This article is about Tradesman SEO: How to show up in Google.
SEO is how well your website is understood by Google. Keep in mind Google is not a person, it’s a robot, so it won’t be looking at images or pondering the meaning of sentences. It’s just looking for keywords.
Most web designers will provide some level of SEO but few follow all the required steps to get the website to come up for keywords in Google. Many will cut corners and do the bare minimum because they don’t view SEO as part of their job - but customers want it.
Here are the exact steps we take to make sure your website shows up in Google.
Page Titles
URLs
Meta Descriptions
Htags
Alternate Text
Google My Business
Google Search Console
Page Titles (Tradesman SEO)
The first thing we do is make sure you have page titles. These show up in Google search results and can appear in other places when your website is linked.
You’ll want your main keywords in there as well as your location. Your business name can also be in the page title to boost business name SEO.
URLs (Tradesman SEO)
The next thing is to make sure all your URLS are entered correctly. The part we’re concered about is the “add on” to your domain name.
In the example above, the add on is “locations”. For pages like this and “about” or “contact” that is fine. But for service specific pages, we want to make sure the keyword is in the URL.
For example if you were a sparky who had pages for solar and airconditioning, you’ll want to make sure you have service page URLs such as businessname.com.au/solar and businessname.com.au/airconditioning.
Sometimes web designers can be lazy and forget to use those keywords, instead leaving it as businessname.com.au/service-1 and businessname.com.au/service-2. Which will have absolutely no benefit to SEO.
Meta Descriptions
These are a couple of sentences that show up in the search results under your page title.
The aim of the meta description is two-fold:
Using keywords and location to increase your SEO
To describe your website to the person who is looking at it in the search results, and entice them to click on it
So we want to use a few keywords, our location and the business name in the meta but we don’t want it to read like shit and put people off.
They’re looking at lots of results so we try to make it stand out and appealing. If your business has a unique hook or angle it’s best to play it here.
Htags
These are “tags” we can put on certain important headings to tell the Google robot to look there for keywords.
The most important htag is the H1 tag. This goes on the main heading at the top of your website. You’ll want to make sure you have your main keyword and location in there.
For a plumber in Brisbane, the H1 tag could go on the heading that reads “Local Plumbing in Brisbane. Fully Licensed and Insured.” Even if it’s a whole sentence, the Google robot will understand Plumbing and Brisbane are the important keywords.
The second one we use is the H2 tag. This goes on all the subheadings throughout the page. Subheadings could read “Need Plumbing in Brisbane? Use a Local” and “For Plumbing in Brisbane, Our Family Helps Yours.”
There’s H3-5 as well but these aren’t as powerful as the H1 and H2 tags, so we don’t generally use them.
Alternate Text
Remember, Google is a robot. It can’t see images or watch video. All it does is looks at code. That’s why we need to use alternate text for images so the robot can understand what those images are about.
If a website has a photo of a kitchen renovation, but they’ve left the name of the photo IMG_02014 then Google has no idea what that photo is about. The benefit to SEO has been wasted.
If on the other hand we set the name of the photo to Kitchen Renovation, now this photo is a keyword and will help our SEO.
Google My Business
One of the final things we do is connect your website to your Google My Business profile. For those that don’t know what that is, it’s basically your business listing with Google.
When someone types in your business name, your profile will appear on the right of the screen. It contains your business details, contact number, logo, other photos, opening hours and Google reviews.
When we attach the website to the profile it lets Google better understand what business the website is for.
Google Search Console
The final step is to index your website with Google Search Console. This basically tells Google to send its robot to crawl your website and try to understand what you’re about.
Once it’s indexed, it’s listed in Google search results.
When your website is indexed with Google, you will receive an email that looks like this:
After 2-4 weeks from indexing, we’ll go into Google Search Console and bring up a report on your website’s performance.
Typically Google has already picked up a ton of keyword phrases from your website and has begun showing you to searchers.