#5 Business SEO: Get Higher in Search Engines in 2021- Part 2 of 3

Hello! Today I’m going over part 2 of 24 Business SEO tips to get higher in Google in 2021. I talked about the first 8 last week.

#8: Develop A Strategic Plan For Your Content

Do some keyword research. I went over keyword research in part one, be sure to listen to that episode if you haven’t yet. Develop a plan on content that works with the best keywords. Plan on writing a page or blog post once a week, fortnight (not the game), month or whatever works for you.

#9: And Strategic Page Design

Make good use of headers: H1, H2 etc. Use bold and italics to highlight important text, but don’t just use text. Yes, search engines love text but people love images. Mix in some imagery with the text to break it up a bit.

#10: Remove Duplicate Content

This is very important! Your website should not have any duplicate content. You can use Copyscape (www.copyscape.com) to check your site to see if you have duplicate content on it. Some ecommerce sites have duplicate content because the items you sell may be on more than one page.

In that case, I recommend hiring someone to help you create what’s called a canonical page and I know this techy-nerdy, sorry. For your website, the canonical page is like an anchor page for specific content. You can tell the search engines which page is the correct, or cornerstone page when you have duplicate content.

For instance, there may be five pages that have the same information but one particular page is the one you want the search engines to pay attention to. That can be very important for ecommerce sites when it’s dynamically creating the content. And again, I highly recommend that you hire someone to help you with that because it can get techy-nerdy real quick when you have e-commerce sites.

#11: Relevant Content is a Web Page That Changes When Needed.

Search engines like websites that change, but search engines also like websites with longevity pages. Yes, this can be a catch-22. Don’t change a web page by adding a period or space just to change the publish date, it doesn’t work anymore. But do change your web page when it stops being relevant.

This is generally more true of blog posts than web pages. blog posts can become irrelevant and outdated. It’s better to remove or update unnecessary blog posts than to leave them there. Or, you can also take several blog posts and combine them into one if they’re all about the same thing.

This series of 3 podcasts used to be 9 blog posts. We updated the information and condensed it into 3 podcasts. Search engines look for this, and they like it. Since we took 9 blog posts and made 3 larger ones, there is more text per blog post, and more likely Google and Bing will index it higher.

 #12:  Use Long-Tail Keywords.

 I know that’s kind of techie nerdy, but you’ll get it. Long-tail keywords are just keywords that have more than one word (also known as keyphrases). Plumber is a keyword. “Residential plumber in New York” is a long-tail keyword. But this long-tail keyword could rank for residential plumber, plumber, New York, and residential plumber New York, so long-tail keywords can actually help you, so long tail keywords can help you by ranking for each of the words.

Fewer people look for long-tail keywords, but the people who do look for them are looking for specific help, so it’s more likely you will get new customers with long-tail keywords than shorter keywords.

Listen to episode #19, The Stingray and Other Long-Tail Keywords for more.

#13: Notice How a Location Was Used in The Last Point?

The average plumber in New York isn’t going to travel to Florida to fix a leaky pipe. Using your location can make a big difference. For instance, we at Port Bell do search engine optimization for companies around the world, but we use the “SEO Tacoma” and “SEO Seattle” keywords all over our site because that’s where we are based.

People generally like working with local people first. Then, when you get a bigger reputation, you’ll notice that it starts expanding out more. Remember, I can put Seattle SEO everywhere and the search engines are going to see just SEO as well, so it will help with both local and national keywords.

Remember to go to our website www.portbell.com and go to success tips. click on join the club and you will be among the first people that find out about all of our podcasts and other stuff that comes out. I only email once a week so you’re not going to get overwhelmed with emails from me.

#14:  Unique Content Is A Must.

Don’t copy content from other web pages and put it directly on your website. This is called web page spamming and is an old blackhat technique. It’s also one of the most likely ways to get banned from the search engines. Yes, banned. Use a program like Copyscape to make sure your content is 100% unique.

You can also use Copyscape to make sure that others are not stealing your content.

#15: Make Your Page Names Descriptive and Relevant.

Some pages on your website have to have a specific name, have to and for business purposes you should standardize some of your page names because remember; our job as business people is to get people to your website.

Even if you have a creative business, you do want to standardize some things. For instance, your main page should always be index. that is definitely kind of techy- nerdy. But, it has to be or people may not see your main page when they come to your site.

Some other pages can be more creative. Instead of contact for your contact page, you could have contactseattleplumber. That makes the page more descriptive for both people and search engines.

I’m talking about the URL, or permalink, of the page, not the META title or main headline you see for the page.

#16: Work On Your Social Media Pages.

The floodgates have opened. You can now find Facebook and LinkedIn posts on Google. This is huge. You might have been able to find someone else’s profile page before but never a post. But, I am finding Facebook videos and LinkedIn posts on both Google and Bing more and more lately.

I’m now starting to see not just videos but other pages popping up on the search engines now, so that is huge and it’s going to get even bigger.

Stay tuned for part 3 next week and be sure to subscribe to this podcast.