SEO
How to Rank Higher on Google: A Small Business Guide
How to rank higher on Google, step by step: choose the right searches, improve your pages, fix technical problems, earn trust and measure what works.
We’ve been providing SEO services to Romeo Homes, a Melbourne builder, for nearly 10 months now. Needless to say, this SEO services success story has been a long time coming.
Romeo Homes are custom home builders in Melbourne, specialising in period homes. They came to us with a beautiful and visual-heavy website that’s structured well and easy to navigate. They work with us on a partnership plan that covers SEO and website hosting.
While their site contains hundreds of photos of the homes they’ve built over the years, they don’t have quite as much in the way of written content. We generally recommend that our clients have a nice balance between photos and written copy throughout their site, with the balance skewing toward having more words than photos if anything.
The lack of copy was an initial concern for us, but a business like Romeo’s lends itself better toward visuals rather than words. After all, customers want to see the houses for sale, not read about them.
But we’ve been able to get their keyword visibility up to over 30% since last November. Here are the main things we did that contributed to the gradual and steady increase in visibility that you see below:
Fixing Site Audit Errors
As we do with all of our clients, we ran a site audit and spent time correcting any errors that popped up.
In particular, there was a pesky www-resolve error that initially prevented our audit tool from being able to crawl the whole site. We corrected that, as well as several other errors such as duplicate title tags, broken links, pages missing or more than one h1 tag, images missing alt tags, and a missing sitemap.
While fixing site audit errors isn’t exactly optimisation, it’s necessary for getting a website set up to be optimised. That is: it’s correcting anything that’s wrong with the site so that it’s ready to start ranking higher for the chosen keywords.
Clear Keyword Strategy
At the beginning, Romeo Homes had an extensive list of keywords to optimise for, most of which related to the various types of houses they build. Rather than dilute their SEO juice and attempt to optimise for something like 80 different keyword terms, we did some keyword research to determine the search volume and competition for each.
We found that a solid portion of their keywords only had a handful of searches per month. Armed with this knowledge, we aimed to optimise for the keywords with a higher search volume instead. Focusing our efforts on fewer keywords that are more frequently searched definitely helped us achieve SEO success with Romeo Homes’ site.
Optimising images and image galleries as part of our SEO work.
Heaps Of Images
Lastly, we spent considerable time not only optimising the alt tags on the hundreds of images and image galleries spread throughout the site, but re-optimising them month over month.
Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint: you can’t just “set it and forget it”. It’s really important to continuously monitor your keyword performance on Google and adjust your optimisations accordingly. If you’d like someone else to manage your website’s SEO, our SEO team can help.
