Hi Marshall and Gary here,

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing we are often asked by our small business clients “What is the one thing we can do to get a good ranking in Google?” It is like many people see that their site is lacking the one special ingredient that, when corrected or incorporated, will pump up their ranking. The number of snake oil internet sales pitches floating around seems to encourage this perception. You know “Rank number 1 in Google in 24 hours” type of push.

We feel a bit like the Christmas Grinch when we have to say “There is no magic bullet.”

As we have discussed a number of times on our posts, on-page SEO and off-page SEO is what gets your site ranking in Google. These are not overnight results. On-page optimisation by and large is within the control of a small business (with the right advice and understanding) whereas off-page optimisation is a far longer slog but certainly builds a fortress around your ranking when done properly.

We often talk about alignment and consistency being the keys to on-page optimisation. What we mean by this is:

Alignment refers to the keyword research you need to do in your business segment to determine what keywords have the appropriate search query volumes in the right geographic locations. Alignment also takes in other matters like the online commercial intention (are the keywords “buy” focussed), appropriateness to your business (as we said in the last post, an aquarium shop optimised for “business suits” is not a winner) and are the keywords really what they say (for example does “online editing” refer to text editing searches, video editing searches, audio editing searches, etc).

Consistency then refers to how you use the chosen keywords on your site. It is things like making sure keywords appear in the URL, in the page title, in the page description, in the copy on the page at the right density, etc. But it goes further. Many sites have way too many product offered on the one page – it confuses the life out of search engines because they just see a webpage with a whole pile of different products. Where possible, make each product (or group of similar product) its own webpage and optimise the keywords for this page differently to other pages.

This may all seems fairly unexciting and ordinary, but we can tell you that virtually every website or blog we are asked to review or improve makes these same fundamental mistakes. Once you get these in place, then go hunting for suitable back links to your site for off-page optimisation. Have a read of our post on how Small Business Internet Marketing got to a Google number 2 ranking through on-page optimisation alone.

Think of the process like building a brick wall. Once you have the foundation, you build the bottom course brick by brick, you then build a second course brick by brick – eventually you have a six foot high solid fence, all made out of individual bricks. The foundation is having a domain and hosting package, each well researched keyword is a brick, each URL with the keyword in it is another brick, and so on and so on. Get it right and eventually Google cannot ignore your site.

So, always remember that the ranking of every small business website or blog lives or dies by getting the alignment and consistency right first.

Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary