Author: Luke, WebsiteFix Digital
Some of the major changes introduced by Google this year is the new attributes of no-follow link. Now, we have two more attributes such as UGC (user-generated content such as forums, comments etc) and sponsored content. This was announced by Google in their webmaster blogs in September 2019.
We believe due to the rise in sponsored content, Google decided to take this step. Most of the blogs across the world, from low to very popular blogs were adopting a model of sponsored content. So much that Google had to adust their own algorithm and had to adapt rather than the other way around.
These attributes can be described as follows:
rel=”sponsored”: Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
rel=”ugc”: UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
rel=”nofollow”: Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
Overall, Googles does not want you to be part of the link schemes in which case you will be violating Google’s guidelines and it can negatively impact your site’s ranking in SERP.
SO HOW SEO IS DONE?
Just like good car mechanics use their skills, experience and tools to check your car for servicing and great doctors perform their tests on the patient before taking further actions -a good SEO should perform various checks on a website and follow all guidelines of Google to rank better.
There are 200+ ranking factors provided by Google. Not all can be mentioned here but we follow these guidelines, use our skills and experience to achieve better rankings for your site. SEOs may provide monthly reports and weekly email updates to keep you updated with the progress.
I’ll explain this in a way how we do SEO at WebsiteFix Digital. This will give you a good idea of how SEO is done.
Details –
Discovery/ Market Research
The first key element here is market research.
We will perform a whole bunch of research around your industry, the keywords that you should be targeting, what your competitors are doing, and essentially how visible you are online for the type of keywords in your industry and what you want to be achieving.
That really sets a lot of direction for where you want to go with your SEO strategy.
Keyword Research
The foundation of any good SEO campaign is choosing the right keywords.
We help you find the terms your potential customers are using and make sure they have the right balance of potential traffic and competition.
Once we’ve completed our research, we work with you to finalise the keywords. The finalised keywords list will be our “Hitlist” – Keywords we want to rank for.
Audit/Technical SEO
The second important aspect of SEO is technical SEO.
It’s really important that Google can crawl your website and it knows who you are, where you are and what you do.
There are a few technical things that we need to make sure are ticked.
We typically start with complete website technical audit, so reviewing where your website’s currently at and any issues that might be preventing Google from crawling it.
Once we know what those issues are, we then start implementing or changing the website accordingly.
A lot of these things you/website visitors may not see.
They’re often in the back end side of the website but some you will. Sometimes you may need a web designer or developer on board to assist with some of those elements.
Content Strategy & Marketing
Once those technical things are done and we know that Google can get into your website and crawl it, that’s when we move on to the content side.
Content is a critical part of any SEO strategy. It’s really important because you need to make your website relevant and engaging to your audience.
We are experts in the art of storytelling. We create content to drive brand engagement and product sales. Because if you give people content they’re passionate about, they will do your marketing for you.
Links & Promotion
The next stage is all around making backlinks and promotions. This is a big difference between good SEO and bad SEO.
Bad SEO has low quality and spammy backlinks. Sometimes you can get a bit of a sugar rush and rush up the rankings, but you’ll crash just as quickly as you went up.
Here at WebsiteFix, our SEO strategies are all based around good quality links. The way in which we build good quality links is by creating great relevant useful content and taking those out to other relevant industry websites.
As an example, if you were to sell shoes online, if you created a great content piece on the latest fashion when it comes to shoes, we could potentially get other industry websites and forums that have information around shoes and fashion sharing and linking to that piece of content. Google is going to see that that’s a relevant link for what you do.
Gaining links from other high-quality websites can push your pages to the top of the search results. This requires creating popularity of your website and relationships building.
CRO – Conversion Rate Optimisation
The next element here is conversion rate optimisation and usability.
The reason why these are so important is that once you’re getting a lot of traffic to your website it’s then all about maximizing that.
Conversion rate optimisation is about making little tweaks to get someone to take the action that you want, whether that is them watching a video or whether that’s them downloading an eBook or whether that’s them inquiring or buying online.
At WebsiteFix, we want to test a range of different things to see how people react. The usability side is really important because you’re going to get a range of people to your website.
Again, we want to add value. Google is looking at sites that add value. If we can give your site visitors a positive experience, give them great content and they enjoy being on your site, Google’s going to pick up those positive signals.
Putting the Strategy Together + Transparency
Transparency is really important for SEOs and they should clearly help clients with following Google’s guidelines instead of participating in link schemes. We want you to know what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, and how much it costs. We would like to go through with you about how we put an SEO strategy together for your business
Everything we do is completely customised. There are no cookie-cutter packages here at WebsiteFix. With an SEO on the cheap and a cookie-cutter package where the agency doesn’t understand your business, you will struggle to get the outcomes that you’re looking for.
We also make sure that our SEO is part of a broader digital marketing strategy and aligns well with our client’s business.
How Long Does SEO Take?
Many of our clients see improvements in rankings and some even scored first page rankings within 3 months.
In general, when executed correctly, an SEO campaign is a long-term (6 – 12+ months) strategy that will continue to grow and expand your business well into the future.
There are hundreds of factors that determine your site’s ranking position, which makes it impossible for us to set a broad expectation.
Some SEO strategies can just be one-off projects. We can do 3 months, 6 months, 12 months. It completely depends on you and your business and what you’re trying to achieve.
David Johnson
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