The million pound question. At least it can be. Having your website rank on page 1 of Google for regularly searched keyword terms is so important that an entire industry has grown up around it: SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimisation and, here at Smart And Slick, we’re obsessed with it.
SEO campaigns are hard work and only pay off long term. For this reason, we do not recommend that early stage startups and unprofitable businesses invest money into SEO. It takes too long to yield a return. However, companies and organisations that are making money and aim to still exist more than two years from now should definitely think about it.
An SEO campaign has three steps.
Before we go into the nuts and bolts of what exactly an SEO campaign entails, we need to figure out what we want to achieve. Yes, we want to get our client’s website to the top of Google – but which pages and for what keyword phrases?
So we start by looking at search trend data and figuring out which keyword phrases and search query strings we want to target, and which specific web pages we want to rank for each of those phrases or terms.
This step involves using data to inform strategy and is essential to using an SEO budget efficiently.
How well Google ranks your web pages for particular keyword phrases is impacted in part by the composition of the web page in question. For example, this page is optimised for the phrase “How To Get To The Top of Google“. And in all likelihood, you probably found this page because you googled that phrase.
In order for that to work, certain words have to appear in certain places in the web page code. If they’re not there, it’s highly unlikely the page will rank. And that goes for any page, trying to rank for any keyword phrase.
So every campaign starts with an on-page SEO audit, in which we make sure all the right things are in all the right places to maximise the chances of getting the results we want.
This is really the easy bit because we have full control over the content of the web page itself. So next, we move on to the hard part…
The other major factor involved in getting to the top of Google is a web page’s backlink profile. In a nutshell, that’s the number of other websites that link to the web page in question. That includes both web pages within the website of which that particular web page is a part, and third party websites as well.
We spend a huge amount of time and resources on generating backlinks to various pages on our clients’ websites in order that they rank well for the keyword phrases they want to rank for.
This is definitely the longest part of the process and can go on for many months, depending on the website in question and the target keyword phrase in question.
The thing about getting to the top of Google is that Google isn’t particularly forthcoming with information. To get to the top for any particular search term, all you need to do, in theory, is to beat whoever is currently at the #1 spot for that term. And that’s true. But the problem is that until we try, we cannot know how competitive a particular search term is or what the relative distances are between the existing ranked pages.
From personal experience, we may have an idea of how difficult it will be to rank a website for a particular term, but we rarely make promises about results.
Want Your Site To Get To The Top Of Google?
If you want to see your website ranked at #1 in Google, get in touch today to see how Smart And Slick SEO can help you do that.
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