5 Things that Ranked my Website Fast | SEO

hey what's going on guys so in this video i'm going to talk about five things that i did for a brand new website in an established industry rank on page one so before i get into the video let's do a quick recap and uh talk a little bit about why i'm even doing seo because i normally don't do it on this channel but you guys started asking me in the comment section after a few videos where i mentioned it so i put out a tweet just to confirm that theory and see if you guys really want it and it looks like the people have spoken so from now on i'm gonna start putting out videos on seo every now and again so i'm not going away for my normal content i'm still doing everything i do but i'm going to start talking about seo and in particular because i do so many django videos i'll show you guys how to apply it into django websites and i might go from start to finish at some point so with that being said let's go ahead and get into the video and actually recap the project so this was actually the first project that i've ever built out so this is the first website i built it in wix and just to explain to you how new i was at this time i actually went and bought the book art of seo i knew nothing about it other than i needed to rank this website that i built and i started following from that book within two weeks i had all the meta tags complete title tags i put the site map there got the website onto google webmasters got some analytics on it so i did all the basic on-page seo so all the technical stuff that you can do to rank a website well i took care of that but after you do that there's a lot of waiting and there's things that you can do to really help improve that as far as the social side so you really have to do things beyond just getting the technicals done so let's go ahead and actually get into those five things that really helped boost my website and get these competitors that have been there for some of them probably 30 years and actually outrank their established websites so the first thing that i did was run some ads to the website and get traffic by paying for it so i don't know if you guys ever seen those ads on google you probably have the first couple of results are usually going to be paid ads and you can just pay per click for those and the reason why i did this is because when you first create a website google needs time to learn who you are they don't really

trust you just yet so they're going to throw you somewhere in the back and one of the ways to actually get google to trust you after indexing a site is to get some traffic and let let google know how users respond to your web traffic so without any ranking you're not going to get traffic and without traffic it's kind of hard to rank the website so i needed something to propel that and using something like ads really was able to push me forward and because we were making money on the website right away or at least on the service uh i was able to actually get a return on my investment so i did have to put some money into that but it was definitely worth it it gave us a huge boost in the beginning so number two on the list is getting reviews so because my website was based on a local business i knew that this was going to be very important in actually ranking that website because google takes reviews very seriously if you don't really understand how search works google is trying to give you the best results so they're trying to find you uh something that's nearby they're trying to find you something that's highly rated so you use their platform over and over again so they take reviews very seriously in this process now i knew that i can use this to my advantage

but the only problem was the fact that with a new business you're competing with businesses that have been established for a while they already have their reviews from years prior and it was kind of hard to compete with that but one thing i did notice is that they weren't really getting reviews at a high rate so i saw that they weren't aggressively going after the reviews so what i did was i put in a system in place where employees out in the field when interacting with customers they were able to talk about reviews and i made sure that they were mentioning it to customers now this is kind of an area it's a gray area where you don't want to ask for reviews you never want to pay a customer for feedback but you do or you're able to actually at least mention it to them and let them know hey if you uh if you give us feedback it really helps us online so customers surprisingly are very responsive and really like helping out so when you when you mention it to them you're not asking for it you just tell them it helps you a lot of these people were giving us reviews and because of that we probably had 70 reviews within i think a two month span it was a lot with a couple hundred customer interactions every single month it's pretty easy to have good

experiences and get these positive reviews so it wasn't long before we started out ranking in reviews we had more reviews than our competitors and that was a huge boost for us this next one is one that can be very powerful if done correctly and that is writing articles for your website so a lot of small businesses try to do this but they don't do it the right way and uh one thing that i did differently here was i did a lot of research and made sure that i was writing articles that people would actually read because if i just put out content it might help with some more content creation on my website as far as google understanding who i am but no one's reading it so google doesn't really see me as an authoritative website so i started doing research and my industry was the locksmith industry so i wanted to make sure to write relative content to something uh somebody might actually look up so i'm gonna give you a few examples on some articles or types of articles that i would write and these articles that i wrote actually ended up getting a bunch of traffic so these aren't the actual articles but the general idea and that is uh the first one is tips on how to unlock your own car now i'm sure most of us can imagine being in some kind of situations like a situation like that and having to look that up now even though i'm not getting uh even though that traffic may be out of my area i'm not getting paid for that i can't provide that service google's still seeing that traffic go to my website and i'm building domain authority i'm building trust with google and i'm showing them that people like the content on my website you can show it to other people now so another one would be what should i pay for locksmith services so make sure that you know what to expect whenever you're dealing with a locksmith another one would be locksmith services and general pricing breakdown so i'm going for keywords i'm saying certain things that people might look up but they're also able to do this in a normal search and these did big i probably pulled more traffic to our website from these articles than i did to the actual services based on locations but because of that we're able to create that presence and get a lot of traffic there so i didn't know how to title this next one and i just titled it modernize the website meaning i made it more modern and uh specifically focusing on the bounce rate and session duration so session duration

is how long does a user stay on your website after coming to it and bounce rate is how fast do they leave after coming to the website so you want to keep the website bounce rate down session duration high so the reason why i mention this is because the competitors had older websites after doing some research i noticed that they're really old and outdated and the feeling that i got going onto those websites was like walking into an old wine cellar that nobody's been in for years it looked like no one's maintained it looked like an old newspaper so i realized that it was going to be very easy to fight for that and make my website a little bit more modern and increase some of those statistics now i know people have argued about bounce rate if google actually takes that into consideration um whether they do or not i think they do but whether they do or not it doesn't hurt to improve that because why wouldn't you want users having a better experience on your website so focusing on that was a big deal split testing user experience now this is something that i know my competitors weren't doing in your industry you might have to deal with this it means that you just have to be more aggressive now i watched like a hawk what the users were doing on my website i wanted to know every page they went on how long they were on it what they did on that page anything i can do with google analytics which is what gives you access to a lot of that another example actually or another tool that i used was actually hot jar so you're able to actually see the heat map of where your user is on that website i really made sure to watch what they were doing and constantly adjust now split testing is just the process of testing one page against another so an example would be when i ran the ads i would run one landing page and i'll run that for a day and then i would run another landing page and i would see which one converted better and what experiences they had now the one that didn't do as well i would take that down and then i would make another landing page and improve on that and see if that one did better than what i had once i kind of saw good metrics once i was comfortable with what i saw i'll keep it that way and just leave it at that so split testing was huge and actually able to understand my user and understand what they wanted which again goes back to step four which is why the website was able to give the users a better experience okay so i just wanted to leave you with some

final takeaways some final points to summarize up this video and the first one is don't try to outsmart google now too many people over complicate this process they're trying to find ways to trick google into ranking their website just focus on building good websites and google will eventually find your website write good content focus on that now the next one is going to be focus on the user experience if you give the user a good experience uh it goes hand in hand with google google can tell how people are on your website they can see how they interact with it and if you give the users a good experience and focus on them you're just going to create a good website by default and it will rank now uh the last one is going to be google cares about the user's experience now if you focus on that if you're not trying to trick google and it kind of summarizes up the last two or the the first two points that i just made here google cares about the user so if you think about it that way you'll know what google ranks you'll almost instinctively think about what google is trying to give their users and you're going to be able to give the users that experience so if you focus on those things make it about them and not about your own website things usually will fall into place so thanks for watching i hope you guys enjoyed this video