SEO – A WORKING EXAMPLE

Can you remember before the internet how did you used to find a supplier in the yellow pages? Well, the yellow pages was the original search engine database, and YOU were the searcher. You lifted the directory and were in need of a service. Let’s say that you needed a plumber, what would be your next move? Look under P for plumbers of course. When you find the page, you then review the adds. OK this is a very easy example, and the yellow pages had their own way to decide who was shown first in the plumbers section such as company’s alphabetical name, or the largest and boldest advert.

Now lets jump back to 2017, and Google is your new resource. Let’s continue with the plumber example. Instead of just typing in Plumber, now you can be very specific. For example “I want a plumber who specialises in boilers within 5 miles of my home“. Wow! You can really do this? YES!

Now the examples have shown how you find things via the search engine, let’s look at how and why it does.

In order for the plumbing website to appear at the top of the search engine screen, the website has to comply with Google SEO Guidelines. There are many factors in these guidelines, but I will talk about just a few. Before I go into that, the thing you need to understand and remember is that the search engines look at your site with robots, and not people. So, they can only follow rules programmed into them which are simple and logical.

When reading and scanning your site, they ask a number of questions.

• What is the site about?
• Does the page title reflect what the business is about?
• Does the page description give a reasonable understanding of what is on the page, and is it relevant to this business?
• Are the images on the page identifiable as relevant to the subject of this business and contains information the robots can read and understand?

OK, its all getting a bit “information overload”, so I will just highlight the technical background to what has been discussed.

In order for the plumber to be number 1, or appear on page one of the search engine, the SEO elements had to be completed correctly.

This is called Meta Data, and as you would expect, that’s what they are called to identify them in SEO.

• The page needed a relevant Meta Title – “Joe Bloggs Emergency Plumber”
• The page needed a relevant Meta Description “Are you in need of an Emergency Plumber in the local area?”
• The home page (and other pages) needed to have a heading “Welcome to you Emergency Plumber Joe’s Page”

Just these 3 factors above (and there are many, many more) would help Google bots to read the site, and say

Hey! The word Plumber appears in the Title, the Description and is the headline of the content of the page. This guy must be a Plumber or selling Plumbing services. Hey, when someone searches for a Plumber, this would be something they would want to see.

Now if you have ticked all the SEO boxes and your content is good etc, they you will climb the search engine ladder and the more relevant your site is to the search term, the more chance Google will put your page up higher.

Simple.

OK. It’s not all that simple, but that is the building blocks of how you get your site to appear, so customer can find you.