The first step in building trust in potential customers is reaching them, and a great way to do this is through targeted keywords. These keywords will help you not only reach more potential customers but also help you better understand what they are searching for in the first place.
Where do you appear on Google?
When most people are looking for the solution to their problem or researching something to buy, they begin with a Google search. Customers will likely use where you show up in their search as a measure of your trustworthiness.
Boosting your rankings requires Search Engine Optimization. It’s going to take months, building page after page where all of those pages are themed around important keyword search phrases for your business. It takes time to produce this content, and it takes time for Google to crawl your website and respond to this content, but once it’s done, you will have people discovering your website and generate leads through your search results for years.
Google’s Search Promise
Google’s promise, which is the reason that so many people use it, is that they will show the most important, relevant pages on the internet for what you search. They try to show you the best quality and most substantive pages on the internet that are about the terms you searched. If you are not investing in this, if you have a website with very few pages that are light in word count and not themed around a particular search term, Google will either be unable to tell what your site is about or will determine that your site is not among the most pertinent and high-quality entries. This will result in a lower search rank and Google will display sites that are more specific to the problem that your customer is trying to solve.
Technical Factors
When ranking sites, Google takes into consideration certain technical factors. These factors are important for your SEO and are a key part of the trust building process.
- Backlinks and Anchor Text
Google uses links going to other pages on your site, or words linked from other sites, to figure out what a page is about. Those linked words are called anchor text, and the link itself is called a backlink.
- Speed and Device Responsiveness
Responsive means that as the layout and size of the display is changing, whether on a laptop or a phone, that the content adjusts to scale. Half or more of the visits to your site will be from a mobile device, so if your site is slow or unresponsive, Google penalizes it.
- SSL
An SSL certificate is a secure link at the top of a browser. Google will warn users if a form is not secure.
- Error and Malware Free
Your site needs to be free of any coding mistakes, including things like broken and missing links, as well as malware free, which is coding that may cause damage to the person browning the site.
- Tags/Structure
Google needs to know what the important things are on the page, and it uses what are called H1 or H2 tags, which apply a certain style to heading and body text. These tools are available on almost any web development platform.
- Meta Data
Metadata is information that is on or in the page that you cannot necessarily see when you are browsing the page as a user. Some of that Google uses to understand what your page is about as well, and some it doesn’t use to understand but might use to display in your search results.
Quality Factors
When you’ve picked out your best keywords, which is what we will help you to do in this lesson, and you’re thinking about creating pages themed around these keywords, it’s important to remember that we are not trying to trick Google, we are trying to create unique, quality, substantive content focused on these keywords.
- Create meaningful content around these search terms because they are essentially the problems that customers are trying to solve.
- Write detailed pages. We want to focus on things like our services, our team, frequently asked questions, articles on relevant topics, and comprehensive and relevant information.
- Focus on substantive pages between 200 and 1000 words formatted in a way that is very organized and readable.
- Theme the page around an important search term or phrase. Use just the one phrase and possibly its variations (like the singular and plural). You will want to name the page by that, use it to create a page title, and include it several times in the text.
- Identify your best and winnable search terms. You should take into consideration what the most relevant terms are, as well as the ones are realistically achievable.
Creating a List
Making the list of the best and winnable terms is easier than you think, and we’ll walk you through it.
- Go here and navigate to External Keyword Planner
- Search by keywords and brainstorm main phrases
- Select some of the suggested terms until the list it creates is between 1000-2000 words
- Download the list and open in Excel or Google Sheets
- Sort by bid low range: large to small
- Remove terms with no bid
- Highlight those with the top 25% of bids in yellow
- Sort by low search volume: large to small
- Highlight any terms in the top 25% NOT highlighted in yellow with blue
- Remove all remaining terms not highlighted
- Sort keyword name: A-Z
- Create column “to keep”
- Evaluate each term for relevance, and put a 0 in the column to remove and 1 to keep
- Sort to keep: large to small
- Delete all zeros
You should be left with a list of terms that customers are searching for. These will be the terms you should use to create pages and themed content on your site to boost your rankings in Google searches.
This lesson, along with a step-by-step video walkthrough and demonstration, are available when you sign up to be a Cultivate member.