1. Understand what your customers are searching for
Before you start trying to optimise you need to know what people are typing into the search box in order to find you.
This could be ‘hairdressers in Cardiff’, ‘haircut Cardiff’, ‘barbers in Cardiff’.
Think about the services you offer or the products you sell. You can probably take a good guess at what people are searching for. It might also be a good idea to ask friends, family, or customers for ideas too.
We could get really in depth figuring out the best keywords to optimise, but, in the interest of keeping it simple, we’re going to use common sense for now.
One thing it might be good to do, if your businesses if very location specific, is to be more accurate with your location; for example using the exact neighbourhood or area of a city: ‘Hairdressers in Ely’.
This would likely have fewer searches than ‘hairdressers in Cardiff’ and thus there is less competition when it comes to ranking on search engines.
You can use tools like SEMRUSH or Ubersuggest to find the top keywords for your circumstances. We’ll cover these tools in depth later in this series.
2. Title tags and meta descriptions
Now you’ve chosen some keywords and phrases that you want to optimise, you need to start using these strategically on your website.
Each page of your website will have a title tag and meta description.
Title Tag
This is the writing that appears in blue on a Google results page. It must be 70 characters or less and you should always include your business or brand name and keywords/phrases that are relevant for that page.
Meta Description
This is what appears under the blue title tag on a Google results page. As users will see this, you want this to be written for both humans and search engines to read. We suggest using your keywords here too..
Here’s an example for the search term ‘Hairdressers in Cardiff’.
Guy Christian Hairdressers in Cardiff | Hair Salons Cardiff
www.guychristian.com
Guy Christian is a quality driven and award winning hairdresser based in three locations across Cardiff City Centre, Cardiff Bay and Cwmbran. Delivering professional hair styling, colouring and hair extensions in the comfort of our beautifully designed salons.
It reads nicely for humans and it is optimised for search engines to rank it.
For WordPress sites we recommend using Yoast SEO to add your title tags and meta descriptions. It’s a great free plug-in that will not only help with this step, but will also assist you in any future, more complicated, SEO that you want to engage in.
Remember, each page of your website should have it’s own specific title tag and meta description.
3. Using H1 & H2 Headers
Your content should be structured correctly with the use of headers and header tags.
Note* If you’re a client of mine that submits content via a word or google doc. Header tags options can be found in the toolbar of your word or google document. You can select a tag for your header here.
H1 headers
H1 headers are the most important and acts as information signposts for search engine crawlers. There should only 1 H1 header and that should be the title of your page. This should include the keyword that you’re targeting.
H2 – H6 headers
Here’s an example on using tags in the correct way:
- H1 tag > The Best Personal Trainers in London and How to Find Them.
- H2 tag > The Best Personal Trainers.
- H3 tag > John Mcclain – Personal Trainer
- H4 tag > Why Choose this Personal Trainer.
- H5 tag > His His Fitness Results are Published on Instagram
- H5 tag > He is an IFBB Pro
- H5 tag > He Has a 5 Star Google Rating
- H4 tag > Why We Recommend This Personal Trainer in London?
- H4 tag > Our Rating for John Mcclain
- H4 tag > Why Choose this Personal Trainer.
- H3 tag > John Mcclain – Personal Trainer
- H2 tag > The Best Personal Trainers.
If we want to add another business to the content then we would start again with a H3 tag:
- H1 tag > The Best Personal Trainers in London and How to Find Them.
- H2 tag > The Best Personal Trainers.
- H3 tag > John Mcclain – Personal Trainer
- H4 tag > Why Choose this Personal Trainer.
- H5 tag > His His Fitness Results are Published on Instagram
- H5 tag > He is an IFBB Pro
- H5 tag > He Has a 5 Star Google Rating
- H4 tag > Why We Recommend This Personal Trainer in London?
- H4 tag > Our Rating for John Mcclain
- H4 tag > Why Choose this Personal Trainer.
- H3 tag > MR T Personal Training
- H4 tag > Why Choose this Personal Trainer.
- H5 tag > His His Fitness Results are Published on Instagram
- H5 tag > He is an IFBB Pro
- H5 tag > He Has a 5 Star Google Rating
- H4 tag > Why We Recommend This Personal Trainer in London?
- H4 tag > Our Rating for MR T Personal Trainer
- H4 tag > Why Choose this Personal Trainer.
- H3 tag > John Mcclain – Personal Trainer
- H2 tag > The Best Personal Trainers.
4. Integrating keywords into your pages
Now your tags and metas are sorted, you want to look at using your keywords throughout your web pages too.
For my nail salon home page I might choose keyword phrases such as ‘nail salons in Newport’, ‘beauty salon in Newport’, ‘manicure in Newport’.
Throughout my homepage I am now going to slip these phrases into my text.
It’s important to remember here that, whilst we want to rank highly on search engines, we are also selling our brand to real humans. So, for homepages, make sure the content flows and sounds natural; for blog pages specifically designed to acquire traffic via SEO you can be a bit more robotic with your language in order to optimise.
Choosing relevant keywords and keyword phrases for each page, you can now go through and optimise each page of your website.
5. Don’t be excessive
You might think, ‘I’ll cram my web pages full of keywords, this way the search engine is sure to pick it up and choose my website over others!’
WRONG!
Don’t stuff your web pages with ridiculous amounts of keywords or phrases.
Firstly, it will probably read like absolute rubbish to the everyday user.
Secondly, Google actually punishes websites it feels are over-optimised.
The general rule is: use your keywords/phrases roughly five times in an average blog.
Using Yoast SEO gives you an advantage here, as it actually tells you if you’ve used your keywords enough on each page in proportion to the amount of text on that page.
Summary
In this article we’ve tried to explain the very basics of search engine optimisation.
It’s such a vast field and there’s no exact science to getting it right, but you might be surprised at how these very simple steps can increase your ranking on the results pages when applied correctly.
We recommend taking it slowly.
Start with your homepage and work your way out from there.
The advantage of it being so overwhelming can now be yours, as you can get one up on your competitors without really doing too much.
Once you’ve optimised all of your current pages, you can then look at creating more content that is inline with topics that you want to rank for on search engines.
For more details check our Cardiff SEO Page.
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