Search Engine Optimisation for franchisees
By Francois Muscat
As a franchise owner you benefit from a variety of franchise-related marketing aspects such as brand identification and customer loyalty, but how successful are you at marketing your own franchise?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to the practice of applying techniques to your website to up its rating in the “organic” or “natural” search results, and is a key strategy in directing people to your website, blog, product pages and other content.
The power of ranking well in search engines
When was the last time you whipped out "The Yellow Pages" to find a local service company? Search engines have replaced Yellow pages and calling your business "AAA Plumbers" so it would appear first on an alphabetical list is no longer a viable option.
As most internet users will tell you, people rarely browse past page two of the search results to find information, so if your website is hard to find in the search engine results pages, you are not really marketing your website on search engines at all.
If your SEO is well executed, your website will be prominently displayed when people search for your products, services or company name in Google. With 700,000 searches per second it is important that your website can be found on Google.
Think about that for a second… Every second that your website is not indexed in Google, is hundreds of potential opportunities lost for someone to visit your website. The sole purpose of a search engine like Google is to provide searchers with relevant content at the exact moment that they are searching for it.
Of the 3 billion searches on Google each month, one-third are local searches. A local search being you type in keywords plus a location, e.g. “pluming Johannesburg or “insurance consultant Durban”. What many people don’t realize is that if your website does not contain the words people use in searches, you are not even in the race to get found for that search term.
How SEO works
Some digital marketers try to sell SEO as some form of “Google manipulation”, intimating that you need to hire experts who know the Google algorithms to get your pages ranked on the first page. The problem with this approach is that Google’s search algorithms are continuously being changed and optimized to give Google users a better experience. Think about it, Google rewards relevancy, so the trick is finding out what people want in your nich, and giving it to them.
There are three important aspects to SEO:
1) On-page factorsThis refers to the structure of your website’s pages and ensuring that a search engine can identify what the topic of the page is about. I like to structure the pages the way newspapers do:
- They create a headline
- Tell you what the story is about in the first few paragraphs
- There are sub headings throughout the page that will tell you the actual story (the reader can follow the gist of the story by simply “scanning” the page)
- The they then end off telling you what the story was about.
Google uses website crawlers to index the pages of your website; when a page is structured like this it is easy for Google to establish the theme of the page.
This is what the “perfect page” would look like:
2) Off-page factors
Off-page SEO factors can be seen as a ‘voting system’ that Google uses to determine the authority and trust of your website. This authority is calculated using the number of inbound links that point to your web page using the same "keywords" in the hyperlink as you are targeting on your web page.
There are many different linking strategies that Internet Marketing Consultants use to boost your off-page SEO, such as content marketing (which we will cover in the next issue), link exchanges and online posts.
3) Visitor Interest
In my opinion this factor is the most important SEO tool. Look at your website and ask yourself: “What is in it for the visitor?” What will keep a website visitor on your site long enough to gain confidence in you and follow through on your “call to action”?
While high search engine rankings and increased traffic is great, if your web traffic is not converted into a prospect/customer, you are wasting your time and efforts on SEO.
The basics of keyword research
If you can’t find your website pages, blog posts or newsletters on a search engine, it’s safe to ask: “Do these pages even exist?” As previously mentioned including keywords, preferably consisting of popular search phrases, is the only way to rank well on Google, but how do you decide which keywords to include?
In its simplest form keyword research is easy, and here is how to do it:
- Go to Google’s keyword tool: www.google.com/sktool
- Type in a search phrase that is applicable to your business. We used “Pizza Recipes” in our example.
- The results show the most searched for terms related to “Pizza Recipes”:
The keyword “gourmet pizza recipes” gets 2,400 local searches and about 5,400 global searches per month, translating into 64,800 global searches a year.
Now go to Google and type in “gourmet pizza recipes”. The search box below shows that there are 485,000 other pages in Google competing for that exact phrase.
Dividing the number of searches by the number of pages Google returns for your search gives you a Keyword Competitive Index (KPI). In this case the KPI is calculated as 64,800 searches divided by 485,000 pages and the result is a KPI of 0.13. Anything below one means that there are more pages competing for the keyword phrase than there are people searching for it and you are going to have to compete with good SEO to achieve top results.
Now you are faced with two choices. Refine your search further or start competing for this keyword, which will take a bit of work in terms of providing optimised content and links to your pages, etc.
In going back to the Google keyword search tool and the search for “gourmet pizza recipes”, you will see a closely related, but much less competitive keyword phrase is “gourmet pizza toppings”. Similarly you will find that the more unique the phrase, the easier it is to rank well. A keyword phrase like “pumpkin pizza toppings for gourmet pizzas”, for example, is much more niche and easy to rank well for, even if there are still thousands of people searching for this exact phrase each month.
Now start creating content that fits your keywords and, of course, your business goals. Get your niche keyword phrases on your website and use it throughout. Name your next article, blog post or newsletter “Top 10 Gourmet Pizza Recipes” and the next one “Unusual Gourmet Pizza Toppings” and so on.
The first step to launching your SEO strategy is to do this kind of Google research and list all the keywords for which you would like to rank on the search engines. Your list should be a living breathing document that you review and update at least on a monthly basis. This will ensure you continue your keyword research and will allow you to note the keywords for which you are already ranking.
Planning your website structure
Your initial keyword research will give you an idea of how many specific web pages you want to create. Each web page will need content and pictures and you need to decide where they will be placed on your website and what other pages or offers they should link to. Make a list of the assets that need to be created or gathered and devise a plan to get it done.
While keywords and quality content are significant factors in directing search engine users to your website and keeping them there, website organization is also important. The pages should be interesting to visitors and make sense to Google, to achieve this it is a good idea to create silos and to theme your pages.
“Silos” work well because they help Google to categorize your web content. If you are selling gardening tools, for example, it makes sense to group all the lawnmowers together. Your website’s different silos will be structured as main pages and all of your keyword-rich articles and content pages would be linked to the main page:
Internal linking
Another important aspect of SEO is internal linking. Before we continue let us clarify the difference between internal and external linking:
• External linking refers to text links on your website that will take the website visitor to a page on another website (such as highlighting the word “lawnmowers” and leading them to the Wikipedia entry about lawnmowers). Inbound linking is when a page on somebody else’s website links to your website and if this happens to be an authoritative website, it is extremely good for your SEO.
• Internal linking is when you link to other pages within your website. In an article about The Top 10 Lawnmowers, for example, you could link the word “Lawnmower Company” to your website’s About Us page.
Rather than using “Click Here” or “Find out more” to create hyperlinks, use keyword rich anchor text where keywords relating to other articles or pages on your site help visitors navigate the content. It also helps to increase the indexing of your site and the rankings of individual pages.
Quality trumps quantity with inbound links
When it comes to inbound links, focus on quality – not quantity. In the past, people used to get hundreds of links from so-called “link farms”, which is basically a useless website full of spammy links. Before Google Panda (yet another change to Google’s search algorithm) came along in 2011, these types of links would help you get on the first page of search engines. However, because Google likes giving their search engine users relevant, high quality content and they don’t like giving top ranking to poor content filled with irrelevant links, they are continually improving their search algorithms.
So, where do you get your links from? There are a number of different ways. Article marketing is an option whereby you post your article on an article database such as http://www.ehow.com/. You can also establish a back-link to your website by guest blogging on a popular website, or do a link exchange with another related website and trade a link to your site for a link on one of your pages, but be careful about who you choose to partner with.
There’s also a lot of debate about “link velocity” i.e. how quickly you get links to your website. Some internet marketers have claimed that if they build links too rapidly, their rankings will drop. A note of caution, beware what you heed, because some may attribute their dropped rankings to the same thing when, in fact, they could be losing rankings due to poor content.
I suggest building links slowly and steadily, especially in the beginning. After you have established a solid foundation of about 100 links you can pick up the pace. With the base set, link building will be more natural and result in more organic link building.
When you’re marketing your content, your brand and your website, being seen as an “authority” should be one of the main goals of your online marketing initiatives. When you are giving advice, tips and posting high quality content on your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you will become known as an authority in your industry and this is when the real link building starts to happen. You just need to give yourself a kick-start in the beginning.
Measuring and improvement
A great tool for tracking inbound links, your own and your competitors’ is Majesticseo.com. It allows you to track links, referring domains, images, redirects and more and with a paid account. You will be able to get a more detailed report about unique links and their anchor texts.
Web tools like Google Analytics also allows you to track the number of visitors who reach your website through organic search keywords (i.e. by typing in search phrases into Google) and which other sites are driving traffic to your website.
These types of statistics also provide a good baseline for your core keywords as well as providing ideas for new content that you can add to your website. Your website’s analytics should be used to benchmark your performance and future SEO efforts.
Getting the right content for your website
Planning your website content and producing keyword-rich, valuable content is important because Google also looks at how much time a person spends on your website. Besides SEO and links, Google also monitors the number of times visitors bounce back to Google after presumably not finding what they were looking for. So regardless of how many back-links and keywords you have, you still need to create value and visitor interest on your website.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Content is King”. In the next article I will discuss how content marketing works, how to choose the right kind of content, how to write it, where to publish it and how to plan your content strategy. Getting your content right is just as important as your keyword research and SEO and I’ll show you how to create an asset out of your web properties by updating it with relevant content.
WSI Online Marketing Specialists
+ 27 11 468 3138
http://www.wsioms.co.za/
As a franchise owner you benefit from a variety of franchise-related marketing aspects such as brand identification and customer loyalty, but how successful are you at marketing your own franchise?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to the practice of applying techniques to your website to up its rating in the “organic” or “natural” search results, and is a key strategy in directing people to your website, blog, product pages and other content.
The power of ranking well in search engines
When was the last time you whipped out "The Yellow Pages" to find a local service company? Search engines have replaced Yellow pages and calling your business "AAA Plumbers" so it would appear first on an alphabetical list is no longer a viable option.
As most internet users will tell you, people rarely browse past page two of the search results to find information, so if your website is hard to find in the search engine results pages, you are not really marketing your website on search engines at all.
If your SEO is well executed, your website will be prominently displayed when people search for your products, services or company name in Google. With 700,000 searches per second it is important that your website can be found on Google.
Think about that for a second… Every second that your website is not indexed in Google, is hundreds of potential opportunities lost for someone to visit your website. The sole purpose of a search engine like Google is to provide searchers with relevant content at the exact moment that they are searching for it.
Of the 3 billion searches on Google each month, one-third are local searches. A local search being you type in keywords plus a location, e.g. “pluming Johannesburg or “insurance consultant Durban”. What many people don’t realize is that if your website does not contain the words people use in searches, you are not even in the race to get found for that search term.
How SEO works
Some digital marketers try to sell SEO as some form of “Google manipulation”, intimating that you need to hire experts who know the Google algorithms to get your pages ranked on the first page. The problem with this approach is that Google’s search algorithms are continuously being changed and optimized to give Google users a better experience. Think about it, Google rewards relevancy, so the trick is finding out what people want in your nich, and giving it to them.
There are three important aspects to SEO:
1) On-page factorsThis refers to the structure of your website’s pages and ensuring that a search engine can identify what the topic of the page is about. I like to structure the pages the way newspapers do:
- They create a headline
- Tell you what the story is about in the first few paragraphs
- There are sub headings throughout the page that will tell you the actual story (the reader can follow the gist of the story by simply “scanning” the page)
- The they then end off telling you what the story was about.
Google uses website crawlers to index the pages of your website; when a page is structured like this it is easy for Google to establish the theme of the page.
This is what the “perfect page” would look like:
Off-page SEO factors can be seen as a ‘voting system’ that Google uses to determine the authority and trust of your website. This authority is calculated using the number of inbound links that point to your web page using the same "keywords" in the hyperlink as you are targeting on your web page.
There are many different linking strategies that Internet Marketing Consultants use to boost your off-page SEO, such as content marketing (which we will cover in the next issue), link exchanges and online posts.
3) Visitor Interest
In my opinion this factor is the most important SEO tool. Look at your website and ask yourself: “What is in it for the visitor?” What will keep a website visitor on your site long enough to gain confidence in you and follow through on your “call to action”?
While high search engine rankings and increased traffic is great, if your web traffic is not converted into a prospect/customer, you are wasting your time and efforts on SEO.
The basics of keyword research
If you can’t find your website pages, blog posts or newsletters on a search engine, it’s safe to ask: “Do these pages even exist?” As previously mentioned including keywords, preferably consisting of popular search phrases, is the only way to rank well on Google, but how do you decide which keywords to include?
In its simplest form keyword research is easy, and here is how to do it:
- Go to Google’s keyword tool: www.google.com/sktool
- Type in a search phrase that is applicable to your business. We used “Pizza Recipes” in our example.
- The results show the most searched for terms related to “Pizza Recipes”:
Now go to Google and type in “gourmet pizza recipes”. The search box below shows that there are 485,000 other pages in Google competing for that exact phrase.
Dividing the number of searches by the number of pages Google returns for your search gives you a Keyword Competitive Index (KPI). In this case the KPI is calculated as 64,800 searches divided by 485,000 pages and the result is a KPI of 0.13. Anything below one means that there are more pages competing for the keyword phrase than there are people searching for it and you are going to have to compete with good SEO to achieve top results.
Now you are faced with two choices. Refine your search further or start competing for this keyword, which will take a bit of work in terms of providing optimised content and links to your pages, etc.
In going back to the Google keyword search tool and the search for “gourmet pizza recipes”, you will see a closely related, but much less competitive keyword phrase is “gourmet pizza toppings”. Similarly you will find that the more unique the phrase, the easier it is to rank well. A keyword phrase like “pumpkin pizza toppings for gourmet pizzas”, for example, is much more niche and easy to rank well for, even if there are still thousands of people searching for this exact phrase each month.
Now start creating content that fits your keywords and, of course, your business goals. Get your niche keyword phrases on your website and use it throughout. Name your next article, blog post or newsletter “Top 10 Gourmet Pizza Recipes” and the next one “Unusual Gourmet Pizza Toppings” and so on.
The first step to launching your SEO strategy is to do this kind of Google research and list all the keywords for which you would like to rank on the search engines. Your list should be a living breathing document that you review and update at least on a monthly basis. This will ensure you continue your keyword research and will allow you to note the keywords for which you are already ranking.
Planning your website structure
Your initial keyword research will give you an idea of how many specific web pages you want to create. Each web page will need content and pictures and you need to decide where they will be placed on your website and what other pages or offers they should link to. Make a list of the assets that need to be created or gathered and devise a plan to get it done.
While keywords and quality content are significant factors in directing search engine users to your website and keeping them there, website organization is also important. The pages should be interesting to visitors and make sense to Google, to achieve this it is a good idea to create silos and to theme your pages.
“Silos” work well because they help Google to categorize your web content. If you are selling gardening tools, for example, it makes sense to group all the lawnmowers together. Your website’s different silos will be structured as main pages and all of your keyword-rich articles and content pages would be linked to the main page:
Internal linking
Another important aspect of SEO is internal linking. Before we continue let us clarify the difference between internal and external linking:
• External linking refers to text links on your website that will take the website visitor to a page on another website (such as highlighting the word “lawnmowers” and leading them to the Wikipedia entry about lawnmowers). Inbound linking is when a page on somebody else’s website links to your website and if this happens to be an authoritative website, it is extremely good for your SEO.
• Internal linking is when you link to other pages within your website. In an article about The Top 10 Lawnmowers, for example, you could link the word “Lawnmower Company” to your website’s About Us page.
Rather than using “Click Here” or “Find out more” to create hyperlinks, use keyword rich anchor text where keywords relating to other articles or pages on your site help visitors navigate the content. It also helps to increase the indexing of your site and the rankings of individual pages.
Quality trumps quantity with inbound links
When it comes to inbound links, focus on quality – not quantity. In the past, people used to get hundreds of links from so-called “link farms”, which is basically a useless website full of spammy links. Before Google Panda (yet another change to Google’s search algorithm) came along in 2011, these types of links would help you get on the first page of search engines. However, because Google likes giving their search engine users relevant, high quality content and they don’t like giving top ranking to poor content filled with irrelevant links, they are continually improving their search algorithms.
So, where do you get your links from? There are a number of different ways. Article marketing is an option whereby you post your article on an article database such as http://www.ehow.com/. You can also establish a back-link to your website by guest blogging on a popular website, or do a link exchange with another related website and trade a link to your site for a link on one of your pages, but be careful about who you choose to partner with.
There’s also a lot of debate about “link velocity” i.e. how quickly you get links to your website. Some internet marketers have claimed that if they build links too rapidly, their rankings will drop. A note of caution, beware what you heed, because some may attribute their dropped rankings to the same thing when, in fact, they could be losing rankings due to poor content.
I suggest building links slowly and steadily, especially in the beginning. After you have established a solid foundation of about 100 links you can pick up the pace. With the base set, link building will be more natural and result in more organic link building.
When you’re marketing your content, your brand and your website, being seen as an “authority” should be one of the main goals of your online marketing initiatives. When you are giving advice, tips and posting high quality content on your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you will become known as an authority in your industry and this is when the real link building starts to happen. You just need to give yourself a kick-start in the beginning.
Measuring and improvement
A great tool for tracking inbound links, your own and your competitors’ is Majesticseo.com. It allows you to track links, referring domains, images, redirects and more and with a paid account. You will be able to get a more detailed report about unique links and their anchor texts.
Web tools like Google Analytics also allows you to track the number of visitors who reach your website through organic search keywords (i.e. by typing in search phrases into Google) and which other sites are driving traffic to your website.
These types of statistics also provide a good baseline for your core keywords as well as providing ideas for new content that you can add to your website. Your website’s analytics should be used to benchmark your performance and future SEO efforts.
Getting the right content for your website
Planning your website content and producing keyword-rich, valuable content is important because Google also looks at how much time a person spends on your website. Besides SEO and links, Google also monitors the number of times visitors bounce back to Google after presumably not finding what they were looking for. So regardless of how many back-links and keywords you have, you still need to create value and visitor interest on your website.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Content is King”. In the next article I will discuss how content marketing works, how to choose the right kind of content, how to write it, where to publish it and how to plan your content strategy. Getting your content right is just as important as your keyword research and SEO and I’ll show you how to create an asset out of your web properties by updating it with relevant content.
WSI Online Marketing Specialists
+ 27 11 468 3138
http://www.wsioms.co.za/
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