Climbing the Google Search Results: Where Do I Start?

Step One -  Identify Your Market and Competition: The first thing to do is ask yourself, what is it that our customers find value in? The answer to this question will vary depending on whether you have a product or provide a service. If you sell a physical product, then are you a reseller or a manufacturer? Who is going to visit your website when you are being found on a search engine?

Let's take the example of a service provider first of all.

Let's say you are a plumber in London and you want to rank top on Google for some relevant search terms. These will not be difficult to guess, but let's find out what the top searches are in London,. UK for plumbers.

So first of all we need to use the Google keywords tool in the Google Ads toolkit in order to find out what searches are being performed and which represent the greatest magnitude.

An alternative would be to make a plumberfinder.london website where you try and control the market by listing plumbers by location and your website calculates which plumbers are closest. Perhaps you could use the Uber style model where plumbers accept a task and head over as soon as they accept a job and get rated on their work by the customer. Undoubtedly this will be a template for the majority of service industries in the near future, as it makes the quality and response time of any service the deciding factor on how much work they carry-out.

As we can see from our list on the Google Keyword tool, the top search terms are:

Quite understandably, people are concerned with finding a local plumber, someone who is within a short distance of their own home so that they can be easily contacted and found, and arrive quickly. So location is important for some searches, and here is a prime example. 

So how can we reach the top for searches in London for local plumbers? Well the first question is, do you want to? Do you want to be top of every search in all of London for local plumbers? Probably not. The simple truth is that most people will ask where you are based and unless you have a local shop they will not want to deal with you, and go elsewhere, so why waste all that effort? A solution to this would be to form a group of plumbers  with whom you can collaborate and make a service of trusted plumbers that can deal with the whole of London but in the meantime we are learning that you need to decide who your customers are, and cater for them alone.

So we can see that the majority of searches are looking for exactly what we are preparing to align our strategy with, plumbers close to the person performing the search.

Step Two - Collect Your Strategy and Tools: So now that we have a target audience and a known set of keywords over which we wish to compete, we need to take a few things into account about the way that Google Search has changed in the last few years. Firstly, thinking in terms of keywords is no longer necessarily the most important idea. Google has all sorts of AI tools that decipher the meanings of words and can think of them in terms of meaning rather than terms. This means that those three entries in our list, about finding a plumber close to the search, are essentially all the same term. We need to ensure that we assure Google that we are the premium reliable plumber in our part of London, and to do that we are going to use a host of different weapons. It is also important to remember that although keywords and phrases are becoming less and less important, Google will not make huge changes overnight - they could lose their standing in the marketplace if they upset too many people - so we are going to use tactics that appeal to both the new and the older(ish) Google.

So new Google is going to care about our Google business listings and address, Google reviews, Trustpilot, a clear and easy to understand website, and a good and regularly active social media presence. 

Old Google is going to care about as many incoming website anchor links with the aforementioned keywords as text, which service areas we claim to service on our website, and  how often we mention relevant keywords and LSI keywords on our website. 

So let's get out LSI keywords, which are simply a list of keywords related to keywords in which we are interested. You can get these from the Google keyword tool, but we usually find it easier to get a quick list from the LSI Keyword Generator at keysearch.co as the list is a little less extensive and allows for a more mellow, persuasive tone.

We're typing in 'london plumber' for suggestions here but you must type in whichever keywords you are targeting to get a related feel to the text in your website, then once you have saved these keywords as they are, we can move on to fashioning a page that will help us climb the Google rankings in our chosen sector.

Step Three- Defining the Structure: Now we have the ingredients for our website, we still have to combine everything together in the right way, or we will ruin the recipe for everyone.

This is where we need to outline our page titles, page descriptions, headings, links and text, which will help us and Google understand the text and  how it should be understood. Kinks are vital because they form the pathway through your website, and titles, headings and text represent the sections of information just as if they were in any encyclopedia or reference book.

So our page title must provide the reader, be it human or spider, with a clear understanding of the content of the page. This can come in may forms. For instance, the old idea of just filling a page with text, when you mighty send a query to Google asking 'how do I find the nearest reliable plumber?' and you would wind up at a page saying 'finding the nearest reliable plumber can be a tricky task with so many websites and blah..blah..blah'

Well that is now a thing of the past. Google doesn't care about how much content you have anymore, it cares about how quickly people find what they need. It has become a system motivated by getting you what you need as quickly and efficiently as possible, and that is why so may of the AI written websites are now suffering. This is because the current batch of AI is completely castrated in terms of being able to make any kind of a deduction (and rightfully so) that it can only reiterate how important it is to make a full analysis of whatever it is you are asking it. It cannot work out what is a good investment or a bad one. It can only repeat that you have to weigh up all of the conditions and perform your own due diligence. It is essentially a talking book. 

So where does this leave us with preparing out plumber website? Well we need to think about the query that will be entered - 'plumbers near me' - what is the most satisfying response to that query? Well in truth, Google Maps is a pretty good start, and that will be a huge factor in local service provider success, you must have an up-to-date and sufficient entry in Google business listings for Google  maps to search. This will effect your rankings on both Google Maps and Google Search. 

So let's think about the structure of the page - What is the title? Well it needs to say something along the lines of 'the Most Reliable Plumber in South East London According to our Customers!' so that Google can understand you are a very popular business. You need to be ensuring that you motivate your customers to leave a review, so give a 5% discount for everyone who leaves a five start review. This, once again will help you with your site ranking.

So now we have a title, lets talk about the description. The description does not necessarily affect your ranking per se, but it will affect how likely someone is to click on your listing. This means it has to fulfill everything everyone expects from a good plumber; reliability, trust, friendliness and follow-up support. You need to explain what a good job you do. So the description should read something like 'We don't just do a job, we make sure of it! Our follow-up call service to make sure everything is working as expected is unmatched in out area!' Which should clinch anyone reading you listing as a prospect arriving at your site. 

You need to make sure that the phone number is clear and in friendly, harmless type, possibly integrated with your front page image. Images of the best work that you have completed and happy, smiling customers is also a great way to encourage people to make contact.

So now what about the structure. Well you need to establish what the services you offer are and have a section for each that we can link to. This is important because it means that people can get to what they need fast. It doesn't matter whether it is all upon the same page, as long as you can link to it and Google can see that it is accessible quickly and easily. You might have images of kitchens, bathrooms, guttering and boilers as links to each section, but be sure you have added descriptions to the images so that Google can index them by subject,

Now we have established our sections, linked to them, and all we need do now is add some content. Each bit of content needs to explain in a positive way:

• What the advantages of your services are
• How happy your existing customers are
• How you make sure they stay that way#

And that's all, right? Wrong!

Step Four: Make them Stay! For a website to be successful it has to provide a service in itself. TopOnGoogle for instance, offers a step by step guide on how to climb the rankings above your competitors for free. That is a free service that keeps people coming back. TopOnGoogle also offers reference pages on what various internet technologies are, what they can do for you, and how to get the most out of them. We also post an SEO blog that keeps people up-to-date with the comings and goings of Google Search technologies and how AI is being applied to Google search spiders (GoogleBot) and Google Search Index and Google SERPs or Google Search Engine Results Pages.

So we have to weigh-up a decision here. Are we looking to gain business out of this website or to give away all of our best tips and tricks in order to get ranking? You see the more we give away for free, the better it is for Google. Google essentially get to provide an excellent service at our expense. 

So we have to be careful. Ranking Top on Google might be good for our reputation, but is it going to get us any business if everything we know is available online without paying us a penny? We'd have to go on the after-dinner speech circuit in order to pay the mortgage!

So what would be a suitable way to bring people to your website and keep them there? This is an important question to ask yourself. You need people to stay at your website in order to quash a difficult hurdle, that of dwell time.

Dwell time is an important measurement that Google and other ranking services use to determine the usefulness and interest of your website. If your visitors are immediately leaving the site, then they will deem your website uninteresting and useless, and start sending them somewhere else. This is a serious problem, as it means your traffic will evaporate, and your search engine ranking with it.

So you need to grab attention, be useful and seem attractive all at the same time in the first eight seconds before your visitor decides to try and find a better option. That is one of the reasons a good logo is worth every penny you spend on it and a good web designer with an eye for the aesthetic rather than just good behind-the-scenes code.

A useful technology is some sort of interaction - many popular websites are all about calculating what is best for you. The car insurance sites, for instance, compare all of the prices and force companies to fight for your business. This is a great, customer-centric idea that gives interaction (dwell time) and great value (usefulness) all in one bundle, but it does rather make you the middle man or woman.

Another great tool is the configurator. If you go to a website like Landrover or Aston Martin, you can configure your dream car live on the site and watch it evolve. This another great idea, customer-centric and enormous fun. Not only does it make for great ranking website, but introduces a real hunger for the product and improves the ranking of a brand. That is really clever marketing tactics.

So with all of that in mind, do we decide to add a house planner to your site? Well probably it is worth considering some sort of calculator on the website of a plumber. Something that will make people more likely to leave their details, but do not force them to leave their details to get the quote. That is the quickest way to make someone decide that you are pushy and untrustworthy. A good idea of what they should expect to pay might be a good way of keeping yourself honest anyway and as long as your estimator is fair and doesn't have you doing second rate work to fit the price, then it is a sound investment.

Now you have a general idea of how to start a website for a business and what to consider before you engage anyone to help you with it. Happy hunting!