The Basics of SEO, Part 2: The Essentials of Ranking a Site (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

How should you handle internal links and anchor text?

A couple of other things you're going to want to look at on your site itself. Broken links — have you got any? And are you actively linking between pages? You want a nice structure with links from relevant pages to other pages that are on topic. And please, please don't link just the exact keyword — the one- or two-word phrase you're targeting — every single time.

What you want to use is what I call the keyword sprinkling technique. If you've got a particular phrase you're targeting, there will be other phrases that wrap around it that are very similar — try to use all of those. We keep a spreadsheet with the topic, the keyword we're using, and the list of keywords we want to sprinkle around that topic. That's a really useful tip.

Do SSL and mobile really matter?

Hopefully you've got an SSL certificate. If you haven't, you can pretty much forget ranking now — Google is looking to rank sites with secure socket layer certificates. It's simply a must-have.

The other thing: does your site actually function well on mobile? I see far too many people who've designed for desktop — the site looks fantastic on a desktop, even looks good on a tablet — and they've taken no real time to design it for mobile, or to have AMP pages. A lot of web designers have got lazy; they presume packages like WordPress do it for them, and they do to an extent. It used to be that you had a completely separate mobile site, and I think we're sort of returning to that. Look at which customers are converting into business — if they're typically coming off mobile, make sure you've prioritised the mobile version of your site.

What is a good bounce rate?

The other thing to look at is bounce rate. When you're looking to rank a particular page, go into Google Analytics and look at its bounce rate. What's a good bounce rate? I get asked that all the time — it depends on your industry, and on whether people are finding exactly what they want straight away. You'll always get high bounce rates on particular types of pages, and it depends on the quality of the traffic and where it's coming from.

What you really want to see is whether the bounce rate is high from a particular source of traffic — especially if you're paying for that traffic. If you're paying for clicks, from Facebook or Google, and you've got a high bounce rate, you're just burning money. The other side of it: with a high bounce rate, Google will penalise you in the long term, because it judges the page to be less relevant or less helpful than it could be. Google's main aim, believe it or not, is to get people to stay on Google — they want your advertising revenue.

Look at bounce rate continually and try to improve it. You'll find a sweet spot for your industry — you might find you can't get it below 50%, and that's fair enough. Tactics you can use: get people to navigate around your site. I've seen people using horrible pop-ups — not great. The longer people stay, the better; alongside bounce rate you've got time on page, and Google will also be looking at scrolling and usage — where people travel in your site, what they do, the actual experience they get when they land.

What are landing pages, intent, and the rule of 50?

You might want to build specific landing pages — Landers, I call them. We do a lot of this. If you're building a page specifically for a campaign and a particular SEO keyword, you're going to want to look at all these factors. On a specific landing page I'd target perhaps three key phrases per page.

How do you choose those keywords? That's a really big piece of research, and it's not always obvious — don't just presume that's what your customer is searching for. You want to be looking at intent: if people are typing "where can I buy X", there's massive intent in it, versus just the product name, where they might only be doing research.

One thing to consider within all of this is the rule of 50. The rule of 50 says that if your site has more than 50 pages in it, it has a massive advantage over your competition — sites with 50-plus pages consistently outperform websites that don't have them. So if you've got an opportunity to add pages — blogs, more products, information, tutorials (we've done a lot of work recently building digital academies and training) — think about how you can flesh your site out to more than 50 pages.