Auckland SEO - importance of onpage wording

The importance of well thought-out onpage wording can not be emphasised enough for client websites, says Clickthrough CEO and Auckland SEO expert Glen Maguire

Glen finds that so often clients want to rank for phrases yet do not have those phrases included in the page title and content of their pages. Often the phrases that clients want to rank for are too competitive, do not have much traffic, or would not convert well into leads for the business.

Understanding the business

The first step of proper Search Engine Optimisation is gaining a full understanding of the business. What are they trying to sell? What are their clients searching for? Are they offering goods or services that clients would prefer to have a local supplier offer them? Are they offering services to people located in New Zealand, or other countries.

Google Keyword Planner

Armed with this business knowledge the next step is to use the Google Keyword Planner to add those researched phrases as seed phrases.

• adding many [product], [product] [region], [category], and [category] [region] seed phrases into the Keyword Planner to see how many times people have searched for those phrases in each targeted country
•  adding a small number of phrases each time, then exporting to a spreadsheet where the analysis can continue

If the client has being using Google AdWords, they can find out what of the keyword phrases they are getting the best leads from and what phrases are getting the most impressions.

Competition Analysis

The next step is understanding the competition for the phrases. Become an expert in the Google search results for each phrase.

1. How well optimised are each of the competitors pages for each phrase? - do they have the words exact matched in the page title and content?
2. How many domains are linking into each domain?
3. If there are international websites showing for the search phrase, how powerful is the highest New Zealand website? - use of keywords, and number of linking domains
4. Are their Google local results showing or other Google Universal listings?
5. What other phrases does Google suggest when typing the keywords into the search box?
6. What are the related phrases shown at the bottom of the search results page?

The question is - based on the competition, how likely is it that the clients website will be able to get that many domains linking into it? If they do the onpage SEO better than the competition and have a better link profile, over time they should be able to rank better than their competitors.

Keyword Mapping

The homepage should be used for the most highly competitive, most searched for phrases that are relevant to the business and describe it in its totality. A page title can have up to around 60 characters including spaces shown in the search results. This is actually a maximum of around 500 pixels. That equates to 2 or more two word phrases into each page title. The homepage usually ranks for 4 to even 20 related phrases (singular, plural, synomns) where one or more of the words in the phrase are in the page title.

You then map groups of phrases to inner pages.

Often you will find that there are not enough pages and more need to be created. Often there will be just one services pages that describes all the different services a client offers. These need to be broken down into individual pages for each service offered.

If a business operates in multiple regions, region specific pages can be created. A page for each location can be coded to have [category] [region] related phrases in the page title and content along with the name, address, phone number and Google Map of the location. This can become a high converting landing page if you include enough relevant information into it.

Services pages could be broken down into [service] [region] pages for the business to showcase examples of specific work done in each region.

Category pages on ecommerce websites are fantastic landing pages for highly trafficked category search phrases.

Page Titles

As mentioned, page titles show up to 500 pixels in the Google search results. The most heavily trafficked relevant search phrases should go at the front of the title, not the business name.

There is generally only one of each business name, and a business is generally able to rank top for their business name without dedicating the front of a page title to it. The objective of SEO is to get found by people that DONT know your business name.

Meta Descriptions

While a meta description is not used in the ranking formula, it often determines the number of clicks that you get when Google uses it in the search results. A well formed unique selling proposition included in the meta  description will get better clickthroughs just as is the case for Google AdWords text.

The keywords from the title need to be included in the meta description, otherwise Google will use the page text for its snippet.

Google shows up to around 150 characters of the meta description in its snippet which it more exactly truncates at around 920 pixels.

Onpage content

It is important to get the right wording synergy on each page. The keyword phrases need to be trafficked phrases that are relevent to the business, then at best exact matched in the page title, mentioned broad matched in the meta description, and then exact matched in the page content.

If the trafficked phrase is say "SEO Auckland" it is not always the easiest to use that orientation of words in page content. Yet to get the best SEO rankings you need to include that exact phrase. There needs to be a realisation that onpage wording may need to be a little less perfect so as to get the rankings and therefore traffic.

With a variety of onpage wording techniques, it is possible to have a readable version of otherwise incorrect orientation of keyword phrases.

• "If you are searching for 'SEO Auckland', then consider the expertise offered by Clickthrough..."
• "Clickthrough offer SEO Auckland wide and to clients in the wider New Zealand and International markets"

Onpage wording is vitally important to getting more traffic from the search engines and achieving more online.

Click to find out more about the Auckland SEO services provided by Clickthrough. Ask for an personalised SEO training course for your company.

Clickthrough
1/15 William Pickering Drive, Albany, Auckland, NZ
Freephone 0508 254 258