SEO Foundation tips for every beginner to increase your Google Search rankings – SEO Day 2022
SEO needs those towers of
strength and they need that strong foundation behind them. With my company, I help small
businesses and I simplify SEO for them. So I'm going to be helping
a few of you newbies to it. I hope. And maybe some of the more experienced
people might learn something as well, or maybe get a tip along the way. So we all want that great success
for our clients or for our own websites if we are doing. But so many people jump into the
latest trends or the things that everyone tells them they must be doing.
And sometimes they
forget those foundations. And so when they build their towers,
they don't actually build up straight. They just seem to lean a
little bit to the side. We need to look and remember some of
the foundation things in SEO and make sure we are covering them and we're
not leaving them out in the rain. So I went back and, and tried to
think about what foundation things do we really need to go into. The first one is that we need
our websites to be found. That's the first thing. Then we need them to be found quickly. And we need to give the searchers what
they're actually after, what they need. So those are the three things that
I'm going to delve into today. One of the things that I hear from
people is that they think that there's this Google sandbox that they go into.
So whenever they take on a new site,
they say that, well, it might be in the sandbox for a little bit of time. We don't really get much traffic and
then suddenly it moves out of the sandbox and we start getting traffic. I'm not so sure I lean
towards that thinking. So some people think there is a sandbox. I think that there's
probably not a sandbox. What I think actually happens
is that those sites are sitting there with no back links to them. So they're sitting off on an island and as
we know, Google finds websites by crawling through the links from other websites. So if you have no back links,
you're not going to get traffic.
And then suddenly along the way, you start
to get some back links and Google finally finds you and starts to index your site. There are actually two ways that Google
knows about your sites and indexing it. And the first one is this
crawling from other back links. The other way is through
Google search console. I think it's one of the tool sets
that everyone should make sure they've set up for their sites.
A lot of web developers will set
up Google analytics and they'll forget Google search console. Now it used to be called Google webmaster
tools, and then Google's added a lot to it and made it a lot more useful as well. So now we have Google search
console and what we can do with a new site, if you take a new site
over, is go and inspect that site. So you use the URL inspection over
on the site, and then up in the top area, you put your website. Press enter. And then you can request
Google to index your site. So you can actually start that
indexing off a lot quicker. Now I love Google search console. It's one of my favorite tools and I'm
going to give you a tip on something else that I use this particular tool set for.
And that's, I love blogs getting blogs
up and using them for my keyword. And I want them indexed
as quickly as possible. I want them done as quickly as possible. So my tip to you is as soon as you do your
blog, You've got your URL for your blog. You should come in here, use the
inspection tool, put your blogs address in there and get it indexed. So it's indexed as quickly
as possible, and it can start ranking for your keywords. So that's a, a little tip along the Y. I do love the tool and before
we leave it, there's another one that I wanna actually talk about. So there's lots of things
you can see with it. Links are one of the most important
you can see what links you're getting without having to go to another tool set. But the one that I really think is
important is this site maps one. So you can have your site map set
up for your website and use a tool.
Some of the plugins do this rank
math and Yoast will set up the site map for you on your site. And that will show the pages that Google
needs to go and look at, kind of tells Google, what are the important pages? To you and what you think are important. So it's really handy for Google,
especially with extremely large sites, because you can really optimize
your crawl budget by using this. So you get it set up with your plugin. One of those tool sets, and
then you go into Google search console into this site maps area. And you tell Google
where that site map is. Now I don't only just set this
up for all my sites because of the SEO side of things. The other reason that I do it
is that early on in my career, I helped a client bring their site
back after it had been hacked.
I. Because they had a site map in place. It actually meant that the
reinstatement of the site was a lot quicker than it would've been. If we didn't have a site map in place. So it's a little bit of a security and,
and coming back from a hacker problem. So I make sure I have a site map
in place for those two reasons. Another tool or another file that
you need to check on your sites is the robots dot text file. TXT file. Now this file lives on your route
directory under your route directory. So you can go and look at your file
by going to your website slash. Robots dot TXT. And it will open up with something
like this area down here where it will show you for the different.
Spots that are out there, what it
will allow them to see or what it will actually disallow them from seeing. So it's telling them what
areas they can't go into. And there's valid reasons for that. There's things like when I do WordPress
sites, I don't really want Google to be indexing the WP admin area,
eCommerce sites, you know, you check out pages and things like that.
You don't wanna actually index. So. There's valid reasons for things
to be in the robots.txt file. It's just something that I go and
look at to make sure when I take over a site that there isn't something
in there that shouldn't be in there. And that's from an experience. Once again, I had a client site,
we were trying to work out why this page wasn't ranking and
wasn't getting up in the engines. And I finally went back and
looked at the robots.txt file, and it was a Joomla site. Someone had put something in
earlier and then renamed things the same as that earlier item. And it was disallowed.
So for me, from that point onwards,
it came onto my checklist and I go and check robots.txt every time. Now Google is important. It's important for us
to be found by Google. And in terms of businesses, Google really
has so many non businesses out there. People pretending to be businesses
that they want to actually trust you. So a lot of us will go and put
citations up with a lot of directories. It's just another thing. Another indicator to Google that our
site is a real business because it's in, it's being referred to from all of these
different places with those citations.
It's a really important thing
that your nap is consistent across those citations and your website. Now nap stands for name,
address, and phone. I throw in a w at the end for
website, and I'll explain that in a minute why I do that. But nap, consistency is really important. You need to have the same words or Phrases
used for each of these in the same way. For example, my company is Autom8
Now, and I can have it as Autom8 Now, or I can have it as Autom8 Now Pty
Ltd, which is the company thing in Australia that we have at the end,
I pick which way I'm going to do it. And I have it the same
way in all of these sites.
So I've chosen the one with
the Pty Ltd at the end. And I put that on all the citations
and on my site, I put it in the footer area so that it's on every page so
that it makes it clear for Google to connect the dots and say, this
company is the same as that company. Addresses once again, I've got a unit 12. -Then my street address, I can put
that as 12 slash or I can put unit 12. They are different things. We want it to be the same in all of
these sites, phone numbers, we try as hard as possible to keep these the same. Brackets or not brackets spaces or not
spaces, try and make it consistent.
I do know that some citation sites do
make it different because they'll do automatic formatting, but try as hard
as possible to keep yours consistent. The websites -I added at the end
the, there is a reason for this. Generally with your websites, you
actually have four kinds of sites. You have your HTTP, the HTTPS then
you might have the same ones, but with the www at the start, all of these,
well, three of these will actually be pointing to one of the others. They get redirected and they should
be redirected to one of the sites. For example, mine are all redirected
to this last one with the secured site and the www at the start. Doesn't matter really which one it
is in terms of, I would definitely have it as the, the secured one. But you just need to work out
what is your canonical one.
So you can do that by putting in each of
these and checking once you've entered it. And it goes to your page, what the
URL is up in the top of your browser. Once you find that one, that's
the one that you want to use for all of your back links? Why do I choose that? Well, that's because all the
others are being redirected, so there's this slight delay now. It's not much. But it is a slight delay
when it's being redirected. So I want the fastest one as the one
that I'm using for my back links or for my citations, wherever I have to put my
website, I'm going to put the exact same thing every time in all of these places. And when someone's referring to my site,
I want them to put this one as well. I want it to be quick. And that's getting to the second
foundation that I wanted to talk about. And that is that the speed
is as quick as possible. Google wants fast pages
because we want fast pages.
I'll put my hand up. I'm one of the people, if it takes
too long, once I go to a site, I will jump back out and go to another site. I'm impatient. And so are the rest of
the users on Google. I want you to think about this with some
of these stats, that if you have a file that you load in, say you put in a, a new
image and you don't optimize it, and your site goes from one second to 10 seconds. The bounce rate is going
to increase by 123%. Over double what you had will
be bouncing out of your site. So it's important to make sure
your speed is as quick as possible. Now, the great thing is that
Google has actually told us this. There's not much that they tell us they
really don't like to give away much. But they have told us they want
our mobile speed, not just desktop, the mobile speed to be fast. And I've had client sites who think
their speed is great and their desktop is, but their mobile speed is slow. So you need to look at your mobile speed
and make sure it's as fast as possible.
Google Google also told us all of these
core web vitals that we can look at. So these metrics that we can look
at to make sure we are aligned with what they're checking, it's
amazing that they've told us these. So make use of them. They gave us four to start with. They changed one on how it was worked out. They've given us another two. Some people call that TT FB at the bottom. You can see these in
Google search consult. If you get enough traffic to them,
you can see your real time stats. If you don't get enough traffic,
you have to use some of the page speed tool sets, which I'm going
to give you some examples on those.
And I have put on the document. So if you look at the slides
afterwards, I've just given you some easy descriptions to try and
explain what these all are about. The one that's my
favorite is this CLS one. And that's the one. When you go to a page and the
page is still coming up, but you can see the button that you want. You click on the button and by
the time you've clicked, it's actually moved the page down and
you've clicked on something else. I hate that. And that's really great that
that's one of the metrics that they're testing and making people
be better at, on their websites. So to go and check them I've given you the
page speed, the Google page speed site.
It gives you some great statistics
or you can go to GT metrix and use the defaults there. And they give you great information
and water flow waterfall information. So you can see what is taking
the time on your sites and delve into those and speed them up. I've had sites where I've moved
them from quite a number of seconds down to one second. And my rankings have just
raced up in the keyword. So really important that
you get your speed, right? I use GT metrix. I actually use the paid one because
I'm not in the States because I'm in Australia, the defaults are to
the states and it actually doesn't give me the real indication of
what's happening here in Australia. So I pay so that I can see my actual
servers in Australia and what's going on. I've given you some of the metrics
that you need to try and get in the right ranges for those core web vitals. Definitely try and get under three
seconds for your mobile site.
I really, if you can get it
towards one, that is the aim. Okay. They've also told us about
mobile responsiveness. So that's in Google
search console as well. Don't have your buttons
too close together. Make sure your text is big. Don't have lots of menus try
and do scrolling instead. So that's a really handy tip
that you get from Google. So follow the tips and yes,
the most important thing is that yes, size does matter. Mostly speed problems. Come down to image sizes. I get a lot of this. I've had a photography site where they
put up huge 5,000 by 5,000 pixeled images. If you think about it, this image
that they're trying to display is only part of the page and on
a desktop in 1920 by 10 80 size. You don't need. An image that's that big shrink the
images, make them optimized and make them optimized for the different devices.
I use Divi on a lot of my WordPress
sites and I can choose the image that I put on a tablet of iPhone and a desktop. And I optimize for the size. So the mobile, because
it mobile's so important. You don't want it doing all this energy,
trying to shrink this huge image to a mobile size, give it the mobile size. That is set up for the mobile, go
and remove your excess plugins. That's just a lot of data
that's going up and down and. Of no value to your site and slowing
your site down, minify it and cache it. So one little tip that I'll
give you on the caching. If you do change your plugins for
caching, make sure that you work out how to remove the casing completely from
the last plugin, I've had sites where they've changed sites and the caching is
still there from the previous plugins. And that's once again,
data going up and down. In terms of the image optimization,
I use a couple of tools before I load the image up.
I'll use tiny jpeg.com to shrink my image. I'll go into geo image.com and I'll
put some location data on it, whether it helps for local SEO who knows? But I throw it in just in case. And then when I've loaded it
in, I have a plugin installed, which also does optimizing and I
utilize smush most of the time. Okay. The third part is that we
actually wanna go back to thinking about the search of themselves. They're the most important person,
because they're the one choosing your site and hopefully converting
into either lead sales along the way. So I want you to take that
step back and think, what is it that Google is actually doing? They're just trying to answer questions.
So you need to take that step
back and think, am I actually answering questions on my website? A lot of people forget that a lot of
people think it's about me, it's me. And this is what I do. And these are my products. Instead, it needs to. be "What are you after? Here's the solution", "Got got a question
I can provide the solution and here's some extra help or here's another
product that might help you as well." So it's all about thinking in that. Of course words are the answer. Google needs to know that you
can answer the question and it only really knows that from the
words that you have on your pages. So you need to have blogs. I have lots of people, lots of businesses
who say, I don't have anything to write.
Do I really need to do a blog? Yes, the answer is yes. You need to do a blog. Preferably, you also do FAQs with short
answers and you can optimize your blogs and do lots of work on your blogs
to make them as effective as possible. And lots of people get caught up
in that and think that they have to have really huge blogs, you
know, 1200 words, or 2500 words. If you're not doing them
because that essay thought is putting you off doing a blog. Just do a 300 word blog. Heck I don't care if you just do a
50 word blog, in fact FAQs are best. If they're about a 50 word answer,
because if they're about a 50 word answer, then they're more likely to be
pulled up in your featured snippets.
So those extra bits that are up the top
of Google above the position rankings. The featured snippets or they're also
brought up in things like voice search. To do that though. You really need to tell them, tell
Google that this is an FAQ in the language that Google understands
and that's that structured data. And Anton talked about the markup
tool that you can actually utilize. The structured data tool is useful. You can also use a lot of plugins these
days, like rank math and I think host might do it in their premium as well. So Utilize those tools to use
structured data, which is the language that Google understands. So if they don't actually have to try
and work out from the page, what it's all about, then it will actually help
them and they might move you up a bit. I do yet good response from
structured data on my pages. The other thing I wanted to point out
is for someone to actually click on your page, they're reading you, your meta
titles and your metadata description.
So you need to actually make
sure that you stand out on those. I have a lot of people that use plugins
or the default in plugins and which is company names slash page title. And so they don't have to fill it out. It's all right. It's all filled out for me, but you
are wasting such an opportunity. I go in for keywords and I go to
the keyword and I search on it and I see the results that come up. And then I look to see what could make. My page, stand out in this. I need to make mine better than everyone
else's I need to answer the question that they're asking in the keywords.
I need to give them something that makes
them come to my page and that slight word adjustment can actually make it. An increase of a lot of
percentage on your clickthroughs. Now I'm not hiding my head in the sand. Google does change the meta titles
and the descriptions on about 58%. They say of our results. There's reasons they do that. If you do a long title longer than the
50 kind of characters, then it will probably cut it and change it over. So make sure that they fit to the criteria
and just in case they change it over. Make sure you have your
keyword in the page title. Accessibility is important. You want actually to look like
you're really great to Google that you are helping with accessibility. So make sure in your
images you put alt text. Once again, I had someone telling me they
had a plugin that did it automatically for them, and I just said, wasted opportunity. Your alt text is another chance
for you to get your keywords in. Make use of it. And the other thing is once you
get them to your site, you want to actually keep them on your site.
The longer they stay there, the more
that they can do on your site, the more likely they are to convert. So give them information
down the site, give them. Other areas they could go to show them
your featured products, get them with their call to actions, get them to join
your newsletters, put internal links in. So they stay there. Google sees this, we
think as a very good sign.
Once someone is dwelling on your
site and staying on your site, they think you're a good answer and they
will move you up in the rankings. And finally this one's not
really to do more with SEO. It's more with actually converting to
sales, but that's, what's behind SEO. A lot of people aren't putting
their call to action in the top. Third of the page.
A lot of people don't
scroll down the page. They just stay on the top bit. So make sure you're call to action,
which might be contact me, book a session, or buy this product, make
sure it's up in the top third. So they see it. SEO is there's a lot to it. It's not hard, but there's just a
lot of steps that you should do. Make sure you have a checklist,
mark it off as you go and start off with a strategy working out. What's going to give you
the best bang for your buck. If you're interested any, and any
of you are small business owners.
I'm creating a simple SEO
course for small businesses. I'm not teaching you everything in
SEO, but I am going to give actionable steps that people can do for their
websites to help their websites improve. I'd love you to join the wait
list so I can tell you about it when it becomes available. And I love to give tips. So please follow me on my
social media or connect with me. I'd love to connect to you all. Are there any questions? Look back links are important. They're very important in moving up. But I would say you're on page. Is really important,
particularly, well, actually it's probably more your technical. I, I think your technical's
the most important you need to get that speed, right? It makes such a difference. Get your speed. Right. Then you need the words. If you don't have the words,
Google, doesn't think you're an answer to the question. So it doesn't matter how
many back links you have. If Google doesn't think you
answered their question. You're not going to show up.
So that would be my answer
to be in Google ads. No Google ads have their place. There's no doubt about that. So I have in Australia, we have
superannuation, which is like our pension area and I have a client who's in that. And our tax office has most of the
parts on that first page because they tell them about superannuation. There's no chance for my clients
to get on the first page for that area, unless they do ads. So there are reasons that you do
ads, but it's part of your strategy. Not, you don't have to do
it to make Google happy.
It doesn't, it doesn't
really connect there. I, I use a lot of tools. I'm a bit of a tool addict. I'll admit that. but in terms of the big tools,
Arefs is actually my favorite. I put a lot of energy into that one. But yeah, I will say at Google
search console and analytics, of course, I need to know my metrics. I need to know how I'm going. So analytics is important too. Thanks everyone. Thanks for watching the video, please
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