The Content Pillar: Onsite Optimisation

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show. Welcome to the SEO show. I'm your host, Michael. And as always, I'm joined by Arthur. Hello. Hello. How's it going? Well, not too bad. Really not too bad at all because it's that time again. We're talking SEO. We're talking another pillar this time. So as you remember in the last episode, we spoke about how there's a lot of factors that Google's algorithms look at when deciding how to show search results, but they all sort of neatly fit into four main pillars. What are the pillars? Are you asking me?

ARTHUR: Sorry. Yeah. Um, onsite technical authority and UX user experience beauty.

MICHAEL: So today we are going to talk about the content pillar or onsite optimization. So what is that? Uh, it's really everything you can do on your website to the content to make it pleasing to Google.

ARTHUR: Would that be right? Yeah, it'd be Ryan. Cool. Maybe a little bit weird way to say it.

MICHAEL: No, you've got to please Google, give it whatever the way you said, please. And then it will give you what you want. So how do you do that? And I guess what is going on? Well, as we, as we covered off in the last episode, Google's crawlers move from page to page and read everything. So when Google's reading all of the content on your page, it's storing that back in its index and it uses it to figure out whether your site is relevant for something someone's searching for. Yep. So really on-site optimization is just going through your site and checking all the boxes and making sure that it's giving Google what it needs to see in the places that it expects to see it to give yourself the best chance at showing up in the search results.

ARTHUR: Yeah, that's right. So things like your page title, H1s, all the content on the page.

MICHAEL: Yep. So, we spoke about how no one really knows exactly what Google looks at, but that doesn't mean we don't know a lot of what Google definitely looks at. Because, you know, what Google's been around since the late 90s, people have reverse engineered it, yeah, longer. Yeah. People have reverse engineered what works. So when it comes to on-site optimization, content and the like, there are key things that if you do them, lead to better results with Google, with pleasing Google. So we have a few tips here for nailing your on-site optimization. So the key areas that you need to look at and if you do them, it's going to help you out. So first and foremost, it does start with keyword research, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah, that's right. So that's basically using a bunch of different tools to identify what people are searching for or which keywords people are using to find your website. So using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, using Google's Keyword Planner, getting all the high volume, high value keywords and mapping them out to all the right pages of the website. Right.

MICHAEL: So let's pull that apart because there's a bit going on there and we want you to follow along. So I guess if you think about it, um, There's keywords that people search for. There's going to be some very popular ones with a lot of searches every month. There's going to be some abstract random ones that get very little searches per month. There's going to be informational searches. There's going to be commercial searches. There's going to be, I guess, nonsense searches. So not all keywords are built equal. You as a business owner need to be making sure that your website is going after the ones that sort of going to lead to the outcome that you're looking for, right? Yeah. If you're a lawyer, you want to rank for commercial, you want to look

ARTHUR: Commercial lawyer Sydney. Yeah, all the different areas of law, basically, and wherever, whatever the location is.

MICHAEL: Sure. But ranking for something like, um, how much does a lawyer get paid? Probably not as good for business because, you know, that's just someone looking for some information. Yep. So when you do the keyword research, you met, you mentioned tools before there, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner. Yep. Basically, you don't have to just sort of pluck keywords out of the air and come up with them and hope that people happen to be searching them. You can use these tools to find out how often these keywords are searched each month, how competitive they are, you know, how many other people are sort of ranking for them and the like, and be a bit strategic about it. So Ahrefs, it is a third party tool. It's not something Google made. No. It's your favorite tool. It is my favorite tool. If I had to pick one. Yeah. The reason I love it so much is because it is basically like a mini Google itself. It crawls the web. It stores information on keywords and rankings and links just like Google does.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think they're only second behind Google, aren't they, in terms of how much of the web they crawl? Yeah, I think that's correct.

MICHAEL: I hope. I think YouTube is the second biggest search engine type thing.

ARTHUR: I remember hearing that somewhere, maybe in one of the conferences we went to.

MICHAEL: Yeah, AHS probably talking themselves up. But it's not wrong. They know a lot about the web and what people are searching for, for sure. So with keyword research, it's basically you want to sort of enter in a few seed keywords into a tool like Ahrefs or Google's Keyword Planner, which we touched on as well, which is basically that's a tool that they have in the Google Ads platform that they make available to their advertisers to figure out what keywords they should be running ads against. And the reason these tools are good is because they show you how many times per month on average these keywords are searched. So you can start to filter by, you know, most volume through to least volume, discount keywords that aren't being searched that much and sort of focus your efforts where it's likely to lead to traffic to your website. Yep. So basically as a business, you want to be researching keywords and then coming up with a plan to optimize your website accordingly. Is that right? That's right. So how do you go about keyword research at the moment? What's your process?

ARTHUR: I try to keep it pretty simple, to be honest. I'll look at a website, obviously look at the structure, see obviously each website's different. I'll see what the categories and subcategories are, what services a website or a client might have and start putting keywords into keyword clusters. or keyword seeds. And they basically just kind of visit each one of those seeds and try to find a pool of keywords that are relevant to that seed, that are relevant to the client and start building those out. So that way I get a good idea which keywords we need to include on the page for each page of the website. Cool.

MICHAEL: So when you say building it out, you'll take those seed keywords and what do you do with them?

ARTHUR: I'll take a seed keyword and I'll use either Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner and use their keyword ideas tool to see, I guess, different keywords which people might be searching outside of the, I guess, core keyword or primary keyword. And then, like you said, have a look at what people are searching for the search volumes to see how competitive a keyword is. I might even chuck the keyword into Google and see what other keywords come up when I search for it. And basically, I'm basically just explaining keyword research here, but we would create a document where we can kind of visualize and see all the keywords for the whole website structured in a way where we can see it's all mapped out to different pages. Cool.

MICHAEL: So yeah, you, you've done that research. You've got the keyword, you've got the volume there. You sort of figured out the competitive ones and non-competitive ones. Yeah. Every business is going to have main keywords that they want to go after.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: So like a dentist wants to rank for dentist and then whatever suburb they're in.

ARTHUR: That's right. Yeah. And when I say I keep it simple, I mean a lot of the time, nine out of 10 times we already know what the keyword is going to be. Yeah. So we don't really want to go too crazy and you know, pull out hundreds and hundreds of keywords because that's just, you know, a lot of the time it's a waste of our time. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And that can be the temptation when you're doing this is to sort of search for all sorts of different keywords and think you're going to build thousands of pages and just rank for everything. But what you find is a lot of pages will rank for multiple, multiple keywords. So it's better to have you do this research to find the key themes or topics or ideas that are relevant to your business. And then with your own side optimization, ultimately you seek to create content around those themes or ideas. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, cool. So basically, look, that's where we always start things with on-site optimization. It's knowing what keywords you want to go after. From there, I guess it's a process of mapping, right? That's right, yeah. Where you take the keywords, and figure out what each page in your site is going to target. Because you don't want to have multiple pages on your site all going after the same keywords. You don't want to sort of be trying to target too many keywords in one page. You might need to create new pages if there's opportunity to. So the mapping process is just basically mapping out those keyword themes or topics to the relevant pages on your site. So you might get an Excel doc or something like that. get the whole architecture of your site, so all of the pages in there, just figure out in that Excel doc what the keyword themes are going to be for each page.

ARTHUR: Yeah, that's right. Like you said, it's also a good opportunity to propose any new pages that you might need on the site.

MICHAEL: So, okay, what we're talking about here at the moment I guess is theoretical, you know, you're researching, you're mapping things out, but when it comes time to actually make changes to pages, there's a fair bit that can be done. Um, so probably we probably want to start with talking about the basics because coming back to the Pareto principle, 80% of your results are going to come from 20% of your effort. There are certain areas on every page that we know from experience that SEO community knows from, you know, sharing knowledge that if you optimize them, it is pleasing, very pleasing, pleasing. What are the on-site basics? You know, when you're optimising a page, if you had a gun to your head and they said, go and optimise my page, some psycho had you bailed up and said, I need you to optimise my page, do the main areas, what would they be?

ARTHUR: If a psycho had a gun to my head for some reason, for some reason, um, well the obvious answer that would be the page titles or the page title, uh, the headings and the content. Okay. So making sure that the target keywords or any, any keywords that you want to target, uh, including the page title and the headings, the H one H twos and all the way down. Yeah. Cool. Um, and then like I said, you're optimizing the page copy to make sure that it is targeting the keyword slash keywords. Yep.

MICHAEL: So there's a bit going on in there, I guess. When we say page title, what is that?

ARTHUR: It is what it is, the title of the page. So it's what Google, the first thing, one of the first things that Google sees when it crawls your page, it's basically what the page is titled. So it's super important to have your target keywords in there because it gives Google context as to what the page is about.

MICHAEL: And we're not referring to like, if you look at a page, like the, the writing on the page, it's actually a bit of code. Yeah. In the, in the, that's right. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Yeah. The title code.

MICHAEL: Yep. Meta title tag. That's the official name for it. And. Nerdy circles. And this is the number one, this is like the first thing that Google sees. It's like the street appeal of your website to use like a real estate term. You know, when Google rocks up and decides if it wants to come into the open home, it's looking at your title tag as a street appeal. So if you have a really nice title tag with keywords in it, then Google thinks, you know, this page might be relevant for that keyword. I'm going to go in and have a little bit more of a look. So then after title tags, what next? H1, I heard you mention.

ARTHUR: Yeah, H1. So the first heading on the page. Again, making sure that you are targeting those keywords in the H1. Again, it gives context to Google as to what the content is about on the page.

MICHAEL: Sure. Now this is something that is actually seen to the end user. Like when they're on their web browser, they see H1 tags just like Google does.

ARTHUR: Yeah, that's right. So it could be anywhere in the hero banner, you know, at the start of the content, um, it could be anywhere on the page really, but making sure that you do have a H1 and it is targeting the keywords that you want to focus on.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And there should be a theme or scent, like there should be a similar scent from the title tag through to the H1 tag. So to make it simple, criminal lawyer Sydney, you would have that in your title tag. And then in your H1 tag, you might have get in touch with the best criminal lawyer Sydney has to offer.

ARTHUR: or something like that.

MICHAEL: So Google is seeing the keywords it needs to see, but it doesn't look totally like gibberish to the end user. Is that about right with the H1 tags? Yeah. Yeah, I thought so. The other thing is, right, page copy itself. Google's reading all of the copy when it lands on the site, the crawlers. What we find is you want to work in the target keyword for a page early on in that copy, somewhere in the first couple of hundred words, ideally. Yeah. So it's going to be again, the same scent from the title tag to the H1 tag to the body copy. Yeah. Keyword being used multiple times.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And having the copy towards the top of the page. So Google has enough to crawl through all the code to get to it.

MICHAEL: Now there is a, I guess on that point, different scenarios where you've got to think about the aesthetics of your site, right? Like you don't just want a wall of text.

ARTHUR: No. So there's ways to go around it using, you know, like read more CSS, hiding the content. Yeah.

MICHAEL: I say hiding, but like have a blurb and then read more and it pops out with more copy. Yep. Yep. Because realistically, As a business, you want people on the site to actually use it for what you want them to use it for or intend for them to use it for. So you might be able to submit a lead form. You don't want to smash them with too much content. So there are ways of giving Google what it needs to see, but making sure the end user also is enjoying using your site. I guess when it comes to on-site as well, the other basics would be content needs to be long enough, right? Like you can't just have a little snippet of text and that's it. Um, I guess a big part is probably looking at sites that already rank.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Looking at the competitors, you know, searching the keyword that you want to rank for and having a look at the content that's on those pages to get a good idea at the word count, to see how they structured the content. Um, that's a good starting point. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So really, Success leaves clues, I like to say. So the sites that are doing well in Google, just reverse engineer a bit what they're up to. Like if they have a couple of thousand words and you just have like, welcome to our site, we are the best criminal lawyers in Sydney, then you're going to need to add more content.

ARTHUR: That's right. There's a reason why they rank. Obviously there's something they're doing right that Google lacks, which is why they're ranking at the top. So yeah.

MICHAEL: So the basics that you need on every page is an optimized title tag, optimized H1 tag, and then other headings. So H2, H3, H4, they're just sort of subsequent headings, less important, smaller headings, that sort of thing. You want to have the keyword somewhere early on the page, the main keyword that you're going after that you uncovered in the keyword research and mapping process. Then you want to have enough content that you're in the same ballpark as all the other websites that are ranking already in Google. They're the main basics. I guess outside of that, you probably want to have synonyms and other words that are related to your main keyword, I guess. So if you are going after criminal lawyer Sydney, coming back to that one, then in the copy, it might expect to see things like DUI or defense lawyers, just relevant terms, court.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: no win, no fee, whatever the common terminology is in the space.

ARTHUR: Yeah, those are keywords that you'd identify in the keyword research process.

MICHAEL: Correct. And the mapping. So again, coming back to the idea of each page on your site having key themes or keywords that it is then optimized towards. But they're the basic, you know, basics that need to be done on every page. Because if you're doing that and all of your competitors are doing that, that's what Google expects to see. So if you're not doing it, you're going to be way behind the eight ball. That's it. Yeah. If you're doing it, you're better than doing it. But if you're not doing it, so that didn't quite make sense, but you get what I'm saying. All right. So moving on the next thing that you can do from an onsite optimization point of view with all of that in mind is making use of tools, right? Cause we were sort of talking about reverse engineering competitors and looking at what they're up to. That's not something necessarily that you have to do manually. No, you probably should. at first. If you're just doing one or two pages on your site and you're learning to do this stuff, then do it all manually. Yeah. But when it comes time to do it at scale or a multiple websites, there are tools.

ARTHUR: It'll take forever.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. So when I say tools, um, what are a couple of examples that sort of we use for content?

ARTHUR: Page Optimizer Pro is a good one. Surfer SEO. Both very similar in the sense that they kind of look at the page that you want to rank, the keyword that you want to rank for, and it kind of spits out recommendations on things like word count, how to structure the content, where to insert keywords, be it in the heading, be it in the paragraph text. different LSI keywords or related keywords. Basically it's like a road map or it gives you a brief basically of what you need to do to improve your content so it's in line with the competition.

MICHAEL: And what's cool about these tools is, coming back to success leaves clues, All these tools are really doing is they're going to take like a snapshot of the search results and analyze how much content's on the page, analyze all the H1 tags, the title tags, the keyword use, and they get like an average across all of the top ranked sites. Yeah. And then they analyze your site and compare how your site is faring against that average. Yeah. And if you're below here, you know, if your H1 tag, let's say you don't have the keyword anywhere near as many times as all those top ranked sites do, it tells you, well, chuck the keyword

ARTHUR: Yeah, it's super convenient. I mean, it does all the hard work for you. It's a great tool. Yeah. And it gets results. It does. Which is the important thing really with any tool.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And look, this stuff is part art, part science. So it's not to say that you can rely on it a hundred percent, but this is definitely a way of speeding things up. You know, it's going to give you, uh, I guess the right path to go down with the way you optimize your cover. You're not just writing blindly, willy nilly shoving in keywords. You sort of being a bit more structured about it through the use of tools like that. Yeah. So moving on, let's chat about other little tips and tricks, you know, outside of the basics, outside of using tools. Yeah. What are some other things that can be done from a content point of view to please Google? What's one of your favorites? I think, you know, if I go three, two, one, we can both say it at the same time.

ARTHUR: Ready?

MICHAEL: Let's go. Three, two, one. People also ask. Because it's good.

ARTHUR: Yeah. No, it is good. And it works.

MICHAEL: So, Let's take a step back. Yeah. What the hell is people also ask and why does it work?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Um, so. Basically what happens is a lot of the time when you search for a particular search query, you'll find that in the search results there'll be a box with different questions people have also asked in relation to that search query. So basically what's happened is people might've went to a site, gone back and searched again because they didn't get the result that they wanted. So what happens is what you can do to improve your content is make sure that you incorporate those questions within the content because Google thinks that they're super relevant to whatever keyword that you're searching for.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So let's, um, we'll just freestyle an example of this here. Let's say you go to Google and type in digital marketing agency, scroll down the page. And then in the middle of the page, there's going to be questions like, why should I use a digital marketing agency? Who is the best digital marketing agency? Um, can you do digital marketing yourself? It's going to be all sorts of questions like that. Google leaves little hints about, I guess, what it considers relevant, right? If you've typed in digital marketing as a keyword, then those questions it considers relevant. So if you can then go back to your website and answer those questions in the copy, you're addressing the content in a way that's pleasing to the algorithm. So this is what we do with a lot of our pages on our sites and our client sites, is basically type in the main keyword that we're trying to optimize for, see what the people also ask are, and then have our content writers write, you know, 250 or 300 or 500 words, whatever the right amount is to make sure that you've got the right level of copy on the page overall on those questions. Yep. And you do that and it pretty much always leads to improve rankings, right?

ARTHUR: For sure. Yeah. Making sure as well that the questions are some sort of heading, H2, H3. You can also use schema to mark it up with Q and A. So that will get pulled onto the search results.

MICHAEL: So when you say schema, what are we referring to with that? I'll let you explain schema. Well, schema is basically, it's just structured data. It's extra markup in the code that makes it easier for Google to understand what the content's about. Because I've got a little secret here. What's your secret? Google is not as smart as we all think it is. It's not. No, it's not like it's pretty smart, but like a lot of the time we find that adding a keyword four times instead of twice can lead to improved rankings. So it's not like it's this genius machine learning, artificial intelligence, like be all and end all, I guess cyborg type thing that rules us all. Although we all think that it's not. So with schema, it is just ways of helping Google better understand So, for example, we've just touched on the topic of people also ask questions. You can mark up those questions with FAQ schema, where you say, here's a question, which is, you know, the heading would be the question, and then the answer. So you say to Google, here's a question, here's the answer. That way Google can use that and display that in its search results and do all sorts of stuff with that information. So, yeah, that's what schema is. Moving on, I guess, in terms of content, I don't really have too many more, I guess, tips outside of what we've covered today. It is just about figuring out what people are searching for. As one thing. Oh, yeah.

ARTHUR: Writing for the end user, not for Google.

MICHAEL: True. What does that mean?

ARTHUR: Um, so a lot of the times when people want to, I guess when they go to optimize content on a page, they'll neglect the end user and start inserting keywords in places where it might not make sense. So making it more appealing to Google rather than the person that it's intended for. So making sure you strike the right balance of, you know, inserting the right keywords, but not at the cost of making or having the content on the page not make sense.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And we've all seen that, right? Yeah. You land on a page and they're like, we are the best plumber. Sydney's get in touch for plumber Sydney to come to you today. Plumber Sydney wants to come and get your plumbing Sydney.

ARTHUR: Plain keyword stuffing. Yeah. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Now, which can work sometimes, but yeah, that comes back to the point that Google is not as smart. Yeah. But there's ways of addressing both segments of your audience by audience. I mean, humans and Google. You, with all the money or sort of the important copy on the page, the money copy, I call it. So your hero banner, your top headings, your sales copy, the stuff that explains to the end user who you are and how you help them, that should very much be written for the user first, not trying to shoehorn keywords into it because it just comes off as weird and sort of, you're not helping your conversion rates. You know, you're not helping yourself generate leads or sales if you're just shoehorning keywords into your copy. You can then put your Google sort of catnip copy somewhere else on the page, deeper on the page, hidden behind a read more, whatever. Ideally, you don't want to be like just jamming keywords in anyway. You want to write it in a way that makes sense. But yeah, I think if you use a first, probably should be the core principle behind everything you're doing with your website, right? Yeah, for sure. All right, well, I think that's been a pretty good intro to the content pillar of SEO. It really does come back to research, mapping, doing the on-site basics, writing for Google second, users first. Yep. Make use of tools, like Page Optimizer Pro, Surfer, create your content around the keyword themes, and then use things like FAQs and schema, and people also ask. And really, you'd nail all of that. You're doing better than most of your competitors straight out of the gates. So that's about it for this episode. We will be back with the next episode to have a chat about technical SEO, the technical killer. That's the nerdy aspect of SEO, the even nerdier part than what's already a nerdy subject. So it should be a good one. We'll see you in the next episode. See ya. Ta-ta.

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