Ok, I’ve done quite a bit of content around the keyword “Web Design Wagga” and to be honest it can be frustrating in seeing only partial results but it’s not just about what your doing to increase your ranking it’s what your opposition are doing as well. I’ve probably got at least 10 articles on SEO and my experience on this site while other articles on my other site Regional Web Developer.
Google Rankings are Volatile and a Great for business
During this week I did the usual search on Monday to see where I’m at with “Web Design Wagga” – Whoa, I’d dropped to 5th or 6th despite all my efforts and then again today we’re back at position number 2. What happened between then and now. According to some well known SEO journals I subscribe to Google are not only providing best results for customers based on keywords and content but also factoring the right results depending on the day of the week.
Google are sharing the love amongst those competition for top spot while having us all SEOers come back for more to provide rich content for our audience. Or is it there audience. I’m not sure.
Anyway On Monday a competitor out of Newcastle Jezwbe (yes I know I spelt it wrong on purpose) surged past some of us local web designers for “Web Design Wagga“. It can be super frustrating when out of town agencies especially if we’re all battling regional communities businesses try to take some of the market share saying they’re local when you investigate they’re no more local than some of the other franchises leaching regional communities. I’m not saying that’s what Jzeweb did. This is what my other site Regional Web Developer is all about. Networking with other creatives in communities to keep work local but provide services that local customers want. Frustrated that the other agency out of Newcastle (yes, regional Australia) had taken my spot and even that Google for a Wagga term and had pushed me down the list I was thinking it’s been a week since my last post and I need to keep on going.
But I don’t think it’s just about adding more content to your site to get your site to rank for short periods of time. Well mostly, there are obviously hundreds if not thousands of factors that Google use to figure out how awesome your site is an if it should rank. One of these is backlinks.
Backlinks
Paid Backlinks & Research
It’s worth while paying for a tool called Keywords Everywhere which is super cheap compared to some of the big players like Moz or SEO. One of the features I used with this tool was the backlink checker and quickly discovered our friends from Newcastle had potentially “paid” for backlinks. Now everyone wants a quick solution I get it and the SEO world is full of these but in contrast Google’s policies on backlinks are that this is bad and a great way to get penalised. The line in the sand is somewhat faded in this area when it comes to some sites. Take for example the idea of sponsorship. You pay to be a sponsor of say PCYC or some other local sporting affiliation. They then list your site as a sponsor. Haven’t you just paid for a backlink? Or say there’s a site with the idea of becoming a sponsor of an emoji. Yes, that’s right your sponsoring something that is virtual and having your site listed as a result. Getting further and further into the dodgy sector right?
Further problems for paying for backlinks is that the companies running these services often push your link out “while you pay”. That’s right you pay a monthly and they keep your link active on their link network, once you stop paying they remove your link. I’ve seen this first hand with SEO agencies.
How do you find Quality Backlinks
Same as above with my competitor from Newcastle I did a spreadsheet and listed out those sites with a high authority and other sites that ended in .org.au – these are two factors that can help but not all .org.au have value. Check each of the sites domain authority rankings in order to figure this out. The other thing to consider is if your in say real estate which sites are in the same area or industry as you that may also help.
Negative Backlink Your Competitors
This is playing dirty and I really think you risk the opposite if you go in this direction unless you know 100% listing your competitors site on that dodgy, dodgy site is going to put them on page 2. Personally with so many dodgy sites still helping competitors to rank against me in Wagga I get frustrated why Google don’t catch up with these sites and penalise them big time. I think a little penality here and there is probably fine and then every now and then they release something like penguin which rocked the SEO world and penalised a lot of black hat SEOers. Who knows when the next Penguin will arive especially with so much AI content out there.
While it’s a term in the SEO world and you have the capability via Google Webmaster tools to get these dodgy links to your site excluded I don’t see this as a way of growing. It’s just not good business and I’d avoid it.
Other Types Of Backlinks
What about backlinks for websites I’ve built or designed? I haven’t paid for the link and yet the backlink should help me rank as an authority in the area of web design. Even this has it’s drawbacks and web designers are now not listing their site as a link on customers portfolio sites as it gives competitors a list of websites to target. Especially if say there was a vulnerability with technology or you knew say LocalSearch were charging x amount of dollars for their website hosting and you could charge y and provide that little extra incentive to keep them local.
Backlinks are harder to get than doing keyword work in content and I’ll go through the rest of this article explaining why.
Keywords
Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the first steps of a successful SEO campaign. A keyword is a word or phrase a user would type into a search engine to find a business like yours.
Through research, you (or your SEO agency) can find keywords that would be an ideal fit for your business.
As part of keyword research, you should look at and understand the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword. Every keyword is different. Some are extremely difficult to rank for as there is a lot of competition. In contrast, others are easier, with lower levels of competition.
In this blog post, I will show you how to measure keyword difficulty.
What is keyword difficulty? –
KD is measured based on how your competitors are actively trying to get ranked for the same keywords. It’s usually the hot areas where Google cashes in on their Google Adwords getting you clicks.
Accommodation Wagga Wagga
One great example of a really difficult area in Wagga is “Accommodation Wagga”, if you put a number on this it’s 55/100 as of today difficulty off site vs difficulty on-site 59/100 and with 6,000 searchs per month. There is not one website listed on the search results for a motel specifically until you get to page 2 and 3. it’s all resellers of their services where consolidated sale of accommodation in Wagga is seen as a better result than leaving it up to the motels to fight it out with better photography and content. Google plays god when it comes to giving the searcher the best results for their search. It’s called the searchers intent.
Real Estate Wagga
Next let’s look at “Real Estate Wagga”, you got it, this is another super competitive term 5,400 searches per month on page difficulty 53/100 and off page 55/100. At least for this one there’s a few local agent websites listed.
So what’s the point of the numbers? It’s figuring out what’s low hanging fruit where searches exist and keyword difficult is less that can be leveraged through business websites in Wagga.
Here’s some strategies and tools to get insights into getting ranked for keywords “Wagga”:
- Using SEO tools – SEO tools can give a quick overview of keyword difficulty; however, there is a variance in the results. Each tool will show a different difficulty percentage, so it’s not a 100% accurate metric. If readers want a quick overview, they can purchase an account with Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz Pro or similar.
- MozBar is free – Your reader can install MozBar for free, giving them valuable information about the website’s ranking at the top of the search results. Specifically, they’ll be able to see the page authority, referring domains and domain authority. This data can be used to understand keyword difficulty.
- Page Authority – MozBar shows the Page Authority using the “PA” acronym. Page Authority is an excellent way of understanding how much trust and value search engines will apply to each page in the results. The higher the number, the more authority a page has. Your reader should look for results (on the first page) with low page authority.
- Domain Authority – Domain Authority is shown on MozBar with the “DA” acronym. Domain Authority is the value of a domain as a whole rather than an individual page. Explaining how Domain Authority can grow through relevant and valuable links would be a good idea. Your readers should be looking for results with low domain authority. These represent opportunities.
- Link Explorer – You can utilise Moz’s Link Explorer data with a free Moz account. A free account can access Link Explorer 10 times per month. This gives an overview of a domain’s links, how many referring domains there are, and so on. Understanding referring domains is important, as it is a metric that can show your reader how difficult a keyword could be to rank for.
- Additional Steps – At this point, you’ve got opportunities to go deeper into keyword difficulty. You could include some video demonstrations to show your readers how to get started quickly. You could also dive into on-page SEO, which will help a reader understand the content quality in the results on the first page. There’s a broad scope for where to take this blog post idea.
