How to rank your site with SEO
3.5 billion searches are performed on Google every single day. Seriously, no matter what you do, people are looking for your products and services on Google; cell phone repair shop: 1,700 monthly searches. iphone charger: 34,000 monthly searches. best smartphone: 41,000 monthly searches. And these search volumes are only for US based searches.
Ahrefs,the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors,and dominate your niche.
what SEO is, you’ll have very clear and easy action items that you can implement into your website right away. So we’ll be covering the most important things that you should know to ensure that your website is optimized for search. So what is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the process of optimizing your website passages to get free organic traffic from search engines like Google. Think of Google like a filing system in a library. The library has billions of books with hundreds of trillions of pages. So let’s say that you want to find something on, “global warming.” Then Google would search through these books and extract pages that contain your keywords or closely related words. But as I’m sure you know, search results aren't returned in any random order.
Google tries to return the most relevant results first by using sophisticated algorithms. And they're so good at this, that most of us never have to click through to page 2 of the search results. Nobody knows exactly how these algorithms work or the exact factors it looks at to rank a webpage, but we do know a lot of the so-called"Google ranking factors," so we are able to make some optimizations.
So your job is going to be two-fold: Number 1, we need to make sure that it's easy for search engines to understand what your page is about and create that content that matches what we call, “the searcher’s intent," right?
number 2, we need to show Google and other search engines that it’s ‘worthy’ of ranking. So throughout this tutorial, let’s say that I’m a new and budding photographer and I live in Toronto, Canada. I’m starting my new wedding photography business called “Sam Photography.” Yup, I’m pretty awesome... but I don’t have any friends, so referral share out of the question. Alright great. Step 1 is to find relevant keywords that people are searching for and see how these search queries fit into your business. The easiest way to start finding relevant keywords is to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer.
So I would think that a bride or groom looking for some magical wedding photos would search for “wedding photographer in Toronto.” Makes sense, right? So I’ll go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool, which is one of our SEO tools that provides rich data on Google searches, and I’ll enter in that search query here. I’ll also change the country to Canada since people in other countries, they probably aren’t looking for a Toronto based photographer as often. Now, I’ll run the search. And you can see that there are only around 60 or so monthly searches for this keyword phrase, which is far from exciting. But looking below, you’ll see that the parent topic for our query is different.
The parent topic determines if you can rank for your target keyword, so the one that we originally entered here, while targeting a more general topic on your page instead. In this case, the parent topic is showing that more people search for, “toronto wedding photographer,” over “wedding photographer in toronto.” Now, if we scroll to the bottom of the page,you can see the top 10 Google rankings for your target keyword and a bunch of keyword metrics. I’ll just touch on two of them for this video: traffic and keywords.
Take a look at these two ranking pages. You can see that they generate well over a thousand search visitors every single month and next to that, you’ll see that each page individually ranks for hundreds of keywords. If we click on the number of keyword ranking share, you can see all of the different keywords and the ranking positions in Google search. This is a good thing to do because you already know that Google is ranking this single page for all of the keywords, so why wouldn’t you be able to rank for these keywords and maybe even more? Try and remember this part, because we will be exploring things like keyword usage multiple times throughout this tutorial.
Alright, now that we have a list of keywords,it’s time to optimize your pages. In the world of search engine optimization,this is called “on-page SEO.”
Since we know the keywords that people are searching for in Google, it gives us clues on the language we should use to let both Google and potential customers know what your page is about. For example, knowing that “toronto wedding photographer” is a more popular search query than “wedding photographer in Toronto”,that will help us make smarter copy writing decisions. So for your homepage content, you might want to say, “Hi I’m Sam, a Toronto wedding photographer. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” instead of “Howdy, I’m Sam and I do wedding photos for couples in Toronto.” But I do need to make two things very clear: First, you don’t have to use your exact match keyword since Google has gotten pretty smart at understanding what your page is about. And second, it’s very important to note that you shouldn’t try to trick Google by using keywords where they don’t belong.
Your first priority should be to optimize for people because the last time I checked, robots aren’t going to pay you for your services. Here’s an example of what you shouldn’t do: "I’m a Toronto wedding photographer that does Toronto wedding photography for your Toronto wedding.” This is known as keyword stuffing and long story short, it does more harm than good. So key takeaway? Don’t do it.
So for on-page SEO, I want to pass on 4 very basic, but important tips that you can use on every page you optimize. First is to optimize your title tags and meta descriptions. When you look at the Google’s search results,you’ll see this part in blue and the text below. The top part is called your title tag and the other part is the meta description. The purpose of these is to entice someone to click through to your page. And if people are actually clicking through to your page, then that’s telling Google that your page is likely relevant to the reason why they had searched for the query in the first place, right? And you can see that Google actually even bolds these keywords and similar keywords within the search results making them stand out.
With that in mind, I might create a title like, “Award-Winning Toronto Wedding Photographer,” and then my brand name. But of course, if you’re going to do something like this, it should be true. Then for the meta description, you can explain in a couple brief sentences what the page is about. But rather than putting a generic description that everyone else is doing and calling yourself the best, you can put something like: “Sam Oh was rated the Star’s Best Toronto Wedding Photographer. He combines creativity with science to capture life’s happiest day in a million pixels.” Now this would make me as a consumer want to find out who this awesome photographer is.
The last part of on-page optimization is the most important and that’s the actual content on the page. For a typical wedding photography home page,I might have some images, a short “about us” or “about me” section, possibly the services that I provide, and some testimonials from happy brides and grooms. Without over complicating things, you’ll likely want to use your primary keyword phrase in the main headline, often referred to as an H1 tag. And looking at one of the top ranking pages,you’ll see that they did this right here. An example of what you probably shouldn’t be doing is something like this: hello there. The H1 or heading tag here says, “hello there” which doesn’t help anyone understand what the page is about. And remember, your job is to help Google best identify your page as being relevant to the user’s search query.
I’ll go back to the organic keywords report in Ahrefs to see one of my competitor’s keyword rankings and see if there are any other ideas that might help Google better understand what my page is about. You can see some other relevant keywords inhere like bridal, photos, and GTA, which stands for the Greater Toronto Area. So as you’re writing the copy for your page,you might want to keep these in mind and sprinkle them in where it makes sense and reads naturally to visitors. Alright, so let’s take this Sam Photography example one step further.
Let’s say that my business was growing,I got a lot more experience under my belt and I found out that I have some mad skills in areas like landscape, portrait, travel, product photography. So I decided, heck, I’m going to offer those services too! Rather than trying to rank my homepage for keywords that aren’t exactly related, I could easily create new services pages. So I’d do the same thing by first
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