Top of Google — SEO expert advice

Strategies to reach the top

No-one wants to write con­tent or upload product inform­a­tion for a web­site that doesn’t get well ranked in Search Engine Res­ults Pages (SERPs), we’ll show you how we reach the top of Google and how we can do it for you.

Example: Here are some tips to show how to rank at the top of Google for the search term “Help with SEO”
(google.co.uk — ‘pages from the UK’)

Keyword Com­pet­i­tion

SEO is the bridge between your web­site con­tent and the poten­tial vis­itor. You should never write an art­icle, cre­ate a page or launch a product and just hope for the best.

You need to choose care­fully the keywords that you think a vis­itor will be using to search for con­tent that matches the type of con­tent you have created.

Don’t just pre­sume that the obvi­ous keywords are the best choice for get­ting vis­it­ors to your site, if the keywords you are think­ing of using are too obvi­ous you will find that there is massive com­pet­i­tion for those keywords from other web­sites with sim­ilar content.

Use Google AdWords to eval­u­ate how many monthly searches are made for cer­tain words. Also, Google AdWords will tell you the strength of com­pet­i­tion for those keywords.

SEO Ser­vices — 74,000 monthly UK searches, com­pet­i­tion HIGH
Help with SEO — 3,000 monthly UK searches, com­pet­i­tion MEDIUM

So faced with high com­pet­i­tion for SEO ser­vices are we right to decide that they are the keywords we want to tar­get? Are those keywords the best option for the most traffic mak­ing it’s way to our site? The lure of so many poten­tial vis­it­ors com­ing our way is def­in­itely appealing.

How­ever, is it real­istic with only ten res­ults avail­able per page in Google search res­ults that we are going to beat off all exist­ing, well estab­lished com­pet­i­tion and rank on the first page of Google for SEO Ser­vices? The link to our site being a res­ult on page 2, 12 or 22 won’t see us get much of a share of those 74,000 searches, how many poten­tial vis­it­ors will click on our link if we aren’t at the top of Google and on page one? Prob­ably none.

3,000 searches com­pared to 74,000 is a lot less poten­tial vis­it­ors for Help with SEO, but AdWords told us the com­pet­i­tion was only medium for the search term. 3,000 seems a bet­ter tar­get than the zero vis­it­ors we could very eas­ily end up with by using SEO Ser­vices.

So we title our web page with our chosen keywords, we use our keywords in our head­ings, our con­tent is using our keywords but doesn’t feel keyword stuffed and remains nat­ural — and what do you know? We’re now at the top of Google in the UK for Help with SEO.

Hey, I’m an SEO Expert!

Don’t get too excited yet, we’ve shown you how to get to page one, but on page one of Google you still have nine other res­ults vying for the vis­it­ors ‘Click Through’.

What if they NEVER pick our link to click on? That could quite eas­ily be the case, so let’s put down our rab­bits foot and lucky charms, stop say­ing “please pick me, please pick me, please pick me…” and let’s do some­thing about it.

Con­vert­ing Click Through

In a Google search engine res­ult, below the title and URL is a ‘snip­pit’ or a brief descrip­tion. Google can take a sec­tion dir­ectly from your webpage and use it as a ‘snip­pit’ but that’s not always ideal, not the per­fect ‘teaser’ that we need to entice the poten­tial vis­itor to click our link and not one of the oth­ers in the search res­ults page.

The best option is to sup­ply Google with a ‘meta descrip­tion’ to use as it’s ‘snip­pit’ text for your res­ult entry, this descrip­tion text does not show dir­ectly within your page and is instead a coded mes­sage that Google looks for and uses if it is present.

A well writ­ten ‘meta descrip­tion’ which doesn’t get too spammy, yet entices is exactly what you are look­ing for in try­ing to make sure the poten­tial vis­itor con­verts into a site visitor.

That’s great — but I need some help imple­ment­ing this

No prob­lem, we’ve not covered everything there is to know about SEO in a single art­icle, just offered some keyword advice — get in touch with us about man­aging your SEO and dis­cuss­ing what you’d like to try and achieve.

It’s also fair to say, that con­trol of your web­sites; titles, tags and meta descrip­tion down to indi­vidual page level might be out­side of your present web­sites tech­nical abilities.

You might be using a bespoke CMS that is get­ting pretty old now and wasn’t cre­ated with the level of SEO con­trol described within this art­icle, and it might be worth look­ing at options that can empower you with bet­ter SEO con­trol for yourself.

We’d recom­mend Word­Press as a CMS, and the bril­liant Thesis Theme as it’s per­fect part­ner with it’s built in SEO control.

Our Word­Press cus­tom­isa­tion ser­vices offer afford­able web design at very com­pet­it­ive entry prices. Find out more in our How much does a web­site cost article.