How I got to #3 on Google
If you want to get to(wards) the top of Google, I’d like to share my story.
I’ll confess, 12 months ago SEO wasn’t part of our marketing strategy. Yet in one year, we’ve climbed from unfindable to #3 for competitive search phrases like:
‘website design brisbane‘ (#3)
‘web designers brisbane‘ (#3)
‘website designers brisbane‘ (#3)
‘web design brisbane‘ (dropped to #4 today, it was #3…)
Being competitive, I’m striving for #1 in all those categories, but so is every other web design company out there. Healthy competition is good and I enjoy the challenge!
What’s the Secret?
Well, there really is no secret. Despite what some SEOs will have you believe, there’s no magic to topping Google. If you follow the rules, you’ll get there!
But I do want to acknowledge and thank my ‘SEO mentors‘ from whom I have learnt everything I know. I can definitely attribute our success to our friends at Reload Media (Bluewire’s SEO partner) and also to SEO copywriter Glenn Murray who wrote the brilliant e-books SEO Secrets and SEO Copywriting. Thanks guys.
In a sentence, I’ve learnt that if you focus on producing the most interesting, relevant & useful content for your buyers, you’ll automatically be optimising your website.
But that isn’t juicy enough is it…? So, here are the:
Top 5 things I’ve done to reach #3 on Google:
1. Commit to a keyword phrase to optimise for.
In my case, I chose Web Design Brisbane and two or three obvious combinations that are similar. This decision was based on the high search volume for this phrase.
2. Align Web Copy, Page Title and Page Description with your keyword phrase.
My chosen keyword phrase Web Design Brisbane appears consistently in my Web Copy, Page Title and Page Description.. BUT it shouldn’t be too repetitive for a human since Google is smart enough to know what the page is about if you only mention it once in each.
3. Get Quality Backlinks
I changed the footer tags on all the websites we built to Web Design Brisbane by Bluewire Media. You could also write testimonials for suppliers or write articles for other websites and put back links on them. I do both. You’ll also notice I use the keyword phrase as the anchor text not the company name. This is an important habit to get into.
4. Blog every week
I try to blog every week with useful information for our prospective buyers. This means there is fresh, keyword rich content that Google loves (and more importantly, so do people reading the blog)! If it’s a popular blog post, people will link to it. This is known as ‘link bait‘ – content so good that other people will link to it!
5. Tweet every blog post
I tweet every single blog post to our followers. If the blog post is interesting enough people will retweet it and more people will read it. And if people really like it they’ll link back to the blog (which helps our Google ranking).
What’s our #3 ranking meant for Bluewire’s business?
Well now we have on average 5-10 qualified web enquiries per week that found us through Google… And we’ve doubled our traffic to ~500 unique visitors each week.
We aren’t #1 (yet), but I’ll let you know if we make it!
SEO Brisbane : If you’d also like to see the view from the top of Google, give Bluewire Media a call on 1300 258 394.