Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
Future Proofing your Marketing with SEO with David Pagotto
Show Notes
Background
SIXGUN is passionate about delivering rock solid results with professionalism and rigour. If your organisation needs results-based Search Engine Marketing that delivers lasting growth, contact David.
David Pagotto is the Founder and Managing Director of SIXGUN. He has worked in digital marketing for over 10 years, helping organisations get more customers, more reach, and more impact.
SIXGUN focuses on scaling organisational growth and building sustainable results for the long-term,with a data-driven approach to developing strategy. As a Melbourne based digital marketing agency, SIXGUN focuses on the following core areas:
– Search Engine Optimisation
– Search Engine Marketing
The experienced team at SIXGUN are passionate about seeing organisations grow while working on their mission to support meaningful causes.
What Does SEO Really Mean?
The entire philosophy behind Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to ultimately have your business ranked as high as possible organically in Google and other search engines.
For example
– If someone located in Melbourne was looking for a hammer store and typed
‘Buy a hammer’ in Google,
the first results that would appear are usually the Google Ads (which is a paid section) then immediately under this is the organic section.
This organic section is ultimately where you want your business to be ranked as high as possible through SEO. This would bring traffic to the website and subsequent sales. In simple terms, SEO is all about those organic rankings, being shown in Google for relevant searches and ultimately increasing traffic to your website.
What Drives SEO Performance?
There are 3 buckets that will ultimately drive SEO performance. It’s considering the architecture of the page, ensuring you have the right content management system, content that is unique and ensuring you are getting backlinks back to a particular page.
Architecture
This is where a lot of the technical components sit. In simplistic terms, it’s all those things that start with things like the content management system that you use. The baseline in terms of the website content management system that you use is going to be a big part of architecture and how that works. Other technological elements looked at in terms of the architect bucket are page speed, mobile usability and on a more technical level title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tags and site map.
Content
Content refers to the content (the information – text, images and video) that sits on a website. Having a healthy amount of content on a website is a good idea, particularly on the page you’d like a good ranking for. It’s ideal to have content that is unique from any other page on the website and any other page on the internet.
Link Building
Links essentially act as votes and the more links you have, getting backlinks back to that page will be valuable and useful in ranking that page. Link building ensures you have a process in place to build links to the page you’d like to rank for.
Healthy Content
From an SEO perspective as much content on a page as possible is encouraged. There is an established, strong relationship between long-form content and ranking performance.
There are many ways to still have a sleek design, but plenty of content too. Clients often want minimalistic web pages so you need to marry the two together to have a great design and great content so Google can find you.
Headings
H1 Tag
When it comes to content there’s multiple headings to select from. From a SEO perspective, H1 is the main heading on a page and you want to have a single H1 tag per page with keywords infused in. Ideally it should align to the title tag that you’re using and if you load a page in a web browser and then hover over that table, you will see what the page title is.
H2 and H3
It’s okay to have multiple H2 tags as the secondary headings and then if you need to do headings under those H2 headings, you can use H3 type of headings under those.
Meta Tags
In the search results page when you type in a query, the kind of headings that you see for each listing is essentially the title tag and then under that a little bit of a blurb is the meta description. It’s important to write strong meta descriptions, but instead of focusing on jamming keywords in, you will rank you better if you’re able to get a higher click-through rate with less people clicking the back button. Writing a meta description that aligns exactly, sends people to exactly what they’re looking for and they’re not clicking that back button, that is an indirect performance type of a task ultimately.
Backlinks and PR
From a small business perspective, backlinks can get you really good performance and you don’t have to engage an agency if you’ve got the time and capacity to do it out yourself. You can leverage existing relationships from an SEO perspective, this is probably one of the fastest most simplistic ways to build some high quality relevant back links. In terms of buying backlinks, type of backlinks where people are reaching out to you with a cheap price, that is always an absolute no-go. With SEO it’s not just a matter of doing things that can increase performance.
Journalists often request people that fall into a particular category, to add commentary around a particular question. This gives small business owners the opportunity to put their hand up, and comment on various things to get that back link to get a little bit of PR in a very natural honest way. I would say that that is in terms of a link building strategy, and a little bit of a PR strategy that’s something that we recommend to all our clients to engage with and dive into and have a bit of a play around with. It can take a while to get the right flow of how to reply to get a response and get published, but I think as far as building backlinks and getting a little bit of PR, it’s a good thing.
Digital Marketing in Today’s Day and Age
Today learning about digital marketing, including SEO, Google Ads, Social Media and content marketing is one of the most valuable things for a small business owner to know, learn and be interested in.
There are a lot of good things that come from SEO and it is an asset to a business, but it can be a real slow-moving base. In terms of ads you can set up, have running instantly and they can provide instant performance, but there is a cost.
You don’t want to be reliant on one channel. Have your referral network set up, do SEO, some ads and be on social media and then do your best to use each channel as effectively as possible, picking out the best parts from each. People need to kind of open their mind to very rarely is it about doing one channel awesomely, and just neglecting the rest.
Listen to the Small Business Talk episode 017 – Future Proofing your Marketing with SEO – David Pagotto to get the full details.
David has also written a an article on 5 Best Practices for Local Business SEO, check it out.
