Read this page and become an instant SEO guru.
Our aim is to liberate you from SEO cowboys, the people who turn up in your inbox to tell you that they’ll “put you on Page One of Google” if you give them £300 a month. They’re lying of course. You can do a far better job yourself. We’re going to tell you how.
If they even care at all, if they do anything at all in return for their fat fees, SEO Cowboys try to make your website interesting to machines, specifically bots, the programs that Google and other search engine companies send out onto the Internet to vacuum up content and index it—add it to their private, searchable copy of the Internet. The key to real success is to make your website interesting to humans.
Things you should do
Tell the World exactly what you do.
The engineers who build search engines are smart. And they only make money if their products to deliver the content that people are looking for.
The first step to being seen by the people who want what you have to offer is to describe exactly what it is that you offer. When you write about what you do, you can’t help but use words that other people will type into Google when they are looking for products or services like yours.
For example, if you were a wedding photographer, writing an article giving tips on how to take better photos at weddings, you might use phrases like “professional-looking” and “wedding photography”. People looking for a wedding photographer will type in “professional wedding photography”. If you post photos of photos you have taken at weddings in the West Midlands and you label them correctly as such, your descriptions of those photos will inevitably overlap with what brides-and-grooms-to-be will submit to search engines when they go looking for a “West Midlands wedding photographer”.
Tell the people what’s in it for them.
After you explain what it is you do, you need to tell them why they should care. If you are asking people for their money or their support, you need to tell them exactly why that benefits them.
If you have spent money on a website, it’s tempting to get excited about the website itself and forget the reasons you paid for it in the first place. Yes, a website can be like an online business card, and everyone likes a fancy business card.
But what if the paper stock your card is printed on is so thick that it doesn’t fit in potential clients’ wallets?
Always put yourself in your clients’s shoes. Have you ever been happy to have a video autoplay the moment you turn up at a new website? Have you ever responded positively to a pop-up demanding your email address or insisting on starting a live chat with you or inviting you to give your phone number to book a callback sales session? No, you have not. So don’t do to other people the things that you find annoying.
Instead, tell them, up front, how what you have to offer is going to make their lives better:
“Our valeting service will come to your workplace car park, clean your car while you are working, leave your vehicle immaculate, and all for 10% less than the competition.”
That’s one sentence that tells a potential punter everything they need to know. One promo video uses hundreds of thousands of times as much data, and no one will watch it. Not only that, but that sentence contains a bunch of keywords that anyone looking for a workplace car valeting service might well type into their phone when they search for one.
Give useful content away for free.
Telling people how to do the sorts of things that you do in a way that is useful to them combines attracting search engines and attracting potential clients (through the unavoidable use of relevant keywords) with inspiring a sense of obligation in your website visitors. You’ve done them a favour by helping them with their problem, so they’re much more likely to return that favour by buying your solution.
If your website explains how to fit a replacement part that you sell, then the likeliest audience that search engines are going to bring to your site are people looking to fit the replacement part you sell. If they are looking to fit it, they either have in the past or will in the future buy that replacement part. Because you explained how to replace it, you have become much more likely to be the person they buy this one or the next one from.
Putting up tips like this also allows you to show off your expertise in the least obnoxious way possible. Indeed, you are literally telling people: “I know I can do this; but you can do it too, and here is my explanation of how.”
If your visitors find this task difficult, that’s not a problem: You have shown that you can do it, so they know they can pay you to do it for them, and they’ve seen you do it, so they know it can be done, even if only by someone with much more real-world practice.
And you win too: Every work activity that you document on your website is a piece of “institutional knowledge” that you have documented for future use at your organisation or company. If you document how to add a new page to your website, then you have preserved useful information for other members of staff to access in the future—perhaps after you’ve gone.
(Companies do create internal work wikis, but doing this via your own website is a public service as well as a private one.)
Never forget that you are an expert.
Which leads us to our next point: Skilled and experienced people often take their own skills and experience for granted. But other people are paying you for your talents precisely because other people don’t have them.
You don’t know how much you know until you write it down. Once you start writing it down, you and your colleagues could find it as useful as others do.
Things you shouldn’t do
Don’t stop.
Search engine bots love fresh content. There’s a reason why SEO cowboys set up fake blogs to boost the prominence of their clients’ websites. But people love fresh content too, hence the pre-social-media popularity of blogs. Blogs are online diaries: by definition, they’re updated at intervals. Focus on building an audience of real readers; search result prominence will come.
The only machine you should care about it is your own machine-like dedication to constant steady improvement of your website. “Little And Often” should be your motto. Perhaps it’s better to say that it’s like gardening. Creating content is easier than gardening and you don’t need to work on a website as often as you work on a garden. If you publish something new and relevant at least once every couple of weeks, you’ll do alright.
WordPress, the content management software we recommend, logging software makes this so much easier. WordPress starrt
Don’t annoy your guests.
You hate it when you visit a website and a video you didn’t ask to see starts up without your consent and tells you things you don’t want to know about the site you’re visiting. So don’t make other people hate you by doing the same to them.
Don’t make them scroll further to do the one thing they came to do.
Don’t play games.
SEO cowboys will push all sorts of tricks on you to try to game the system. They’ll wibble on about “backlinks” and “AI-generated copy” and tell you to use a hundred words when ten will do—and then use a hundred synonyms for those words.
Don’t listen to them. At best, these techniques will win only temporary gains; at worst, you could be blacklisted by Google.
Write honestly and plainly and accurately. Build it cleanly and they will come.
Tech tips
Use a content-management system (CMS).
We recommend WordPress. It’s free, popular, simple, and powerful. But the important thing is to build your website on a standard framework that is designed to be read by both humans and machines.
Set your CMS up the right way.
It’s not enough to use a standard platform for your website; you should make sure you configure it so that it works for search engine bots—as well as for you, your clients, and your business.
On this site, we will lead you by the hand through setting up WordPress so that you can get the most out of it.