Getting on page one of Google’s search results for our desired keywords is the holy grail on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so here’s a quick tip on competitor analysis for SEO.
The first thing to know is the kinds of keywords or search terms that you’d like your website to be found on. In this example we’re going to assume you make wedding cakes and you’re in Leicester. So ‘wedding cake in Leicester’ would probably be the ideal search term here.
So the first thing you do put in ‘wedding cake in Leicester’ into the search engine and see what comes up.
The first three I’ve intentionally blurred because they are paid for ads so we can discount them for this example. The following few are what we need.
Now a glaring thing about the first entry is that they have taken the time to get themselves into Google Places which gives them an enhanced preferential listing on the search results (more on that later).
But they also have a variation of the key phrase in the website’s title take (you can see that it’s purple because I’ve clicked on it before.
Below the title you’ll see a short sentence and this is usually the ‘meta description’ and should also include your key phrase.
The next step is to take a look at the website itself and we’ve clicked on the first website cakeshopleicester.co.uk and what you see below is a screenshot of the site.
Now if you look at the menu across the top of the page you’ll see the ‘About Us’ menu item highlighted in red and then a little tag below it which says ‘The Cake Shop Leicester – About Us’. And this is simply a tag that labels this element of the website and it only shows up when you hover the mouse pointer over that element.
It’s effectively what we usually call the ‘Alt tag’ and you can include one of these tags behind almost all images and menu items on your website.
The key here is that this tag can and definitely should include your search term for that page, or the search terms for your whole site. This is one of the things that the search engines examines when they look at your site and it’s a ranking factor in the results when people search for your offering.
So, here’s what to do: take a look at your competition’s websites and scrutinise the tags that they have behind their images and other website elements. And then make sure that you get your website designer to add appropriate tags to your site.
If you’d like help with adding tags or on-site SEO for your website then just give us a call and we’ll chat about what you’re aiming at.
In the meantime, let us know if you have any experience on this by writing in the comments section below.