Welcome back Rankers. Look what’s out, it’s the new edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman-Scott. I just got my copy today and David sent me one because I’m actually in the book this time which is lovely. If you haven’t read this book you really need to if your in business basically because it’s not just about online marketing and those sorts of things, it is what the title says. So if you’re in business you need to read this book. Available from all good online book stores. I’m not too sure if this one is available as an audio book but certainly as an e-book.
What I want to talk to you about today is just the 7 basic steps that are required to make it easy for customers to find you. Remember when we’re talking about search engine optimization we’re talking about customers looking for your products or services. It’s not like display advertising where you’re trying to be interruptive and get your message in front of potential customers because you know where they hang out like Facebook or where ever else. SEO is about customers searching for products or services that your business may have.
First thing that you’ve got to look at is Keyword Analysis. You’ve got to drill down, you’ve got to consider things like regionality and for todays exercise we’re taking this site here, Roof Seal Australia, they’ve been in business in Australia for I think, about a million years, I’m not sure, but they’ve certainly been advertising on television for a long time. So, we’re going to use their site today and do some keyword analysis straight up. Here are some phrases that I’ve already searched for on Google Insight for Search, there are a number of other tools available out there, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Market Samurai piece of software, great bit of software made locally in fact in Melbourne. So the phrases I’ve done are tile roof restoration, roof tile paint, and roof repair. I’ve come up with these phrases by searching for a base phrase, by the way Roof Seal, amongst other things their main product advertised on television is basically repairing concrete & terracotta tile roofs and resealing them so that’s the nature of my keyword discovery process. So I just put the word roof in and get all sorts of results so then I drill down and look in Australia. I’m not going to try and rank for the word roof because even if I was able to rank for that single word it’s going to deliver a lot of unqualified traffic. OK here in Australia we now start to see a break down, we’re seeing roof racks, we’re seeing roof tiles. OK so we can drill further into roof tiles and we’re seeing more related phrases there, some are brand phrases but we’re starting to get away from what the actual product is now. We’re probably getting into people looking to buy roof tiles or looking to select roof tiles. So we’ll go back, start to look to phrases that relate to your product or services, roof repairs OK. This probably the place to go, you can click on that one and get further results. We’ve got roof repairs Sydney, Melbourne roof repairs as opposed to roof repairs Melbourne. So a variety of phrases there. That’s how I’ve come up with these phrases and I’ll just put Melbourne roof repairs in, just seeing how that compares and when I’m talking about regionality, that’s what I’m talking about, actually having a town name. Melbourne roof repairs is actually pretty good and you would say probably high converting because it’s so specific and it is a local phrase. However we’ve still got roof repair far and above all the others. So, if we go roof repairs, I always like to check the plural against it when I get a high volume phrase like that to see if there’s any discrepancies there and we can see that there is. The plural is giving us more traffic. People will often ask in this situation, if I just try to rank for roof repairs won’t I therefore rank for roof repair – not necessarily. If your competition is trying to rank for the singular and they’ve got pages geared more towards the singular than you have then they’re going to rank for the singular. I would say you really need to be going for both of those phrases but this is a very rudimentary keyword analysis of course.
So let’s go and see roof repair, so let’s go and have a look at Roof Seal. This is the page title, we can see here that we don’t have that phrase in the page title but before you go and look at those sorts of things have a look at the competition. What is it that you actually have to beat. I’m going to go for the higher volume phrase, roof repairs, and we can see here we’ve got Jim’s roofing, we’ve got Melbourne Roof Repairs. These guys I’d say have done a little bit of keyword research, I don’t know who they are but the fact that we saw this phrase Melbourne roof repairs come up in the keyword analysis and we see someone’s gone out an registered the domain name and they’ve got roof repairs as the first phrase in their page title says that they’ve done a little bit of homework. This mob here have not done some homework or if they have they’ve implemented it badly. Mainly because, you see this phrase here Roof Roofing repair Sydney, Google’s going to see that as a single phrase because the comma doesn’t come until after the word Sydney. So, if you’re trying to rank for the phrase roof roofing repair Sydney, that’s great, that’s excellent but seriously no-one’s going to be typing that in. This is interesting, even though I haven’t put a town name in, Google has decided to deliver some Maps or Places entries. We can see here that these guys here are getting Google reviews, this guy here sealatex this is the guy at the top of the Places, they’re here on the front page as well. But I would say for that phrase you’d need to pick a spot where you can jump in and I would say, certainly first round of changes you would hope to get somewhere around the bottom of page 1. Even this guy here, he’s done some basic SEO where he divided up the phrases on his page title and broken them into distinct phrases. I don’t think Victorian Slate Roofing is a good one, people tend not to type in a state name unless they’re tourism accepted. For products and services ranking for the state really is not what you want to do because people don’t type that in. Exceptions to that rule would be around say conference centres or venues where you would seek to attract either interstate or international but certainly for most products and services people will type in a town name rather than a state. So, that’s some pretty basic competitive analysis done.
I would also just quickly have a look to see whose doing what with backlinks. Try to assess if these are real, look Jim’s Roofing’s only got 34 backlinks but they’re #1 for that phrase. These guys here, I suspect, will have more because they’ve gone out and registered that domain name and they have they’ve got 83. So you can see already the number of backlinks really isn’t a measure of where you should rank. Then we’ve got the #3 result with 18 backlinks. Let’s have a look at this other person we thought was having a red hot go at ranking and we can see 86, not much there. Remember it’s not about the volume it’s about the quality of the backlinks. Not a lot of backlinks but I would also have a look at those backlinks just to get a feel of what they’re doing or whose working with them or if they’ve employed someone. When I see these backlinks here I would say they’re all fairly legit because we’re getting backlinks from other Jim’s sites, we’re getting backlinks from a franchise site. What I’m not seeing there is a whole bunch of junk links that you will sometimes see. We’re getting your typical directories like HotFrog, those sorts of things, but mainly they look like they’re legitimate backlinks. That’s probably why they’re #1 for that phrase because they are real backlinks. They haven’t done much for that phrase in their page title so it’s always a trade off. Jim’s roofing services has got there I would say for that phrase roof repair mainly because of legitimate backlinks. I would also have a look at the page and what I’m looking for here is to see if the word roof repairs and it’s not, the word roof repairs does not appear on the front page. That in itself tells me it’s there only because of backlinks and maybe some content deeper within the site but it is something you can beat.
So we’ve done our competitor analysis, we’ve looked at backlink strength, whether it’s real or artificial. It doesn’t look as though they’re doing a lot of content production on that Jim’s site and they’re certainly not using authorship or anything like that we’ve discussed in the past.
So then you have a look at your own site. Let’s first of all, look at the index. Type in the word site:roofseal.com.au. We can see that Roof Seal has 115 pages in the index. If the site is not that big, once again you’ve got a problem. If the site is a lot bigger than that, you have a problem. If that seems about right, then OK. To me that seems a lot of pages for a site and I’m already starting to see some things here that look a bit questionable. Where you start to see things repeated in a description like this, you know that something’s not quite right. I would say (and I haven’t done a good check of this) that it’s some of the plug-ins or the content management system that’s been used here. We’re seeing here flash files, the one thing I always do is go to the end of the search I’ve just done and always click this “repeat the search with omitted results included”. Right there we’re seeing a lot of links actually in the index but Google hasn’t actually followed these links but is actually listing them. That’s part of the 115 pages and I think it’s because we’re using this plug-in. I think that’s a plug-in for Joomla, Zoom I think it’s like a gallery plug-in, from memory. It’s been awhile since I’ve used that. Really you’d need to block Google out of that and keep Google away from that. See there’s a lot of them in fact that’s probably the bulk of the results in the index. This is good, we’ve got videos in here as well, that’s always good. Obviously get rid of a lot of those backlinks.
The next thing to do is check your own code. Check to see what your code is like for the keyphrase and I’m talking about roof repairs here the plural. Yes it is a Joomla site. I would, and you can do this with Joomla, loose this meta tag up here ‘index follow’ I think it’s just not needed. Robots do that by default anyway. The one thing that pops out here which can be fixed for a Joomla site is the page title appearing down here after the Meta Tags, big no no. The page title should be at the start, the reason for that is it is the first thing Google sees. Also, just looking at these keyphrases in that page title, obviously we haven’t got roof repairs in there so we need that. I would question some of these phrases themselves. Home Seal (I don’t know if these are brand names, maybe they are) isn’t really something that someone is going to type in. Reroofing that’s not bad but cement sitting out there all on its own (when I say all on its own I mean there’s a comma on the end of it and it’s a word sitting there all by itself) isn’t going to help you. Drive Seal maybe that’s meant to be Driveway Seal, I don’t know, but you would always do your keyword analysis around these keyphrases and double check. Also with Joomla you can make certain that you get a lot of this script and these sorts of things that the bot doesn’t need to see, out of the actual page.
Then I would have a look at the site to see what is the keyword authority on the page. What is this page telling me about? The first thing I’m looking for here is Heading tags. I’ve caught a lot of flack over the years but just for the record Google has said time and time and time again that it does consider H1’s, H2’s, H3’s those sorts of things. That’s formatting basically, what I’m talking about here as to what has authority on the page or what the page is about. Right here it looks like we’ve got a graphic as a H3 and we’ve got Contact us Online Now as a H3. There’s no H1’s no H2’s so Google says there’s not authority. I don’t even think we’re getting that phrase on the front page, let’s just check that – No. So roof repairs does not appear on the front page. I mean there’s a good amount of text here, good balance.
Then the next thing to look at is your link structure, so make sure Google can actually follow these links here. These are text links and the one good thing here is that these links actually match your page title it’s just that we’re not seeing consistency through the headings and back into the menus. Google looks for all these things, it looks for that consistency of the page title, the headings, the link structure itself and the keywords in those links. The main issues there would be around certainly cleaning up the index and certainly making the page titles and those sorts of things far more targeted to the relevant keyphrases.
They’re the main things you would look at. Of course, step no. 7 is set up Webmaster Tools and check it religiously. Always check things like site performance, crawl errors, also make sure you check things like crawl rate because that will tell you how often Google’s coming out to your site and if it’s taking a long time to download a page and those sorts of things.
That is it for today’s show. Sorry it was a bit of a long one but these are the questions I get asked all the time and this is the process I go through to rank a page. Hopefully that is helpful to a bunch of you out there. We’ll see you next week. Bye.
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