Getting your on-page content to attract search engines while not turning off your potential customers can be tricky, and in the long term should probably be handled by someone who specializes in content. There are some things you can do yourself that should give your site a boost though. Just follow these quick and easy steps.
- Find your keywords/key phrases – Doing this the right way can take a lot of research and specialized knowledge, making an educated guess is better than nothing at all though. Do a Google search of the phrase you think your customers are using most often when they are looking to buy your product or service, for example “puppies for sale”. On the first page you will see 10 results. Notice the bold words within the content? Those are important. For “puppies for sale” the first result as of the time this is written was breeders in bold along with puppies for sale. It looks like the other words that show up are puppy and dogs for sale.
- Now make it local – Google tries to bring searchers local results first. If you are writing your content to appeal to a local audience it is a lot easier for Google to move you up when someone in your area is looking for “puppies for sale.” So instead of simply “breeders” or “dogs for sale” we’re going to use “Las Vegas breeders” and “dogs for sale in Las Vegas.”
- Know where to insert these words – You can do a full rewrite if you want, but it might not be necessary. All you need is a title with one of the keywords or phrases from above and one of those keywords and phrases per 500 words of content or so. It’s okay to have multiple different keywords in that space, but try to avoid using the same one over and over unless it is 100% natural.
- Now proof read it for humans – Fitting the right phrases in should come naturally since it’s about your business. Being natural is important because first and foremost human readers don’t trust websites that mangle the language, they think something about it is fishy, and they are often right about that. Also, Google is getting better at recognizing SEO spam. Google loves good content almost as much as your human readers.
These simple steps probably won’t put you on page one, but it is a definite start and something you can do yourself in no time at all.