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Episode 181 - Rank a Page on Google
1.7k Plays2 years ago
In today's episode I'm sharing an overview of what our process looks like for creating a piece of content that ranks on Google for a keyword that we're targeting. This is from the outline of a presentation that I gave at Spark Conference (Showit's conference) in November 2022.
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Transcript
SEO Titles vs. H1 Tags
00:00:05
Speaker
So starting with the page title, all right, if you have a tool like WankMath or Yoast, you're able to set an SEO page title, it's gonna be most likely the same as, you know, if you're writing a blog post, for instance, it would be the same as the title of the blog post. If it's a page on your website, it might not be the same as the H1 tag that you're using, but it should probably be really similar, all right? But I like to start with the page title. Like I said, use power words, try to peak curiosity.
Introduction to Ranking on Google
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones. Wonder what it takes to rank a page on Google? In today's episode, I'm sharing an overview of what our process looks like for creating a piece of content that we want to rank. We're sharing a bit about how to research the topic, developing the content, and optimizing the page. My hope is that this is a super streamlined way to think about writing content that ranks.
00:01:05
Speaker
I'm always looking for ways to make this content both easier to understand and implement. So if you have questions, send them in so I can continue to refine this content. Also, be sure to check out some of the SEO resources that we have a link to in the show notes. As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check them out at DavianChrissa.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts.
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Speaker
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Presentation at Spark Conference on SEO
00:02:39
Speaker
In today's episode, though, we are talking about how to rank a page on Google. This is another presentation that I gave at Spark conference this past year. If you don't know what Spark conference is, it is show its conference. It is their new conference. They're hosting again, not in twenty twenty three, but in twenty twenty four.
00:02:55
Speaker
In November, yeah. Yeah, in November, in Phoenix, I think, and we've said this in past episodes, but show it knows how to run a conference. They do. Yeah. So if you're on the fence about going, or if you need a marketing business conference to go to, put it on your list. Yeah. And Phoenix such an easy place to fly into. It is. So anyways, we're talking about ranking a page on Google. This is part of a much longer presentation that I did there. We are going to give you sort of the Sparknotes version of it.
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, I hope so because this was, you talked for 60 straight minutes on this topic, if I remember right. Yeah, and I wasn't even planning on talking for that long on it, but people had a lot of good questions. So that's what we did. So we're going to go through, you know, just kind of my approach for, you know, basically when we're creating content and we want it to rank well, and that goes for most of our content, not all of it.
SEO as a Broader Strategy
00:03:43
Speaker
I think that this is one of the things, like SEO is just like one part of the strategy. You know, like we create content all the time that I think, ah,
00:03:51
Speaker
Maybe this doesn't rank well, but I think it's still going to be really popular. But of the content we create that we do feel like there is an opportunity, like an SEO opportunity, this is sort of the approach that we're taking to that content.
SEO Course Promotion
00:04:04
Speaker
Unfortunately, I'm not able to cover every single aspect of SEO in this discussion.
00:04:12
Speaker
Fortunately, we have recorded a number of the other episodes about SEO. We'll link to some of those in the show notes. And as always, if you have a question, let us know because it might become the topic of a future episode. We also have an SEO course if you want a compact, thorough look at SEO. Yes, that's right. We have an SEO course. We have a show at SEO course and may be released by the time that this episode airs a WordPress-focused SEO course as well.
00:04:37
Speaker
And the show it SEO course will hopefully have been updated to by the time that this episode rolls out. And just in I've been doing some more teaching lately, you know, again, just conferences as conference come back.
Streamlining SEO Courses
00:04:50
Speaker
And I've been thinking through the way that the content is organized. And so I think I'm going to.
00:04:57
Speaker
So I have this idea that I think is going to really streamline the content for people, especially when it comes to SEO, because there are so many different aspects of it. But I'm really thinking that this new organization, or how I'm going to organize the content in these courses, really going to give people quick and actionable steps to get to this, which is the goal to rank stuff on Google.
00:05:21
Speaker
Hopefully that's the case, but check out those. We'll link to them in the show notes as well if you're interested in learning more about exactly how to do the things that we're talking about today. If they're ready. I hear a lot of doubt, all right? And I expect an apology when we get to the end of January and these are released. If you have them ready, I will make you another apple pie or a cheesecake. You can pick. Maybe both. So one for each course. Anyways, moving in, where should we start?
Content Creation Starting with Keyword Research
00:05:48
Speaker
I think you have to start with keyword topic research because that's how we decide what we're going to write about when we're choosing content. That's right. There's no other place to start. So we're going to start with topic and keyword research. We don't talk as much about keywords anymore in SEO. You know, it used to be like way back in the day, you just stuff as many of the keywords in there as possible. And the more you put it in there, the more Google thought that that's what that content was about. So bad.
00:06:11
Speaker
So that's not really the case anymore. What Google looks at now and other search engines is sort of topical authority, right? And so one of Google's more recent updates, the Google Helpful Content Update, really focused on this sort of thing. Basically, are you the topical authority on that subject?
00:06:27
Speaker
Right. Or do you have authority on that topic rather is probably a better way to put it. So for instance, let's say your email marketing expert, right? One, your site should have a lot of articles on it about email marketing or a lot of content on it about email marketing. Right. And by creating all of this, this different content around email marketing, right? You're increasing your authority on that topic.
00:06:50
Speaker
So that's important. Now a business like ours, we have sort of a liability here, right? Because we do a lot of different things. So it's important for us to keep our content as tight as possible. That doesn't mean we never could include a personal post, but you know, like we do brand and website design and we talk a lot about marketing and there's a lot of different niches within marketing.
00:07:12
Speaker
So whenever we're creating content, for instance, we spent a lot of time creating content just around email marketing. We have posts like ConvertKit versus Flowdesk that at least time recording this is the number one result for that search. But had we just written that one article and called it quits about email marketing, that post might not do as well. So that post is assisted by all of the other posts that we've written about email marketing.
00:07:39
Speaker
and we tend to link to the other posts from each other, correct? Yeah, and we'll talk about that. Internal links become really important, I think, here. External links seem to get all the love when we start talking about SEO, but internal links are just as important. We'll talk about that in a minute. But all that to say, so we're doing our keyword and topic research.
Tools for Topic Research
00:07:55
Speaker
Some of the tools that we're using specifically are professional SEO tools because over at Till Agency especially, we're working with clients on a professional level, right? So we need those tools. Those tools aren't often worth it for just the average user.
00:08:09
Speaker
So there are tools out there that can help you with this task. So Answer the Public is a good one. You can put in a topic and it's gonna give you a lot of different topic ideas around that topic. And you think you can do a couple searches a day for free, right? Yeah, I think three or something like that. Yeah, per IP address.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, a good place to get started though. Uber suggests is on the more inexpensive side, all right? And that's spelled like Uber, the car service, U-B-E-R suggest. Keywords everywhere is another popular tool. But all of those are going to be, they're still gonna be professional level tools, but they're gonna have a subscription that's gonna be more manageable for the average user.
00:08:49
Speaker
When you get in there and you start doing that topic research, typically I'm looking at two metrics primarily. I'm looking at volume. That is how often is that topic searched and difficulty. Each keyword tool has its own difficulty metric, but you'll get an idea of how difficult it would be to rank for that search.
00:09:09
Speaker
And do you want a high volume, a low difficulty? That is the unicorn. Yeah, the unicorn. Something that lots of people are searching for, that is not difficult to rank for. Typically, the things that a lot of people are searching for are harder to rank for. That's just how it goes. Wedding photography would be incredibly hard.
00:09:25
Speaker
Yeah. Just like as a broad keyword, you know, and that's why we want to focus on like longer tail keywords or more, you know, sort of sub topics of that, right? Like film wedding photographer in Annapolis, Maryland, you know, something like that. All right. But I am looking at volume and difficulty.
Filling Content Outlines with Related Searches
00:09:41
Speaker
There are other things that I'm looking for as well. Typically a keyword research tool or topic research tool is going to give you related searches, right? So I'm looking at some of those related searches. I'm using those related searches maybe to fill in my outline for that given piece of content. So for instance, if my content is about, let's say ConvertKit, right? And it's maybe a cornerstone piece about ConvertKit. I'm writing a review about ConvertKit. Those related searches are going to give me ideas for different subheadings within my
00:10:11
Speaker
So they might be like, what does ConvertKit cost a month? Or how do I get started on ConvertKit or? Features of ConvertKit, things like that. So that's gonna give me an idea of what people are searching for related to ConvertKit that I might include in my article.
00:10:26
Speaker
Especially, I typically start with that cornerstone piece because each of those questions, like features of ConvertKit, I could write another post just focusing on those. And again, it supports that cornerstone piece.
00:10:41
Speaker
So something to keep in mind as you're writing your post. So I'm looking at related searches and you can use sort of more intuitive research techniques as well. You can go to Google, you know, as you type something in Google, it's going to complete your sentence. Pay attention to those. Pay attention to the section on the Google search results that say people also ask. Pay attention to the related searches at the bottom of the search results. All those important to take a look at. Any other questions, comments, concerns about keyword topic research?
00:11:10
Speaker
Well, maybe, would you feel like people need to do this for every piece of content they create? Or is it just like if, you know, you're writing for search engines, you really want a piece to rank this, you should do all this.
00:11:20
Speaker
I mean, certainly for the latter. If you're writing and you have sort of SEO in mind,
Keyword Research for SEO and General Content
00:11:25
Speaker
then you should do this kind of research. I think it's just smart. I think for a number of reasons. One, because like there are a lot of topics that I start writing about, but people aren't thinking about the topic in the way that I'm phrasing it, right? Because like we're experts in what we do. And so we talk about our product or services in ways that people don't talk about our product or services. Keyword research kind of reveals some of that.
00:11:49
Speaker
I think it's just good practice. I typically do it for any piece of content that I'm creating, even if SEO isn't the primary goal there. If you were a photographer blogging a wedding, you probably wouldn't do this level of extensive research, would you? Yes and no. I think one of the best things that a photographer could do, and this I think goes with anybody in the wedding industry,
00:12:11
Speaker
you know, making posts or pages that target specific venues in your area and it's being high quality like a cornerstone page around that venue and then featuring some of your best weddings from that shot at the venue or planned at the venue or whatever. And then whenever you create a blog post where it's a wedding that happened at that venue, you always want to link back to that cornerstone piece.
00:12:35
Speaker
And if you're like, that sounds like a lot of work, we have a template in our shop that does it all for you. If you check out the venue landing page template, that is kind of the idea behind what I'm talking about. I think that keyword and topic research, it's something that you can learn to do really quickly and doesn't hurt doing. You have to do it every time? No. Do I do it absolutely every time I create a piece of content? No.
Importance of Competitive Research
00:12:58
Speaker
But certainly if I'm sitting down and writing a blog post or something like that, I am thinking about it.
00:13:03
Speaker
All right, so competitive research, also important. Take a look at who's currently ranking for that search, what kinds of questions they're answering in those pieces of content, what kinds of results are given. If you are trying to create a piece of content that ranks high in Google, and when you search for content like that, when you search that keyword, if the first five results that come up are YouTube videos,
00:13:27
Speaker
it should be a good indicator that you writing a written blog post on the subject probably isn't gonna help you get to the top of the Google search results, right? Because what people are looking for is a YouTube video, like a tutorial, right? So understanding search intent is super important.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's all I want to go into right now for keyword and topic research. Just because we're already getting along, already getting in there. So then developing the content. All right.
Creating Content Outlines with Questions
00:13:52
Speaker
So again, when I talk about content, I'm often thinking about written content because I like to write, but it could be, you know, podcasts. It could be YouTube video. If you're going to do a podcast, so you probably want to include some sort of outline. Right.
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah, you want to include some sort of transcript because Google isn't going to be able to crawl through your audio file. Well, maybe not today. They're doing crazy things when it comes to understanding images. So anyways, when it comes to developing the content, I like to outline my page or post first, right? And I like to outline it with questions.
00:14:23
Speaker
So I have my piece of content and let's say my piece of content is, it's the ultimate review of ConvertKit, right? Then one of my questions might be, how much does ConvertKit cost per month or year? What kinds of features does ConvertKit have? And then I might have bullet points of those features. And then, is ConvertKit worth it? Stuff like that. And basically it makes it really easy to then go back and fill in that content. So I'm basically just answering my own questions, creating some transitions in there and boom.
00:14:50
Speaker
I have a blog post. I want to compare it to what's already out there because again, I don't want to plagiarize anybody, but I do want to make sure that I'm answering the same kinds of questions that people are looking for. So that's important as well. What else when it comes to developing the content? I feel like you got the bulk of it.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah. We already talked about like search intent a little bit. Yeah. Headlines. Headlines are important. All right. Headlines, what catches people's attention. At the same time, you have to balance that against what people are searching for. You don't want to be too cute in your headline. All right. But you want to learn how to catch people's attention.
00:15:27
Speaker
I like your, what is our current SEO tool, RankMath? It has a headline analyzation tool in it. So it gives you like an idea if your headline is helpful. And it's looking if you use power words. If you don't know what power words are, Google power words and you'll figure it out. But tools like that can be really helpful. And I, you know, I put so much effort into the content. I feel like sometimes I'm just like with headline, I'm like, oh, here's what I think about ConvertKit. You know, it just gets so boring. So it's important to have somebody who can help you brainstorm on that level.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah, all right, so moving on from developing the content. But again, I think if you create an outline and then you're just answering your own questions, really easy way to create content quickly. All right, moving on to optimizing the
Content Optimization Strategies
00:16:08
Speaker
content. I like to think about it from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. So you're starting with the page title, all right? If you have a tool like RankMath or Yoast, you're able to set an SEO page title, it's gonna be most likely the same as, you know, if you're writing a blog post, for instance, it would be the same as the title of the blog post.
00:16:26
Speaker
If it's a page on your website, it might not be the same as the H1 tag that you're using, but it should probably be really similar. But I like to start with the page title. Like I said, use power words, try to peak curiosity. And then move to the meta description. The meta description, one of those things that doesn't, it's not a ranking factor. The meta description, so if you're looking at the Google search result, you see the title and then the text under that is the meta description.
00:16:54
Speaker
But it's what gets people to click into it. Yeah, it's like a sub headline. It's like preview text on an email, right? So you have the email subject line, but then you typically see a few sentences or maybe a sentence from the email, like in your inbox, you know, that's what we call the preview text. And a lot of email marketing tools will let you set that preview text. It's super important because again, if you can hook people with that quick sentence or whatever, you know, they're more likely to click on the results.
00:17:18
Speaker
So that space can be more human and you don't want to just stuff it with keywords. Exactly. And there's no point in stuffing keywords. Both with your page title and with your meta description, Google can actually change those if they feel like it's not relevant enough to the searcher. If Google changes them, it doesn't necessarily mean that you wrote them poorly. It just means maybe they're trying to demonstrate to the searcher that, you know, make that result a little bit more appealing to the searcher, but something to keep in mind. All right. And somebody to check for too.
00:17:47
Speaker
review heading tags, so you want one h1 per page, then you can have as many h2s and h3s as you want. I typically don't go past h3, even though on WordPress, for instance, you can go up to h6. You want to make sure that it's formatted correctly. So you have your one h1 at the top of the page, you have your h2, and then you could use a bunch of h3s, but then you'd want to pop out two and h2 again, you know, at some point, and then you can go back to using h3s.
00:18:14
Speaker
You don't want to, let's say, use an H2 and then jump to H4. Something to keep in mind, but I'm looking at those. I'd say that the most important heading tags are your H1s and H2s.
00:18:28
Speaker
And normally if it's a blog post, your title should be the H1. Most themes and designs are set up that way. Yeah, yeah. But for pages, you have to make sure you go and you have that one H1 per page. More to be said on that, but for time's sake here.
Image Optimization and Alt Text
00:18:42
Speaker
Creating images for the post, one thing that we're trying to focus on is not just have like generic stock images, but trying to create more infographic, like more helpful images to go along with posts. It makes it much more likely that people are going to share it.
00:18:55
Speaker
Alt text I think is still important. File name is still important. But at the end of the day, if you have an old website and you have thousands of images, is it worth it to go back and add alt text? No. Yeah, probably not. Decide for yourself, but if it was us, we wouldn't do it. But going forward, something to keep in mind, alt text is of course important for people who are visually impaired.
00:19:17
Speaker
But something, you know, just good practice moving forward, maybe good practice, like if you have a couple of pages that are doing pretty well, to go back and optimize the images on those pages specifically. But, you know, again, if you have a site that's 10 years old, if it was us, we wouldn't go back and optimize every single image, except maybe in bulk if we have to make the images smaller or compress them.
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah, but you have to be careful changing file names because if things have been pinned to Pinterest and they go back to that page, it's no longer going to link if the file name has been changed. So those considerations. Yeah, that's a good heads up. And then set a featured image. These next two points, I just want to emphasize.
00:19:54
Speaker
I think I've fallen into this trap too. So I don't say it from a place of, you know, I'm not just sitting up here on my high horse. All right. But a lot of people spend 99.9% of their time creating the content and then 0.1% of their time sharing the content.
Systems for Extensive Content Sharing
00:20:12
Speaker
We should create systems. And we talked about this in a episode back in November.
00:20:17
Speaker
about creating systems, so it takes 20% of your time to create the post, and then you're spending 80% of your time sharing the post. Just because you shared the post once doesn't mean your entire audience has seen it. Your audience is always turning over, so as long as that content is good, you should be sharing that post. We have a lot of posts on our blog that we go back and update every year. Just like it takes us in a given post, it might take us two minutes, just because that content is still good. So you gotta be sharing your content.
00:20:47
Speaker
And this is going to go across a variety of social channels too. So you can send things back in emails. You can relink to older blog posts and newer blog posts and do all of the internal links between content. You can share several times on social media channels, especially things like Instagram stories or Facebook or Pinterest where things are more likely to be drowned out amongst all of the other noise.
00:21:11
Speaker
I think maybe for Instagram feed post, not you probably wouldn't want to follow the schedule that you're in a list here, which is like three to five times a week. I think if you had three to five feed posts for the same post on Instagram, that's kind of a lot, but you could spread them out over like a series of months.
00:21:26
Speaker
You could do that or if you're using a different image and you're highlighting a different piece of the content. If you write, I mean some of our posts are 1500, 2000 plus, 3000 words, you could create five Instagram posts that feel different that highlight that post. The point being is you want to make sure that you get some mileage out of your content or it's going to feel like you're spinning your wheels.
00:21:51
Speaker
people just feel like, ah, you know, I created this blog post and I shared about it and it didn't work. And it's like, well, how many times did you share about it once, you know, or even like for a week, you know, like we've had pieces of content that seem like they didn't get any traction, but then two months later, for whatever reason, they seem to be doing well on search, you know, and it's a matter of going back and maybe making some tweaks and then resharing that content. So share your content.
00:22:14
Speaker
Moving on to backlinks and internal links. So a lot of times when you hear conversations about SEO, you'll hear conversations about why links are important. Oftentimes what people are talking about are external links. Those are links from other people's websites back to a page on your website. We call them backlinks. Backlinks are important. You want backlinks. You want backlinks ideally from reputable sites that are bigger than yours. But backlinks are helpful.
00:22:41
Speaker
For the purposes of today's conversation, we're going to focus on internal links. Internal links are those links from within your website. So a link from one page of your website to another page on your website. And pages be awesome in blog posts. Yeah, pages and posts.
00:22:57
Speaker
And links, whether they're external or internal, indicate that something is relevant, right? So for instance, if you have a page on your website that a lot of other websites are linking back to, the idea is that that page on your website, for whatever reason, is important, but also is relevant probably to those other pages linking to it.
00:23:18
Speaker
And the words that you use to link to it are important too. Like you wouldn't want to use, you wouldn't want to link like click here. You'd want to say like, if you were writing a post about convert kit, like, and you're referencing like a lead magnet, you'd want to say like, you know, lead magnet article here or like something more descriptive than click
Internal Linking for SEO
00:23:35
Speaker
here.
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So what you'd want to do is hyperlink texts that utilize the keywords about that article you're linking to. Right. Right. So we'll talk about that here too in a second. The idea is that if you have a page on your website that more of the other pages and posts on your website are linking to, it probably means that page is more or post is more authoritative. All right. Like it's more important.
00:23:58
Speaker
And that makes sense. And the example I always use is like, you know, if you ask a bunch of friends where you should go out to eat and they all say the same thing, you're probably going to think that that restaurant is pretty good, right? So same thing happened with links. Whenever I'm writing a new blog post, I'm going to search for related blog posts on my blog or whatever, and I'm going to make sure they link to this post or I'm going to link from that post to other posts.
00:24:22
Speaker
Typically, I want to link from, you know, like kind of lesser important posts to more important pages and posts. So for instance, like, let's say I had a weddings page on my website, I'm only featuring, you know, it's basically giving people information about my wedding services.
00:24:39
Speaker
It's only featuring my very best wedding's work. I'm going to link from most of my other blog posts on weddings back to that wedding's page, but I'm not going to try to link from that wedding's page to all of my blog posts. That makes no sense. For a number of reasons, even from a user experience perspective, you don't want to be sending people off your
00:25:00
Speaker
to these other blog posts, you want them to see your very best work and then you want them to contact you or whatnot. So something to keep in mind there, cornerstone pages, you know, authoritatively, like I'll probably link to other pages and posts on my website, even if that page or post is not quite as important, but a cornerstone page, like a piece of cornerstone content is typically gonna get more links to it than it has going from it.
00:25:24
Speaker
Okay.
Episode Wrap-Up and Course Promotion
00:25:25
Speaker
So anyways, that's a lot. We're coming up on 30 minutes though. I feel like that is a solid, you know, you follow that advice, you know, I think that gets you 80 plus percent of the way there. Yeah. This is a great episode. That's toot my own horn. But anyways, we'll see if you can follow it up with these courses.
00:25:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. It's no pressure. I've put it out there. But anyways, check out this course's show at SEO. We'll have one that's more focused on the WordPress Elementor as well. I know we have a lot of WordPress Elementor users that use our designs, for instance, that ask about that. Check that out if you want more of a step-by-step tutorial on how to do these things. And I'm looking forward to updating the content across those different courses. And if you have any questions, send us a message. Yeah, thanks for joining us, guys.
00:26:12
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.