Simple, not obvious

Most SEO agencies over complicate SEO and drown customers in reports, data and jargon.

A fundamental concept we try and get our SEO Audit customers to understand is that SEO is simple, but not obvious.

In this email I’ll share with you four simple, not obvious SEO tactics you can use that in some cases can have a dramatic impact on rankings and SEO traffic.

Here they are:

Renew your domain for 10 years or the maximum your registrar allows

Downtime=zero speed and one of the most common causes of downtime is domain names not being renewed.

Your entire SEO and online marketing strategy runs on top of your domain name and because domain renewals are so cheap, domain name maintenance and management in usually completely neglected.

A simple fix for this is to renew your domain for as long as your registrar allows – for .com domains this is typically 10 years. You’ll often get a discount for renewing so far into the future too.

No page no rank and your homepage doesn’t count

If you don’t have a page for something on your site you can’t rank for it, no page no rank.

You’d be surprised how often we see this issue in our SEO audits.

There are some weird technical and edge case examples where this rule isn’t 100% true but broadly speaking, if say you’re a dentist and want to rank for searches relating to teeth whitening, then you need to have a page on your site for teeth whitening.

Each page on your site can only rank for one theme or topic too – your teeth whitening page is not going to rank for “dental implants” and stuffing 15 services onto a single services page doesn’t work either.

A simple action step we try to have all customers do is to list out all the products and services they sell. along with all their physical locations and then make sure there is a page to match each one. Often, by simply adding a page for a product or service you’ll start to rank and get traffic.

NOTE that your homepage is a special page and doesn’t count as a page in the context of this rule. Often it’s the homepage itself that ranks but the ranking is being driven by one of the inner pages.

If phone calls are important to you, add the phone number to your title tag and meta description

A simple one and more relevant for local businesses or ecommerce businesses that take phone calls.

Add your phone number to your title tag and meta description and you’ll typically see an increase in CTR (click through rate) and call volume.

A bonus here is that the phone number in the meta description will become a click to call number and often you’ll generate calls/leads directly from the search results.

Bonus – in a previous email we talked in more detail about meta description CTR optimization – click here to view it

Get detailed insights on your Google Search Console keyword data in under 5 minutes by running a word frequency count on it

There’s a ton of valuable keyword data in Google Search Console (GSC) but pulling actionable insights from it can be very time intensive.

A simple (FREE) shortcut we use to understand keyword data quickly is to export the keywords from Google Search Console and run them through a word frequency count tool like https://countwordsfree.com/

This process takes maybe 5 minutes and can give you detailed insights on search intent and search volume without needing to use expensive tools like Ahrefs.

Bonus tip here – GSC only gives you 1000 search terms when you do an export but if you use the free Search Console Explorer Studio tool here, you can export 5000 search terms. This tool can help you understand and manage your keyword data much more easily than the GSC web console.

That’s it for this email, would love to hear what you think about these and if this style of content is useful to you – just hit reply.

If you’re looking for help with your site speed, core web vitals or SEO, click here to request a free site audit and we’ll review your site and tell you how we can help.