How to create content for local landing pages in SEO
Creating content for your local landing pages can be slightly different than regular website content. When you’re writing for your local landing pages, you want to make sure that you include certain key elements that will help you attract visitors and rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), local businesses have a significant advantage. Unlike larger businesses, local businesses can focus their efforts on optimizing their website for one specific location, allowing them to target potential customers in their area effectively.
One of the best ways to optimize your website for local SEO is by creating landing pages for each service area. These pages should include detailed information about the services you offer, as well as local business listings and links to your Google Maps profile.
What is A Local Landing Page?
A local landing page provides products and services that appeal to one or more specific geographic markets. A local landing page for a brick-and-mortar store is a single webpage designed to attract customers in a given market.
The page’s content should be tailored to the neighborhood’s geographic and cultural geography. Businesses with multiple locations or service areas should create separate web pages for each place of operation.
Difference between a home page and a landing page
On the home page of a commercial business appears a list of safeguards (sales copy), a selection of premises, products, and services, as well as some images designed to appeal to customers.
The landing page highlights a specific service, product, or campaign. A local plumber with a landing page with notice of rates suggested first-time remodel projects would attract customers.
Benefits of Local Landing Pages
Local Landing Pages Improve Local Search Authority
Local landing pages are most effective for attracting and converting customers who make local searches, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. 48% of searches on your smartphone lead to a purchase on the same day. Moreover, 50% of consumers searching for a store on their smartphone reported that they would purchase from that store the same day.
Local Landing Pages Give You a Platform to Publish Unique Local Content
When creating a local landing page, you might begin with content sharing locally relevant information. For example, a community ingredients directory or a directory of local events and activities.
You can make your landing pages accessible as archival posts to let others see what was published at a specific location; these archives can show trends that viewers might have missed. You might also have a blog highlighting itineraries, menus, special features, artwork, and other content associated with your restaurant to let local customers tour the venue and network with staff.
Local Landing Pages Increase Lead Generation Opportunities
A local landing page improves lead generation opportunities outside of publishing unique content for local pages. News sites, local blogs, and vacation guides are even more likely to link to a local page for links.
When your landing page can rank well for local search queries, you attract additional visits from local customers. Your landing pages might not be necessary for every business, but it’s a good way to generate leads without publishing content. Some companies may also claim their Google My Business listing, Yelp, and similar local directories like SimplyBusiness to attract more visitors and increase their
Landing pages for online businesses?
Yes, local landing pages may help with business consulting. For example, if you provide business consulting services, you may create a local page for cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York as a business benefit.
Local landing pages best practices
Targeting Your Audience
While you may be tempted to create a local landing page for each city where you could conceivably have customers, it is not likely to be a good use of your time.
Do: Focus on the regions or cities that provide your business the most value. Find areas with the highest business interest and the greatest number of opportunities for your company. If your business provides the greatest meaning to those areas — social impact being a big sticking point — then local landing pages could work better than national landing pages. Your audience would be more likely to be in a place where the biggest return is realized. For example, the usage of pandemic ads for 60 days is at
Don’t: Target too many locations. This could potentially make your placement experience put you in a tempting position—to cut and paste your content and duplicate your landing page content in multiple places while changing locality. This is a big no-no!
Alternatively, land your content writer with the grueling task of trying to write the same thing in a thousand different ways. For example, if you’re a business selling athletic gear, build local landing pages for cities with strong football teams. The point is to be strategic in choosing which cities you want to place content before you set about crafting marketing copy and building out landing pages for more than just a handful of
Keyword Targeting
Google recognizes what you are after, although keyword planning may be a matter of fact. As a first principle, we would better serve our customers by writing it all from a copywriter’s perspective, to let the end product interpret every word just like a user would. It would help if you wrote about how you operate, the projects carried out, what we can do for you and how we achieve a satisfied customer. Any professional copywriting rule would support that claim.
Defining Your Landing Page’s Purpose
Create a beautiful relationship with your audience by providing the content they seek. Let them see the value in working together, not just the fact that you offer what they want. Do not just brag about your company: show instead how your company can solve a customer’s problems. Make them go looking for more, not for confusion.
Your content should not only be about the website or page that will stay on top of the search engine results but should also serve the user well with great content. You want the search engine results to be about what you and your visitors want to see, which means not creating dumb landing pages that serve only to go to peripheral pages after another click or two. In turn, think about your own experience as a user, and don’t put content in the search engine results that you do not believe to be useful to people. Too often, local pages expect you to have more knowledge of the topic than we usually grant to the average city-dweller. Instead, work to build one informative page that serves the purpose you want it to.
Writing Unique, User-Centric Content
The worst thing you can do while designing local landing pages is to use the same copy or wording (no matter where) on many sites.
Attribute the content differentiating it from the landing page. Consider the special attributes of the state or city, your target audience, and the local area. There are many questions to answer, such as: – What is your business best known for? What is your company’s current website or presence online? – Why should your business’s content be advertised on the site?
Create custom landing pages that are very different from one another. Create pages that specialize on the client you’re trying to reach. Keep your pages fresh by injecting new events, unexpected experiences, and special deals. Listen to your audience, ask questions, and be creative. Let your brain solve the problem!
Meta Title & Description
You will also need a title and description separate from the headline and subheadline. This information shows up as a preview in the search results. That should always include your target key phrase and location. These should help searchers find your content and draw them to click. Example preview for meta title and meta description in an SEO search.
Description of Offers
Indicate service areas as mentioned above. For those operating restaurant types of businesses, these offer service help. A service-oriented business relates to establishing the offerings and services offered. For example, a drain-clearing service establishment might include the removal of obsolete countertops and slop tubs, as well as low-level trench-water extraction by using heavy-duty.
Standardized NAP
NAP (name, address, and phone number) is a location-specific optimization practice in local SEO. Usually, every website feature inside a locales map should use the same information because (they know who is who and are verified in their other listing). All listed have to be connected. Therefore SPOT on your local landing page, submit, and listings in online directories. Use your business name exactly.
Embedded Map
A map makes it easier for users to find, understand, and visualize your physical location in relation to landmarks in the area. The Internet makes it simple for users to navigate and embed maps into websites – specifically, WordPress.
Location Specific Hours
Each landing page on your website should also list specific opening hours for that location. Also, if the business is closed on specific holidays, be sure to include those dates.
DO NOT use the small business fact box at the bottom of the tab for this. Google would then show that information if we click the small business box and see it in our search results. Instead, display this information on an associated location tab.
Publish Unique Local Content
Local content serves to identify the place we are advertising. For example, you might include local awards or recognitions (for example Voted Best Burger in the city), information about local staff, or weekly ads for that specific location. Researchers are more likely to call again and for a longer period, especially if the experience was positive. Some research findings in health economics come from specific markets where marketing budgets are controlled.
Supporting Images or Videos
Images help both users and search engines understand what your content is about. When used well, they enhance user experience, boost website rank, enhance search engine results, and create a favorable impression on people for digital content such as images and videos. All your images should have alt text and titles for SEO and accessibility.
Optimize for Mobile
Home builders know that it is critical to check the appearance of mobile landing pages before launching a site. However, they are not always clear on optimizing mobile devices. To remedy this, Google has a tool that makes examining your performance easy. It will tell you how your page performs, and it’s a good idea to test your Mobile-Friendliness.
Customer Reviews
Once the best method for increasing customer visits is to have firsthand customers say positive things about your business. You increase the chances of returning business by posting or embedding reviews from sites such as Yelp or Google.
Internal Links
Attaining excellence in internal linking optimization is critical to ensuring you are properly optimized for search engines, tracking and measuring web traffic efficiently and optimally on map and location pages like this site.
This way, visitors from all locations around your store will flow off the top pages and into the location pages of your catalog. It is easy for some. For others, it might be a bit of a challenge to establish the relationships that will allow me to create a linking domino effect of links from the top or catalog to directory and parent directory pages.
Conclusion
This article discussed some local important concepts and overlaps you need to understand as you build your website. To start with, let’s do some background research if you need that. This will show you where the right keyphrases to focus on are, and then think about how the local landing pages will integrate into your website structure. After that, you have to lay some basic SEO specifications so that your page is optimized but also make sure it’s findable and user-friendly to your users.
SEO or search engine optimization is the process of modifying your site or parts of it to get recognized by search engines. This recognition is rewarded through a higher ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher your rank, the better for your business. Businesses should aim to rank on the first SERP because no one scrolls past the first page. People only ever scroll to about the fifth result on the first page. So, if you’re not going to use PPC to make your business known, SEO would be your best bet.
SEO strategy
SEO is a great asset because it provides a neutral platform for small businesses with a limited budget to compete with giants in their niche. Small business owners create fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines. This helps bring more qualified potential customers to their sites and increases conversion rates.
We’ve covered a step-by-step SEO strategy to help you figure out where to start your journey. It’s time to figure out what SEO can do for your small business.
Advantages of SEO for small businesses
Cheaper marketing
The heart of SEO is digital marketing. You are going through all the trouble of ensuring your site is SERP-worthy to drive more traffic and build sustainable revenue. If you don’t have the funds to pay for PPC advertising, the best way to drive traffic would be through SEO.
Pros of this are that it is considerably cheaper than PPC, you can do it yourself, and organic traffic from SEO is more valuable.
Create fast and robust websites
SEO will help small business owners create a faster, smoother, and user-friendlier website. Although most people still hang on to the old definition of SEO, thinking it is only about optimizing for the search engines, today, SEO is also about improving user experience.
Well-structured, clean, and uncluttered websites compel visitors to stay longer, decreasing bounce rate and increasing page views. Similarly, highly relevant content keeps your readers happy as they are more likely to answer their questions, solve their pressing issues, and help them find exactly what they’re looking for on your site.
Uncover growth opportunities
One great benefit of how small business SEO works is competitive analysis. Many businesses are competing for the same keywords and the same customers.
Analyzing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is crucial to the success of your business. This will help uncover opportunities for growth that your competitors are yet to tap into.
Let’s take an example of two businesses in the same industry, selling similar products at similar prices. One has an optimized website, while the other has a non-optimized website. Keeping all other factors equal, the optimized site will rank higher on search engines, attracting more visitors.
Reach your target audience
SEO practices for a small business are one of the easiest and cheapest ways to reach your target audience. An online presence will mean more people looking to hire your services will find you.
SEO’s role in this is higher ranking, driving traffic to your website, and potentially expanding your client base.
Create brand awareness
97% of people learn more about a local small business online than anywhere else. People searching for your business will look for your website first. People want to know more before buying through websites, reviews, images, and competitors. Without clear online visibility, you’re leaving a hole of knowledge that may push customers elsewhere.
An SEO strategy helps businesses rank better on search engines. It’s important to note that Google does not allow websites to pay for crawling and indexing, making it a level playing field for any business to rank for a specific keyword.
Better conversion rates
Seo-optimized websites load faster, are easy to read and surf, and display properly on almost all devices, including mobile and tablets. Websites that are easy to read and navigate are more likely to grab and hold the attention of your readers or visitors. Visitors who stay on your page or those who come back help with click-through conversions.
Monitoring and reporting guarantee quality results.
Constant monitoring and reporting are also crucial in growing your SEO efforts. Monthly reporting schedules help you stay in the loop by showing the actions taken to increase your online presence. This also helps ensure the best approach to targeting the right people at the right time. Ultimately, this helps lead to quality results that increase your potential to turn visitors into paying customers.
Small business SEO is a long-term game with even longer-lasting results. Businesses typically start to see movement in search results at the six-month mark. Once you are there, ranking for a keyword, it is much easier to maintain and continue to write and publish content relevant to your search term.
SEO strategies help with quality link-building
A crucial aspect of growing your small business via SEO is link building. Building links with websites that are relevant to your cause is good for your SEO. For a small AirBnBlooking to increase its online presence, they might want to work to build links with travel websites. Relevant and quality links like these help bring high-quality traffic to your site and help increase your page ranking.
Our small business SEO packages start with a minimum of one link per month. We will help write the content and publish guest articles featuring your business on relevant sites. We do this by reaching out constantly with new topics and content ideas to our backlinking partners. Backlinking can be a challenging job. Let us do the work for you!
Build market authority
The ultimate goal of SEO for any business providing online services is to ensure that searchers get the best quality and relevant results based on their searches. Because of this, search engines only rank the best possible results that answer queries.
An SEO strategy for a small business will help in ranking, perhaps even the first SERP. Good rankings signify to other people in the market that your content is of good quality and can be trusted as a source.
Building this market authority will lead to more people sharing your content on other social media platforms or recommending you to potential customers through word of mouth.
Do it yourself or hire an expert.
It is possible to implement SEO yourself or hire the services of a professional. We have listed great resources from our SEO playlist to help you navigate the industry.
The decision to do SEO yourself or hire a professional boils down to:
SEO funds you have. SEO can vary from cheap to very expensive. Hiring the services of an expert will require money. If you are working with a limited budget, consider doing it yourself.
SEO services. Some services are simple enough to implement by yourself, but others are more complex and require a professional’s expertise.
SEO for small businesses: Takeaway
Small businesses are benefiting more than ever from search engine ranking efforts. SEO is necessary if you wish to rank well on the first page and drive traffic to your business. Employ an SEO strategy by doing it yourself or hiring a professional to take care of it. SEO strategies are known to have a high ROI (Return On Investment) and will boost your business’s visibility.
Are you new to SEO and worried about common SEO mistakes? Don’t worry; we got you. The SEO industry is constantly changing and evolving. As a result, there’s always new information to learn and new practices to adopt, and following SEO strategies is advised.
Common SEO mistakes
Anyone can make mistakes; novice or experienced SEO professionals. These common SEO mistakes can lead to poor rankings for your website or, even worse: a loss of traffic altogether. Below we’ll look at some of these common mistakes and offer solutions so you can avoid them next time!
Not making sure your website is crawlable.
Crawlability and indexing refer to the ability of search engines to read and understand the content on your website. If Google doesn’t know what you’re trying to say, there’s no way for it to add that information to its index. This can result in a poor ranking for relevant terms, making it much harder for users to look for those terms with their query string. Crawling issues plague many websites today—and they’re not just limited to small businesses; even large ones can still fall victim if they don’t take care of these issues!
Keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing is when you place keywords where they don’t belong. This can be avoided by using an SEO checklist, which will help you identify areas of your website that aren’t optimized for search engines and fix them accordingly.
Keyword stuffing is terrible for SEO because it makes it more difficult for Google to find relevant content. Users may have trouble finding what they’re looking for on your site. If a user searches for something like “best WordPress plugins,” but no results are linking back to this page (or any other pages), then it’s likely that someone has keyword stuffed their way through the SERPs—and those poor users may end up leaving without finding what they were looking for!
Not optimizing your keywords.
Using a keyword that’s too broad—For example, “green tea health benefits.” You’re not going to rank well for this phrase because so many people are searching for it. Instead, use something more specific like “caffeine-free green tea detox drink recipe.”
Not targeting the right keywords—If you want people to find your website and read it, ensure you use keywords related to what they were looking for. If they were looking at something else first, don’t waste time optimizing a page specifically around those keywords! This is called “keyword stuffing,” where someone throws as many words into their content as possible until they hit targeted results (which isn’t helpful). The best way around this issue is using tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush’s Keyword Research tool, allowing users to create automated lists based on specific criteria including industry verticals and phrases.”
Inconsistent or duplicate content.
Duplicate content can noticeably impact your rankings and is one of the most common SEO mistakes. Duplicate content is not suitable for SEO. Search engines use duplicate content to identify and penalize websites showing up in their SERPs with the same content, regardless of whether it’s from the same source.
Duplicate pages will hurt your site’s rankings and may even result in you being removed from Google search results!
Duplicate content is often caused by multiple versions of the same page published on your site. This could be because someone has created an advanced version of your website or because you’ve added new features that require more media files (like video).
Here are some common causes of duplicate content
Using an exact copy/paste from another source without any updates/changes made to that original source (copying something straight off an article without adding anything new), is also known as plagiarism.
Copying large portions of text or images from another website
To avoid this problem:
Create unique content for each page instead of duplicating existing material.
Use 301 redirects so that people who land on the old page will automatically be redirected to the new one when they visit again.
Forgetting about sitemaps
For example, if you have a blog post that includes links to other articles on your site, you can use sitemaps and metadata to tell search engines what those other articles are about.
Sitemaps help search engines understand the structure of your website by including links to all of its pages (including internal links). This means that when someone searches on Google or Bing for information related to the topic of your web page, the site will appear in their results.
Ignoring search intent
Google favors sites whose content satisfies the search intent for a given query. Search intent refers to the ultimate motivation behind a user’s search. You have to figure out what a user wants to get when searching that query on Google. Is the searcher looking to buy something? Or are they trying to learn something?
If you fail to satisfy the searchers’ intent, you won’t be able to rank for very long.
Not optimizing for mobile
As reported by Google, more than half of online searches are done by mobile. For this reason, search engines prioritize responsive websites that can load just as well on mobile devices as on desktop computers.
Neglecting the mobile aspect of your site is a grave mistake that could have you penalized severely.
Not paying attention to 301 redirects.
301 redirects are an important part of your SEO strategy. They tell search engines where to send users moving from one page on a website to another, so they can find what they’re looking for more quickly.
For example, if you have a blog post titled “SEO Mistakes” that links to a site: http://www.example-site/seo-mistakes/, then Google might send people directly to this URL: http://www.example-site/seo-mistakes/blog/.
If the link doesn’t include “blog,” then Google won’t know how to direct people back here later (and thus won’t count it as an optimized entry point).
In other words, if there’s no explicit path for someone coming from outside of your website to get back inside again (aka “backlinks”), then Google cannot see any value in linking towards those pages—which means they’ll probably penalize them!
Slow Site Speed
Slow site speeds will kill your website. Users are unlikely to keep browsing a slow webpage even if the content provided is relevant. This will affect the bounce rate of your website. Search engines use bounce rates to tell whether a site is good, has good content, or if something is broken.
Non-Optimized Images
Images are key to a website’s SEO, but they can be challenging to optimize. The first step in optimizing your images for SEO is deciding what you want them to do. Do you want them to be high-quality and stand out from other pages on your website? Or do you want them to link back directly to the product page they came from so users can easily find it again later?
The second step of optimizing images for SEO involves taking care of some common issues that prevent search engines from seeing them properly:
File size: Keep an eye on how large each image is compared with other images on your site and adjust accordingly if necessary (e.g., reduce the file size by removing unnecessary metadata).
File type: Make sure all images are in GIF or PNG format instead of JPG because these formats will help get better indexed by Google!
Missing alt tags: ALT attributes provide search engines and visually impaired people with descriptions of the images in your content. Relevance is lost without them, and engagement can suffer.
Thin Content
Thin content is copy that’s not useful for the reader. It may include an image, a link to another page on your website, or any other piece of information that won’t provide value to your visitors.
This type of writing can be hard on search engines because it takes up space and doesn’t add much value to the user experience (UX). The best way to avoid this problem is by creating content that has relevant information to users. It is also crucial to learn the market you are catering to. Hence, there aren’t gaps between them where thin content might appear.
Broken Links
Broken links are bad for search engine rankings but can also miss the site owners, and search engine crawlers can also miss them. Users may also take notice of the broken link and report it to Google. This can lead to lower rankings in the SERPs and reduced organic traffic from Google Webmaster Tools (GWT).
Broken links can be detected by crawling websites regularly with web crawlers built into tools like Screaming Frog or Open Site Explorer (OSE). When these tools find broken links on your site, they will mark them with a red dot, so you know which pages have been affected by this issue.
Long URLs
Short URLs are easier to remember and use, making them an excellent option for SEO. They also make it easy for users to share your content on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Shortening your links also reduces the amount of code in your site, which can help improve performance on mobile devices and search engine bots (which crawl through sites).
Summary
SEO mistakes can reduce the quality of your site and harm your SERP rankings. While embarking on this journey, it is important to know what to do, but more importantly, what not to do. Bad SEO practices have crippled many websites, don’t be one of them.
DO NOT take shortcuts. Instead, go over every SEO item carefully. If you are unable to do it yourself, consider hiring a professional. It will be a worthy investment.
What is the difference between crawling and indexing in SEO
Crawling vs. Indexing
When researching SEO, chances are that you’ve come across the terms crawling and indexing in SEO. Crawling and indexing are among the most commonly used terms in search engine optimization. But what is the difference between these two terms?
Googlebot uses an algorithmic process to determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.
Search engines work through three primary functions:
Crawling: Scour the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.
Indexing: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result of relevant queries.
Ranking: Provide the pieces of content that best answer a searcher’s query. This means that results are ordered from most relevant to least relevant.
We’ll be focussing on crawling and indexing with Google as our point of reference for search engines.
What is crawling?
Crawling or spidering is the discovery process in which search engines send out robots known as crawlers or spiders- Googlebots- to find new and updated content.
There isn’t a central registry of all web pages, so Google must constantly look for new and updated pages and add them to its list of known pages. This process is called “URL discovery.” Some pages are known because Google has already visited them. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page.
Googlebot starts out by fetching a few web pages. It then follows the links on those web pages to find new URLs. The crawler can discover new content and add it to their index by hopping along this link path.
Caffeine, a massive database of discovered URLs, retrieves results when a searcher seeks information on the URL’s content.
During this procedure, search engine bots will either accept and index or reject all pages granting crawling permission, based on whether your website appears spam.
Tell search engines how to crawl your site.
Googlebot doesn’t crawl all the pages it discovered. Some pages may be disallowed for crawling by the site owner. Others may not be accessed without logging in to the site, and other pages may be duplicates of previously crawled pages.
For crawling to be possible, your site must allow Googlebot to go through its link. This is affected by the robot.txt file on a website.
Robots.txt files suggest which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn’t crawl, as well as the speed at which they crawl your site, via specific robots.txt directives.
Googlebot will proceed to crawl your site if it can’t read any robot.text files. Web admins use robot.txt files to direct bots on which URLs are okay for crawling and which are not.
Discretion while crawling
Using robot.txt files to block crawlers from going through and potentially indexing private pages like administration sign-in pages is common practice. However, placing these pages in publicly accessed robot.txt files can invite bad actors to interact with the data.
For this reason, it is better to NoIndex these pages and protect them behind a login form rather than place them in your robots.txt file.
Optimize for crawl budget
A crawl budget is the average number of URLs Googlebot will crawl on your site before leaving. Crawl budget optimization ensures that Googlebot isn’t wasting time crawling through unimportant pages and ignoring important pages.
Submit a sitemap
A sitemap is the easiest and fastest way to notify search engines that your website exists on the web or you have updated certain pages on it. A sitemap can be submitted via the Google Search Console.
Search engines go through billions of websites, and a sitemap will nudge a search engine to look in the direction of your website and crawl it.
Site navigation
Crawlers need a path of links on your site to guide it from page to page. Your website’s structure should be so that a crawler can go from one page to another from a root page(usually the homepage). Many sites make the critical mistake of structuring their navigation in inaccessible ways to search engines, hindering their ability to get listed in search results.
What is Indexing?
After crawling comes indexing. When Google and other search engines index your pages, it indicates that they are ready to appear in search results. It does not, however, guarantee that your website will rank well. Even if you have indexed pages, you may not appear on page one in search results.
Factors affecting indexing
Indexing is storing and organizing the information found on the pages. The bot renders the code on the page the same way a browser does. It catalogs all the content, links, and metadata on the page.
Proper SEO strategies
Although you Google to crawl your site, indexing is the most important bit. This is where SEO strategies come into play. If your site is up to search engine standards, your site will be indexed and ready to be ranked on the SERPs.
Google, in particular, is extremely strict regarding SEO practices, and if you want to rank well, you need to put plenty of effort into content creation and optimization.
Duplicate content
Google indexes new, fresh content that they believe will improve their users’ experience. Writing content that already exists on another site or having www and non-www pages with the same information could affect indexing. Google wants to provide the most relevant content, and duplicate content might confuse the algorithm on what content should be indexed. It might even lead to penalties.
Keep your web pages in one location.
Avoid changing the location of web pages. If you must move a web page to a different location, meaning it will have a different URL, use a 301 redirect.
Other redirects include:
4xx redirects when the page does not exist. Typos can cause these errors in the URL. Error 404 is one such type of redirect. You can customize your 404 page by adding links to important pages on your site that users can go to instead.
302 error page for temporarily moving webpages. They can be used where passing link equity is not a concern.
Too many redirects can make it difficult for Googlebot to crawl and index your website. Limit your redirect chains as much as you can; A recommended way is to get rid of middle-men redirects if you have them.
How do I know if my site is indexed?
Google search
You can see if Google has indexed your website with the command “site:” — a search operator for searching specific websites on Google. Enter this into Google’s search box to see all the pages they have indexed on your website:
site:yourdomain.com/posts
Google search console
Search console provides a sea of valuable data on your website’s statistics, such as search ranking performance.
You can view the performance of your customers by location or get a sense of their interaction behavior with your site.
You can also submit a sitemap through the search console so Google can crawl your site and index any updates.
Ranking
The final step in this series is ranking. If your web pages fulfill the required SEO guidelines provided by search engines, then your sites will be indexed. Ranking is when a search engine determines which content should come up in a search and the order it should follow based on relevance.
The relevance of the web page’s content is determined by algorithms within the search engine, like Google’s RankBrain. RankBrain is machine learning and constantly improves predictions through observation and training data.
This means that a site ranking lower on SERPs but containing useful information might be bumped up above other websites.
Information is power
Knowing the difference between crawling and indexing in SEO is important because it helps you understand the relationship between your website and Google.
It will help you understand Google’s site analysis data better when you know what terms mean.
In the case of working with other bloggers, information on these two processes will help you make informed decisions on working together. Bloggers offer backlinks without non-follow instructions and knowing the difference is important.
Summary
To summarize, crawling is simply search engines going through the web to find web pages. When they find the relevant pages based on key factors, they are added to the search engine’s list of searchable links. This is known as indexing. Ranking is the order in which websites providing related content appear on the search engine.
We hope that the information provided in this guide clears up the mystery surrounding these terms.
Following an SEO plan can be tricky if you don’t know the step-by-step process of it. SEO is for your website marketing campaign. It is so important that numerous companies are dedicated to providing SEO services and making a pretty buck from them. It is estimated that the SEO industry will be worth nearly 2 billion dollars by 2027.
Despite a wealth of information on the internet right now regarding SEO, it might be hard and overwhelming to figure out a starting point. This may make it hard for people trying to do SEO themselves to optimize their websites. Fret not, for we will create a fool-proof step-by-step how-to on getting your SEO campaign up and running.
What are search engines looking for?
Before you begin your campaign, you must understand what criteria search engines use to rank your pages. A search engine’s journey begins with a user’s search. These query searches are used to find information on the web that matches the query’s phrasing or words (known as keywords) to return a result. Search engines do this by going through tens of thousands of web pages daily and indexing the pages that provide relevant information for easier access by users.
SEO is the process by which websites ensure that their content is found by these search engines and indexed properly. It takes time for a new website to be indexed and eventually appear on searches, although a proper SEO strategy can accelerate this process.
There are four main elements that search engines look at when determining which site is more relevant and should show up higher in search engine results pages (SERPs):
Content: Is the content relevant to what the user is searching for?
Performance: Does the site load fast, and does it work properly?
Authority: Is the content useful enough to link to, or do other authoritative sites use that website as a reference or cite the available information?
User experience: How does the site look and behave? Is it easy to navigate around? Does it look safe? Does it have a high bounce rate?
Step-by-step guide on SEO
Google provides a detailed SEO starter guide that we’ll simplify in this article and other proven market strategies for other search engines.
Website optimization
Optimization is done during the website creation process and involves intentionally tweaking your website to search engine standards. The Google webmaster contains important information and tips on how to go bout this process.
Keyword research
Keywords feature in both the structures of your website and your content. A successful SEO campaign starts with a proper keyword strategy.
Keywords are the link between your web content and searcher intent. Learning and anticipating searcher behaviors is also good practice, so you can tailor your website and content to answer their most basic queries. Here’s our list of some of the best keyword research tools in the market.
Offer new and unique services
Create a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could write an original piece of research, break an exciting product or service, or leverage your unique user base. DO your competitor analysis using tools available on the web to know what your competitors are offering their customers and use this information to create something new.
Website domain name
A simple domain name works best
A proper strategy ensures that the domain name is aligned with the type of content you’re producing. Domain names are a ranking factor and are the first step when search engines try to figure out what your website is about. A great domain name is easy to remember, relevant, and incorporates the main keyword you want to rank for.
It shouldn’t be forced. The domain name should reflect the type of business you’re doing. contentERP.com focuses on helping websites improve their SEO and provides content strategies and management solutions.
An easy, short, and descriptive domain name makes it easy for people to remember the name of your site. It also makes for easy ranking based on the chosen keywords.
Use unique URLs
Search engines need a unique URL per piece of content to crawl, index, and refer users to it. Different content (for example, different products in a shop) and modified content (for example, translations or regional variations) need to use separate URLs to be shown in search appropriately.
Create unique, accurate page titles and metadata
<title> tag
A <title> tag tells users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. Each webpage on your website should have unique title tags that accurately describe what that page is about. If a webpage appears on a search results page, the contents of the <title> tag may appear as the title link to the document.
Do not use title elements that have no relation to the content on the page.
Meta description
A meta description gives a summary of what your page is about. It may be a short sentence or a paragraph. Meta description tags are important because search engines might use them as snippets for your pages in Search results.
As with the <title> tag, do not write irrelevant meta descriptions that have no relation to the content.
Be as descriptive as possible.
Avoid saturating the meta description with keywords.
Be mobile-friendly
More than half of the human population today use mobile devices to search the web. The desktop version of a website may be difficult to navigate on a mobile phone. Having a mobile-ready site is critical to your online presence. So critical that Google has made being mobile-friendly an important ranking factor.
A mobile-friendly site satisfies the following criteria:
Fast loading speeds- This goes unsaid for the desktop versions of websites as well.
Responsive design that can easily switch from one screen type to another. The algorithm is set to detect responsive sites that fulfill these criteria automatically.
User-friendly and customer satisfaction. Minimize the appearance of ads on your pages. Make sure that visual content loads properly. Pages that provide poor searcher experiences can be demoted.
Make sure any structural data on the desktop version is also available on the mobile version.
Organize your site structure
The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the website owner thinks is important. To rank effectively for your target keywords, you need to structure your website so that each page targets its own set of closely related, highly relevant keywords.
Plan navigation based on the homepage
The homepage, also known as the root page, is the most visited page on a website. It is the starting place of navigation when users visit your site. Plan your site’s architecture to make it easy for visitors to move to other pages from this main page.
Use a naturally flowing hierarchical method to list down pages.
Use breadcrumb lists
Breadcrumbs are internal links at the top or bottom of a page, allowing users to navigate to previous pages quickly. Think of it as links pointing down to pages in a hierarchical manner, from the more general root page to the specific sections in a website structure.
Show useful 404 pages
Broken links or pages that do not exist will lead users to 404 pages. A custom 404 page that guides users back to other pages on your site that work can improve their experience.
Submit a sitemap
Submitting a sitemap makes it easier for a search engine to find your website so it can add new or update content on its index. Create and submit a sitemap to Google’s search console or Bing webmaster Tools for faster and easier crawling and indexing.
Optimize your content
Now that your website’s structure, usability, and appearance on search engines is on track, it’s time to focus on content. Knowing your primary and LSI keywords will help you plan your content.
Understand search intent
You’re creating content that a searcher would find relevant, answering their query.
Think about the words a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know much about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone new to it.
Create compelling content
Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.
Offer a different perspective from what users are used to.
Avoid repetition.
Write content for users, not search engines
While you need to focus on optimization, the content you write should be readable by human standards. Design content around your visitors’ needs, focussing on these key points:
Write easy-to-read text.
Avoid keyword stuffing
Avoid thin content.
Provide relevant information on your content.
Search engines can now detect ‘bad’ content and can penalize you by demoting you from search results.
Optimize your images
Incorporating visual media into your content can greatly improve its quality. Visual data can be optimized in several ways, namely:
Using standard file types that load quickly, like png
Small or medium-sized files make for easier and faster loading
Make them responsive to load on all types of screens.
Use the alt attribute to describe your images.
Off-site optimization
Backlinks
Backlinks are extremely important for an SEO strategy. Crawler bots follow links from trusted websites back to yours making it discoverable. Good backlinks will also bring in traffic from other sites.
Seek out partnerships with other websites by writing great original content hat these other sites can source or guest write for a blog.
Future SEO strategy for the win
SEO is constantly evolving, and your site should evolve with it. Create systems within your strategy to check SEO guidelines posted by search engines constantly. Luckily for you, an SEO strategy once in place is easy to maintain.
