedback! I hope that this article will be a useful guide for helping you achieve better SEO performance.