Transcript
Speaker: Hello, welcome back to the SEO podcast. This is SEO daily flavour of the SEO podcast and we're going to talk about two very simple things. I want to go back to basics with SEO. A lot of the time SEO people talk in acronyms or complex industry chatter and whilst that's unavoidable sometimes,
Speaker: on this podcast we do everything we can not to talk in a confusing manner so I'm going to talk very clearly and well actually you be the judge of whether I succeed or not send me a message and let me know but I am your host Andrew Laws and let's get cracking with SEO back to basics there are two things
Speaker: that you need to know in order to have a successful website and in order to get your website higher up in the Google rankings. First of all, you need to make it very clear to people what it is you do the second they land on your website.
Speaker: We still see a lot of websites that don't have a clear title, make a nice big title at the top of your page and have an image if you want that if that's going to help make it clear and then write a very short, very clear paragraph that explains what it is that you do or what the service or the product on the page is. You want people to be able to know what it is within less than a second.
Speaker: As an aside, we always used to say, you've got to capture people, capture their attention within the first two seconds of landing on your website. Gone forever. That's not the case. Really, any more people know to scroll, but the whole point of your headline
Speaker: is to make people want to read the first paragraph. And the whole point of the first paragraph is to make people want to scroll, to see the rest of your page. If they land on your page and they don't know what it's for and don't know what you're about, then they might not leave immediately. But they're probably not going to take an action that you want them to. They're probably not going to buy something or get in contact.
Speaker: This is important for SEO because Google kind of knows how people use your website. They know not quite where their eyeballs are but not far off that kind of level of intelligence because everyone installs Google Analytics and that's how they figure it out.
Speaker: You can test how clear your website is by getting somebody who either doesn't know what you do for a living, that's a challenge, or getting a family member or just somebody to look at the website. You want people to be hypercritical. There's a weird thing that happens when people write their own websites.
Speaker: sort of right in a way where they assume that people looking at the website have the same knowledge as they do in their head. So this is a kind of complex concept to try and explain, but let me try. So it's assumptions.
Speaker: right without assumptions, your headline on your website should be just clear. Absolute clarity. Don't try and be clever. Don't try and put a slogan in it. Don't try and sell. Just say, this is what this page is about. Because a lot of people won't visit your website via the homepage. Most people, especially if you are doing SEO well, will visit it via whatever page they land on after clicking in Google search results.
Speaker: So that's number one, important thing number one, make it clear as hell what your website or your webpage is about. Don't be ambiguous. The more your visitors understand, the better Google will understand. Remember, good practice, Google essentially rewards good practice with good rankings, but it's all based on clarity.
Speaker: The second most important, well, not second most important, the other aspect of SEO I want you to have a good think about is speed. Your website should be fast. This one's a little bit trickier to fix, but if your website's slow, people would leave. It's as simple as that. Google looks at how fast your website responds and it has an impact on your rankings, put it that way.
Speaker: That's important, but it's not as important as clarity. So there you go. There is today's SEO tip. A little bit of information for you. Please let me know what you think of this new format. And most importantly, let me know what questions you have because we want to help you and I want to get some of the rest of the team involved in the podcast as well. So that's it for now. Please like, subscribe and all that jazz and come back tomorrow for more.
Speaker: SEO, daily SEO. God, I lost my flow at the end there. And I've got to find the stop button now. Thank you, tutty bye.
