Search Engines Rank Pages, Not Websites
Build14Me 42 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Takeaways
Most people talk in terms of how many visitors their website gets, and of course that figure does provide an overview of traffic, trends and acquisition. But for us its actually looking at individual key pages that best helps understand how people are finding, and then using, your website. Having informative, interesting relevant and optimised content on every page simply makes your website more effective.
The Basics - How Google and search engine's operate
If we start with a couple of basics here, firstly Google intends to create a level playing field so every business no matter how big or small, new or old has the same opportunity to be found on the same Google results page. Secondly this is not necessarily the reality, sites that rank top are usually paying for that ranking. They may be paying very obviously through Google adwords or by using an SEO agency or they may be spending time doing this themselves.
Whichever route you take what you do need to ensure that every page on your website is contributing to the overall success of your site as a business generating tool.
Rank a single page for a specific keyword.
To illustrate how a single page can become powerful for a single keyword Build14me decided to create a test. The test was simple – could we create a page with a specific and desirable search term that was not our key area of business but not completely irrelevant.
We are a SEO company based just outside Brighton, so decided on a ‘Brighton’ term and chose ‘What county is Brighton in?’ (Please note that since writing this feature we have moved this blog post to another of our sites but the points are still valid!** - go on try it, you know you want to!)
What county is Brighton in has around 6,000 searches a month. We created a blog feature - What County is Brighton in? - that answers the question more fully than other sites.
Why we think this page ranks top of Google
- The content is actually pretty sound – it may not be the most beautiful page in the world but it does specifically answer the question/search term
- The images are all relevant to Brighton and optimised – so they confirm location, size and what the image shows
- There are a number of trustworthy links
- The feature is about Brighton and the site is on is based in Brighton
- The average amount of time spent on the page is 2 minutes so Google can see that when people find this page – they read the content
Within two weeks the page was top of Google for the search term - ‘What county is Brighton in’ and still remains in a top 5 position being beaten by the beast that is wikipedia.
So we can conclude that an optimised page that addresses one specific question/search term is being ranked by Google for that term.
Thanks for reading our ‘behind the scenes’ feature to support our Build 14 Me 42 Search engine optimisation takeaways.
If you want to know more about how Build14me can help your organisation with SEO contact: ben@build14me.com
