Struggling with your Squarespace or WordPress website’s SEO? Who isn’t!
But, you have some power to improve how Google sees your website. In the video below, I break down three action items you can take today to help move the needle in improving your chances of being found in Google. Watch
Read the Transcript About Three Keys to Improving Your SEO
[00:00:00] Hi, there. I am about to make you super sad, but hopefully I will also make you pretty happy, and I’m going to tell you the three big reasons why your website isn’t getting found in Google. I hear this all the time. I get emails.
[00:00:15] “Sarah, can you help me get found in Google? I want to be number one in Google. I want to show up when people Google “super general keyword.”
[00:00:23] We’ll talk about that another time. But there are basically three big things I see on almost every single website that is keeping your ideal audience from finding you when they Google. The good news is super fixable. You just gotta do the work. So the first one that is, I will look at someone’s website and I will see page after page of unimportant information set as index in Google.
[00:00:52] So that means you’re telling Google, Hey, index this page. Well, a lot of times that page might be your privacy policy, it may be your returns [00:01:00] policy, it may be shipping information. Thank you pages for your optins. None of these need to be showing up in Google, and what happens is those pages oftentimes have a lot of words on them.
[00:01:12] I’ll get to that in a minute. And what happens is they cannibalize your other pages that are important, that explain your service, that explain who you are, your homepage even. And so what you end up with is, Basically a website indexing that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Google throws up their hands and is like, “whatever.”
[00:01:31] I’m not going to show them in search results. Or what they do is the only pages of yours that show up in search results are, say, your privacy policy really, really bad. Number two, and what that is, is using headings in super, super crazy ways. So your website will probably have 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe even six headings options.
[00:01:53] And the reality is that you really need to be thoughtful about how you use these, not just how they [00:02:00] look, but the words that you’re using. So if you’re heading, one is a word, like get in touch, what you’re doing is you’re providing a signpost to. They give them no information about what you do. That heading is the most valuable piece of real estate on every page, and that heading on your homepage is the most valuable piece of real estate on your website.
[00:02:20] So look at your headings, make sure you don’t have goofball things as you’re headings fix it. An easy fix should take you maybe an hour or two. Easy peasy. The last one is the hardest one, and it’s the most important one. That is what we call in the biz thin content. So that means that it’s content that is just a few words.
[00:02:41] It’s hard to understand what the page is about. Basically, there’s just not a lot of info and we see this coming a lot from designers who don’t know a lot about SEO and that’s totally fine. I get it. You can’t be all the things. And so what they do is make really pretty websites with lots of graphics and they tell their clients “No one [00:03:00] reads.”
[00:03:00] That’s BS. People do read, but they don’t read crap. And I’m sorry I’m being harsh here, but it’s true. People will read quality content. So when people don’t have quality content, they just throw in some fluffy graphics. And when Google goes to scan your website, they’re like, Guess this site is about nothing because it’s all thin content.
[00:03:20] So you really want to be aiming for about 600 words or more on every important content page on your website. That includes your blog posts. So again, you just want to fix three things right now if you want to improve your search results. One that would be your no indexes. There’s a link in my bio to my website.
[00:03:39] If you search no index content, you’ll find a whole blog post that explains that. The second one, that is your headings. You want to make sure that you have headings that actually provide context.
[00:03:51] And then the third one is just beef up that content. Tell people more about what you do, how you can help them, how you can solve their problem, do those three things.[00:04:00]
[00:04:00] It’s not going to solve every problem, but it’s at least going to give you a good foundation.
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