First off as the title suggests, much of SEO/ gaining decent search rankings is common sense. It still amazes me the number of people who, when publishing a new piece of content don’t apply a basic thought process to marketing. Well, here are our five common-sense tips for getting those all-important Google Rankings.
How would I search for this?
Of course, you can always go to the Google Keyword Planner and get rough search estimates on keywords/ ideas, and we always recommend this but also think about how you would search for what you’re publishing.
For example, if you’re publishing an article on fixing a washing machine, would you type “washing machine fix” or more commonly “how do you fix a washing machine”. The latter is the better choice as it’s naturally how most people would type it. So including that as your title is going to help a lot! You have to think about search numbers and keywords but also how you would search for the result, put yourself in your customer’s/reader’s shoes!
Steal from your competitors!
Not literally of course but search for what you’re publishing, see who ranks highly and look for common similarities between top ranking posts that you can apply to your own post e.g. title, meta description, content… Use this to influence how you write your post structure, questions and ideas.
The majority of people (even some knowledgeable SEOs) seem to always forget you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just see what others are doing well, it is key to building a winning search formula.
Question and Answer
At core, for a long time, Google has been shifting towards their ultimate goal of a question and answer search engine. Example: a user searches for “what is the value of my home?” Google returns content relating to how you value your home. The algorithm behind this is getting smarter and smarter, a long-term investment in clearly answering people’s questions and structuring your content around them is well worth it.
Time to socialise
Social engagement is becoming a bigger factor for Google as they seek to measure how engaged/ interested people are in certain content to define its quality and use this as a search factor. So go to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, join a few relevant groups and post, post, post! Don’t spam and always make sure it’s relevant.
Write great content
It sounds simple, but a lot of people will go online and write absolute rubbish in an effort to get traffic. This may have worked in the early 2000’s, but with the advances in Google algorithms, you need to write great and expert content to rank and to gain readership.
It’s better to write one well written and focused 500-word piece than five rubbish ones; this data backs up this assumption heavily.
