The best SEO plans are the ones that work.
Learn tips and tricks here to expand your reach and attract more paying customers to your electrician website. SEOBANK offers Web Design, SEM, SEO Plans and Full seo marketing packages for electricians that are looking to generate sales leads. Contact us for an SEO strategy example that is proven to work.
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In today’s digital age, the key to any successful SEO strategy is the same: satisfy Google. It’s been the uncontested search engine leader since its inception on September 4th, 1998.
Google now boasts over 90% of search engine market shares worldwide. Why is that important and what does it mean?
Instead of trying to please dozens of search engines, you need only please one, making your SEO strategy simple and straightforward. Follow a few uncomplicated steps, and voila… your page ranking skyrockets overnight!
Whether you’re an electrician trying to drum up business on your website or a Fortune 500 company redesigning your digital presence, the SEO principles are the same.
Read on if you’re ready to learn those principles!
What is SEO?
Let’s make sure we’re speaking the same language before we jump into the meat of this article. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of adjusting your website to make it easily accessible to search engines.
Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other popular search engines send out web crawlers to scour the web. These crawlers search through each page of your website and take snapshots of what they find. This information is sent back to their company servers where it’s dissected and stored.
When you type a query into a search engine, it quickly flips through the billions of website snapshots they’ve stored. The search engine returns these results, ranking each web page according to how well it matched the query.
SEO is all about adjusting your website so web crawlers can easily read the information. That’s the heart of SEO. Internet gurus sometimes throw a few additional elements into the mix. We’ll discuss those as well in the sections below.
SEO Essentials
How does Google determine whether your webpage matches a query? Only a handful of people actually know because Google’s constantly evolving algorithm is a closely-held, trade secret.
Fortunately, Google has taken pity on web developers. It may not publish the algorithm, but it drops hints. In 2018, we know the following components significantly impacted algorithms:
- Structured data
- Keywords
- Headers
- Content
- Dwell time
- Meta Description
- Alt Tags
- Links
The following sections will expand on these.
Structured Data
A way for search engines to make sense of the content on your website is through structured data, most notably, through the use of two tools: sitemaps and schema.
HTML sitemaps, are primarily for users so we won’t expand on them here but XML sitemaps used to organize your information so those pesky web crawlers can better understand the relationship between pages on your website.
Schema is a tool to use after you’ve built your XML sitemap. Imagine each piece in your sitemap is a wall which defines your structure. Your schema is the paint job and decoration that goes on those walls, giving your building personality.
Keywords
When a user types a query into a search engine, the engine tries to match each word to suitable web pages. One of the methods they use is to match-up the word in the query with the words on the page.
Good marketers take the time to research the most popular key terms people search for in his industry and use keywords to their advantage.
For example, an electrical contractor in Vail, Colorado may find the following are the most searched for terms in his industry:
- Vail electric repair
- Best electrician qualifications
- Where to find an electrician near me
- Common electrical issues
He should then build four web pages, one for each group of terms above.
Where, and how often, he uses those keywords on the page is a constantly evolving strategy. In the ’90s and early ’00s, keyword stuffing was the primary method, where web designers would shove as many of those words as they could onto the page.
Today, strategies have changed due primarily to the advent of Artificial intelligence (AI), which becomes more intelligent each year. AI is now quite good at determining how well the content on your webpage matches a user’s query, relying less on keywords.
Does that mean the use of keywords has disappeared altogether? Hardly. They are just used with more finesse. We recommend you use one in your introduction, one in your H1 header, one in your H2 header, and one in your conclusion.
Headers
Your headlines used as section titles for your content are described as headers. When coding in HTML, a headline is abbreviated as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, or H6. Each headline grows progressively smaller, H1 being the largest and only used once on any page.
Drop one of your keywords in your H1 header and drop it again in one of your H2 headers.
Content
As we mentioned, AIs are much better at discerning whether users will find your content useful. The best way to address this is (you guessed it) to build helpful content, including:
- Blog Articles
- Videos
- Product Pages
- Podcasts
- Infographics
Develop professional, relevant content to your audience to rank high! You’ve hit the mark if your video could land a spot on CBS! If it looks like it wouldn’t pass muster in a 5th-grade art project, it’s time to head back to the drawing board!
To learn more, take a look at how to write great quality content.
Dwell Time
This is just a fancy way of saying how long visitors hang out on your web pages during their visit. The longer they stay on a page, the longer the dwell time. and the longer the dwell time, the higher you score in Google’s algorithm. These are determined by Google analytics.
How do you increase dwell time? You build content relevant to the keywords for the page.
Meta Description
Spend time writing an accurate, enticing meta description. Search engines may not use these descriptions in their algorithms, but they do look at visitor’s dwell times. These nifty little snippets are what users read to determine whether your website is worth visiting and are found on search engine results pages below your website’s name.
Alt Tags
Search engines are getting better at understanding images, but are still inaccurate. You can help web crawlers understand your graphics by describing each with words and placing these descriptions in the alt tag of the corresponding image.
The alt tags are part of the HTML code used to build your website and can be accessed through the backend of your website portal.
Links
Web pages link to other web pages through 3 types of links.
Internal links – links direct visitors to another webpage on the same site
Outbound links – link direct visitors to pages on someone else’s website
Inbound links (also called backlinks) – link visitors from other websites to your site
The complexities of link-building are beyond the scope of this article. Read How to Build Backlinks to walk through the most essential type of links.
Turning SEO Plans into Strategy
Components like keywords and alt tags are the short-term, mechanical portion of SEO plans, but some SEO components, such as backlinks, require a long-term strategy.
Think through your entire process for each component to build an SEO strategy template. Then create an SEO project plan from this template. If you stick to it, you’ll finish most of your SEO in 1 day. The rest will take a couple of months to finish. Remember, whether it’s SEO Plans for Electricians or any other industry, the method is the same!
If you found this article helpful, take five minutes to check out our library of other great SEO articles.
