FAQ Category: Search Engine Optimization

This is part of the process of Google determining your placement amongst your ranking competitors. When a website constantly performs well when placed higher in the search results (via more clicks and less time spent researching).

Google constantly arranges and grades pages for how effective they are at solving a “query”. They measure the quality of the content using the E.A.T. metrics discussed earlier. They also arrange the position of pages to see how this impacts clicks and reduces time spent solving a query.

Clicks will naturally increase as you work on increasing your rank and presentation in Google.

The art of converting impressions into clicks involves all of the proceeding mentions of crafting high quality and indexible content. However, the art of convincing someone your website is the #1 resource for their question is making text that draws them in over the competitors. In Google, your website is represented via your domain name, meta title, meta description and favicon.

Please show an example of a meta title and description from a Google search

The two elements you can easily change and test are the:

• Meta Title: This is the big text that most people read in search results. Making this related to the search question is key in people finding what they are looking for.
• Meta Description: This is the small text under the headline. Perhaps it answers part of their question and they want to click to read the full answer.

After submitting your website to Google, typically, the first keywords you rank for are those related to your brand (ie business name, address, or phone number). To gain impressions target keywords however, you will need constantly improve your content, and build backlinks to your content, in order to show Google your content is relevant and helpful. See our article on producing E.A.T. content for more advice on building content.

Assuming you have already created a website, you will want to make sure you have completed some of the basic steps:

• Quality Content: Produce original and valuable content that answers queries people might search for.
• On-Page SEO: Implement basic on-page SEO elements like meta tags, header tags, alt tags for images, etc.
• Sitemap: Create an XML sitemap that lists all the URLs you want to be crawled and indexed. Most content management systems have plugins to automate this process.
• Robots.txt: Use a robots.txt file to tell search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request from your site.

Then, you will want to submit your website to Google:

• Google Search Console: Sign up for Google Search Console and add your website property.
• Verify Ownership: Verify that you own the site by following one of the methods provided by Google, such as uploading a small HTML file or adding a meta tag to your website’s home page.
• Submit Sitemap: Once verified, submit your XML sitemap through Google Search Console to give Google a roadmap for crawling your site.
• Request Indexing: For immediate attention, you can individually submit new or updated URLs directly for indexing through Google Search Console.

After this, your website is now in Google’s database. This is the first step.