If your brand or business has had an online presence for any amount of time, it’s almost a 100% possibility that you’ve wondered how to get a good SEO ranking.
But there are a few problems that may get in the way of you having good rankings. There are two things that can hold you back from good SEO rankings and they are:
• Not knowing enough about SEO or having the time to do it yourself
• Not knowing how to spot a good company that can do it for you
Using the excuse of “oh, I’ll just get to it later” isn’t good enough anymore. 28% of searches that are conducted nearby, result in a purchase. This means that if someone searched a keyword in Google and your brand or physical location showed up first, there’s a high possibility that they’ll choose your company to do business with.
In this guide we want to tackle the two most common problems that businesses face when it comes to SEO and show you exactly what you need to do to start receiving an inbound flow of leads through search engine optimization.
The 2 Most Common Problems With Achieving High SEO Rankings
Not Knowing Enough About SEO
You’re a business owner who has been wanting to learn SEO but is maybe confused about the process of what it actually takes to rank your website in Google. While the process can be very complicated for someone new it can be broken down into two categories:
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
Now, while both of these categories have multiple subcategories within them, this is really all it comes down to.
Let’s go deeper into each one of those.
On-Page SEO
Every business needs effective on-page SEO in order to rank in Google. On-page refers to everything that is directly on your website. At first glance, it may not seem as important as backlinks, but if you get this part wrong, backlinks won’t help much.
There are a few components of on-page SEO that should be executed properly.
Meta Title and Description
Your meta title and description are actually the first things your potential customer will see when they search for whatever product or service they need in Google.
Let’s start with a local example. We’ll use the keyword “Maryland Waterproofing” as our target keyword.
When you do a search for “Maryland Waterproofing” let’s take a look at the first result’s metadata and see what they’re doing right.
The first ranking website has the target keyword in their meta title and their meta description which let’s Google and the searcher know that this website is relevant to the search.
On-page Content
Once a searcher reaches your website, everything that is on the home page, service page or product page should be directly related to the keyword topic.
Including your main keyword a few times throughout your content is enough for Google to understand what your page is about and properly rank you.
Note: Do not try and overstuff keywords throughout your content just to try and rank higher. Always write for the user first and then optimize for the target keyword afterwards.
You can see that the search phrase appears on the homepage 3 times. Once in the title.
Once in a featured review.
The keyword is also used in the footer as well.
This is enough on-page SEO to get you headed in the right direction, especially if you have a local website where the competition is less competitive.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to any optimization that is done for your website to rank that does not take place directly on your website.
The most common type of off-page SEO you can do is link building. Simplified, link building is just someone else linking back from their website to yours. This can be considered “votes” to Google and lets them know that other people see your website as a resource.
So, how do you get backlinks?
There are actually a few different ways you can go about getting backlinks. Doing manual outreach to other website owners can be effective if done the right way.
The days of sending a pre-written, non-personal email and securing a backlink are long gone.
Now outreach requires building a relationship with other website owners. This does take time, but once done can be extremely effective in helping your website rank.
So which form of link building should you start with? Guest posting.
Guest Posting
We touched on this briefly above, but here we’ll get more into the strategy side of things.
Before trying to secure a post on a website, you should always run an audit on the site you are trying to link from.
You want to make sure that the website has:
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Real traffic
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Relevance
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Good metrics
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Balanced anchor text
Let’s get deeper into each one of these.
Real Traffic
Any website that you consider obtaining a backlink from should have a real source of traffic. Fake traffic can be purchased from a number of vendors online. They’ll usually advertise it at a price that is “too good to be true”, and if it sounds “too good to be true”, it usually is.
Try and also target websites that get at least 50 visitors per month. This is an indicator that Google has found the site useful and has given it some authority. Authority is needed to effectively pass ranking power from one website to another.
To check a site’s traffic you can use a tool in Ahrefs called the “Site Explorer”
When vetting for backlinks, you want to try and make sure that you are racing out to bigger blogs in your space. That way they are still relevant to your company without being a direct competitor.
But for this example, we will use a direct competitor.
Once we have the url, place the site link into the “Site Explorer” and do a search.
Once the data has populated, you should be able to see an estimated value of monthly traffic.
This would generally fit our criteria in this area because the traffic is estimated at over 50 visitors per month.
A free way to check to see how much traffic a site has is to use a Chrome extension called “Similar Web”.
It’s as easy as going to the extension store and typing in, similar web.
Once the extension is added to chrome, you can visit a potential target website, to get the traffic count. Sometimes if a site has really low traffic, you’ll get this message here.
Notice that Ahrefs showed data that this website gets around 70 visitors per months while Similar Web could pull no data. Free tools will not always show the most accurate data. Which is why it is much better to use a paid tool if you can.
Relevance
Seeing if a site is relevant to yours is just as simple as taking a look at the site and seeing if the articles are related to what your product or service is. The more a site is related to yours, the more relevance Google will detect between your site and there’s.
Note: Relevance is important in Google’s eyes because the more relevant to websites that are linking between one another, the more of a “push” you can see in your rankings, once Google detects the link.
Good Metrics
When we say search for a site with good metrics we mean a site that has a strong amount of domain authority, referring domains and domain authority. Let’s take our example competitor website we used earlier.
When searching for the site in Ahrefs, you can see the metrics you need to see using “Site Explorer”. In this specific example, the information tells us that our competitor website has 27 referring domains (websites linking to it) and a DR (domain rating) of 9.
Note: Look for a DR over 5 to go after and a minimum of 10 referring domains, if you are trying to rank a local business.
These stats look good to be a local website. So if this site was not a direct competitor, this would be an ideal website to go after, based on the metrics.
Anchor Text
The anchor text is referred to as the text of the link leading back to your site. If your anchor text looks unnatural, Google can spot this and penalize your site which can actually prevent it from ranking.
Your target website should have a natural anchor link selection. This just means there isn’t too much of one anchor type.
Our target website has a natural linking pattern. Notice, there aren’t too much of just one kind of anchor, they are spread out across multiple anchors.
This would be a great anchor text profile of a website we’d want to try and reach out to.
After this research is done, it’s time to start emailing the website owners and building relationships to try and get a link placed on their site.
Are You Ready for Higher SEO Rankings?
We have broken down the two things that need to be focused on when it comes to getting a good SEO ranking.
If you follow our guide and take the necessary steps laid out on this guide, you’ll have an optimized website and be on your way to getting the guest post to help rank your site in the search engines.
Our team has a systemized process to obtain a number of high-quality backlinks that will help move your site up the engines onto the first page of Google along with a team of experts that make sure your on-page SEO is perfectly done.
