Search engine optimisation (SEO) for tourism businesses | Part 1
Good morning and welcome to this ninth in a series of webinars delivered by VisitScotland in conjunction with Business Gateway's DigitalBoost program and part of a recovery package of webinars aimed at supporting tourism businesses as they look to reopen when feasible my name is Andrew Craig from VisitScotland and this morning I'm joined by Janine Marriott hello Janine hi all just a quick reminder before we get started junior this morning um on search engine optimisation you're all in microphone slash webcam off mode and we'll be distributing a link to the pdf version of Janine’s presentation at the end of the webinar as well as asking for um your feedback via a link that will distribute at the end as well if you have any queries about any aspects of search engine optimisation then please ask them via the questions tab in the go to webinar control panel and we'll spend 10 to 15 minutes at the end discussing any questions that you might have and just a quick reminder from DigitalBoost this is a screenshot of the home the program delivers a lot of free services including up to 21 hours of one-to-one specialist digital support that's of course subject to your application being authorised by a BusinessGateway advisor and you can apply either online or by calling phone in your local business gateway office all the contacts are on the website and the website also offers a lot of what details and workshops and webinars which are taking place at the moment book your place again on these webinars on the website and then finally there are a lot of online guides in fact 21 digital topics and there's video tutorials on a further nine digital topics that's probably enough for me for now so i'll now pass things over to Janine Marriott who's here representing his usual targeting innovation and is going to lead today's session so Janine i'll pass things over to you now and i'll just make sure that we can see your screen so that should be you know i'll switch my webcam off is that me yep thanks me i'm down here switch my webcam off as well there we go so thanks for having me along today the goal of this webinar is to give you a few helpful small tips and tricks that you're going to be able to start working on today that's going to help get your tourism business in front of the right people and at the right time now when you understand how search actually works and the reason why you're going to be doing it and the reason also why you see the results that you do when you put your own search terms in it's going to make it a lot easier to think about the type of content you're going to be creating for your customer so we're going to be looking at the way your customer has changed the way they search as a result of the pandemic and the changes that you need to make now to your website we'll look at the different ways google presents information depending on the keywords that people put in where those results come from and most importantly what you can do to help increase the chances of you being shown there too so the agenda today what is actually seo do you know you know how search works understanding and researching your keywords understanding different search results and how to measure your optimisation and your traffic efforts at the end we'll have a quick chat about paid versus organic marketing and also look at the holiday intentions of the uk consumer and how it affects the content that you produce so VisitScotland have got reports on their website about the new holiday intentions of uk consumer and we'll go through those a little bit as we go through so before we actually get started on the webinar we're going to do a quick poll just so that VisitScotland can get an understanding of where you're at and more what more helpful information we can put forward for you in the future okay so hand over to Andrew for that followers do you know what it's meant by search engine optimisation very simple response yes or no and there we go jenny knows the results of the poll so 93 say yes they do and seven percent say no they don't so yep the second poll this morning is simply do you have a website yes or no and as you would expect very high numbers for yes businesses do have a website 91 and 9 don't have a website you mean so okay as we'd expect yeah i think that that is what i would expect i think hopefully this webinar be able to help those that don't have a website as well the ones that are putting it in the planning stage they'll be able to take on board what we see what we talk about so that's great thank you as we see most of you actually do know what search engine optimisation is and for those that don't it's the process of making your website easier to understand by search engines and friendlier for users an organic search is anything that people click on that you haven't paid for okay it's not an advert so for lots of people when they think about search engine optimisation they immediately think of it as a dark art and it's something that's so complicated it's something to shy away from and quite complicated and scary and for other people i come across sometimes it's just a case of googling search engine optimisation sticking a few keywords in and sitting back and waiting for the results and there's a lot of different factors hundreds that are involved in making your website stand out in search results and search engine optimises like me spend a lot of time looking at these different sorts of results and every single day learning about what's new what's changing what why it's doing it where this information is coming from so there's a reason why there's developers there's a reason why there's designers there's a reason why they're search engine optimises and you as a business owner cannot be all of those things too okay there's a reason why you're brilliant at what you do and there's a reason why some aspects of it you need to ask for help but there are things that you can do that will make a big difference to your results and when you understand why you're doing them it makes your life a lot easier now the reason why you're actually learning about search engine optimisation is to increase the quality of the traffic to your website it's not just the quantity of it and we'll look at that a little bit and more along in the webinar so the truth of the matter is that seo is a huge topic but you can split it down into subsets which aren't necessarily different processes but it's a way of breaking down a complicated process into smaller chunks content seo which is what we're going to be concentrating on today is all about the relevancy and the quality of the content and how to make it better and ideally you want to be publishing content that users love visitors love when they get to your website and that search engines can actually understand that's the best combination and it's where you're going to get the quickest wins okay it's important to understand as you go through all of this that google actually ranks pages it doesn't rank websites as a whole okay which is why it's important when you're looking at all of this you're taking page by page and you're optimising each page to the best of your abilities not just saying right i need my website to rank it's certain pages it's also important to recognise that it doesn't matter what page somebody comes into on your website okay a lot of people get hung up on why is this page not ranking for this search term but all my traffic's coming through from this page all the traffic is coming through to your to your website that's great doesn't matter what page as long as when someone lands on it it's really easy for them to go and find the information that they're looking for and for them to take an action that you want them to take and that might be to phone you to complete the booking to fill out a form whatever action you want them to take as long as it's easy to find it then you're fine another question we get asked is why do you even need a website these days and obviously the massive proportion of everybody on this webinar has a website which is great a lot of people argue that all of their activity although their contents done on social media but your website is your home of your content okay the first thing somebody's going to do when they hear about you is google you so your website is your digital shop front so where you take pride in people visiting your actual premises it's the same for your website you can share the content on your website wherever you like but it's the home you've got control of it and you can show how that information is presented to the world on your website nobody can promise you page one number one result for a particular search term in a particular and set of time okay search engine optimisation does take time and even when you've implemented the changes you need to do you're not going to get hundreds of people suddenly landing on your website okay they'll come in time but we need to give time for the search engines to actually find your content and read it so as well as optimising your website you need to also go and hang out where your customers are online okay for example Scotland holidays staycations group and Facebook in just an example go and speak go and listen to what people are saying go and speak to them there start encouraging people to visit your website as well okay there is no point sending anybody to your website unless there's something for them to do there so bear that in mind that we'll talk about later on before you do anything and we're going to be looking at keywords in a minute it's really important to take the time to figure out who your customer actually is now writing content can be the most frustrating thing at the best of times okay and I know that I find it frustrating as well but it's a lot easier when you know who you're talking to and when you're writing your content after you've worked out who your customer is if you imagine them standing in front of you and you're saying oh we've just bought these new fluffy pillows for our home your customers saying standing in front of you going so what does that mean for me then you're thinking well what that means is that when you come in from your walk blah blah you're going to get a better night's sleep so you have to know who you're talking to if you've been on any webinars hosted by BusinessGateway they'll VisitScotland you will hear the presenters talking about avatars and customer personas all the time and the reason for that is because it's crucial okay the way your customers search has changed now since covid things are different things are important to them and although you already have probably have great content on your website i'm not saying that you don't it's now time to readdress it to make sure that it's still relevant every piece of content you create you need to know the reason why you're doing it and what you want someone to do as a result of reading it okay there's no point talking about the fantastic new booking feature that you've got on your website if there's no booking button for someone to click and i know um graham care did a webinar i think last week the week before on um making your website work so i would definitely encourage everybody to go back and have a look at that in combination with this one as well as working out what your customer needs and wants what are you doing it for okay now the reason that you're doing search engine optimisation is to increase the quality of traffic and hopefully improve the positions in search results that you're getting for various different terms but from a business perspective are you doing it to build brand awareness is that a new business that people don't know about yet are you looking to generate more bookings or are you simply wanting to more simply but wanting to send a lot more traffic to your website so you can then remarket to the customers via an advert okay really think about what's your purpose for doing this because when you can work that out you know what you're measuring and what you measure you can fix change it this is part of a report that VisitScotland has now on their website and it's looking at the holiday intentions of the uk consumer you probably would have heard this time and time again as well but you are not your customer okay now you probably will fit into one of these segments and whether people's views on covid whether they're likely to take uk domestic breaks for either reasons that they have themselves or we're not being we're told you're not allowed to travel they're too frightened to travel they can't afford to travel or they can and they can't wait to travel okay you will fit into one of those and the natural um natural way that you will write will probably be from your own perspective because that's what you know the best okay but when you're doing that you're potentially missing out on another five segments okay you're not writing for you what you think does matter in normal life of course it does but when you have to take yourself out of your head and put it into your customer's head and you will write in an entirely different way and you'll be writing for these other segments as well they don't know that you exist yet okay they don't care that you've got this new gadget that guarantees them a certain i don't know smell when they reach the room or whatever it is they're looking for a solution to a problem they're not looking for your brand necessarily unless it's a repeat customer but to encourage new people coming through to you they don't know you they know that they're looking for a problem for a solution sorry to their problem and that problem might be you know i i'm i want to take my young children with my elderly mother to a hotel for example and so they need something that something for their kids to do something that they're guaranteed hygienic and healthy to try and protect their elderly parent they don't know that you've got this thing that's going to do that i'm not saying don't talk about it on your website because that might be the difference between um they're making the decision to come to you or not but just keep in mind it's the solution they're looking for okay now whether your customers know it or not they're going on a journey when they're starting to plan their trip now as well as you know who you're talking to you know what they're there the way that they're thinking now and what they're looking for and now it's time to make sure that your content is going to reach them at every different stage of their journey okay now at different stages of their journey they're going to be using different keywords and they're going to be having different ways of searching everybody searches in a different way okay some people speak into their phone some people use a desktop and they in different places so different places different gadgets different words that they use and with search engine optimisation is it's the task is to try and get in front of those people at every stage of their journey okay when they're searching in different ways they're also going to be shown different sorts of results because google works on relevancy and it wants to show that customer your potential customer the type of information that is so relevant to them that they don't need to go anywhere else so your customer doesn't know they're necessarily going on a journey you do okay and we need to look at the different sorts of um content that they're shown so for each segment that we saw in the previous slide if you worked through each one and have a look and say this is my customer at this stage of the journey how will they be thinking you know what's important to them what are their needs and what do you want them to do when they come to your site you've got two jobs to do your search engine optimization okay one is to get them on your website in the first place and the second one is once they're on your website for them to look at your content to either you know watch a video see an image read your words i think that is exactly the business that i want to either visit or stay at or take my kids to etc okay now in the next week part two of this webinar series we're looking at more you know how where that your keywords go and what point is important to try and get them to click onto your website and today we're just looking at the types of content google is all about the intent and the relevancy of the search goal search term the main goal is to give your potential customers as i said one piece of information that is so relevant to them that they don't really need to think about looking elsewhere and the biggest clue that you are going to get as a business about the type of information google likes and thinks is relevant for a certain search query is the information that is going to give you back so if you were to do a search for a keyword and put a keyword in that you think at the moment that somebody is likely to search for when they're looking for your business ideally an incognito search or one of your friends or relatives to do it for you so you google isn't looking at your history and you are shown a load of images for example then google thinks the information that you've just put in the type of search you've put in what you want to see what's relevant to you are a load of images okay you don't have images on your website that's straight away you're going to be thinking i'm going to get some images if you were doing a different sort of search and it gave you a directory listing or a catalogue type page and that's not what you have on your website then that's another idea for you to say right google thinks this is relevant google thinks it's relevant to show this page of catalogue results to me when i put in the search query and i don't have one so it's just looking for ideas as well google is going to give you a lot a lot of hints if you know where to look for it about what the best thing is to do so google's rank brain is a machine learning search engine algorithm and it is all based on intent of the keyword okay so it might be you might be shown a map an image a video a normal link but do some research and have a look at what you see so before you even begin your search google's organised information about the web pages in their search index so you may have heard this many times it's like a library but obviously it's massive okay now google's going to follow three steps in order to generate result results back from these web pages the first thing it's got to be able to do is see what pages exist on the web okay so google is needs to crawl your page now a lot of times when new websites are built you can basically click simply put click a button in the back of the website that says google do not come anywhere near this website until i finished it because it doesn't want to start reading it now sometimes that button is left ticked it's not unticked which means google won't find your website okay so there's different tools that you can use we'll talk about them in a second to make sure that google can crawl your website so the spice will come in read your words yes i can find your website once it's found your page it needs to be under able to understand the content that's on it and the beta that google can understand the content that's on your page the better it can then match it to and people who are looking for your content in the future and that's the bit that's called indexing there's different ways for to make sure that google can understand the information that's on your page and again we look more at that next week next Monday so when a user types in a query google tries to find the most relevant answer from its index based on lots of different factors okay it's trying to look it's looking at the language it's looking at the intent it's looking at the device you're using and also the history of your searches and then it's going to give you what it believes is the best suited for that keyword so to increase your chances of your site being crawled there's three four things that you can do so i said just now first of all you want to make sure that google can actually reach the pages on your site and they look correct there's different tools that you can use for this and when you get a copy of the slides there'll be um a url you can go to that simply you put your domain name in press the search and it will come back and simply put it will say yes we can read your pages or no we can't okay you need to make sure that your website is mobile friendly and again in the slides there will be a link to the mobile friendly test but remember on here that google ranks pages it doesn't rank websites as a whole so if you've got your important pages on your mobile and obviously one of the most important ones is going to be the checkout page or the booking page etc you need to check that that's mobile friendly as well now google has got a new set of algorithms search signals out that you might have heard of called core web vitals but again simply put we need to make sure that your web your mobile site is fast as we always have been that it's got a good user experience on it and that it doesn't wobble when you use it if you go into some mobile sites you don't see that they shift they wobble a little bit you want to make sure that yours doesn't you can get really caught up in the different tools that you can use for checking your website one of the best things i recommend that you do is get people to use your mobile site but get people to use your mobile site all the way through to the booking process okay because quite often it's when you get to the last stage that's where mobile versions of websites let you down you want to make sure it's really easy to use and fast to load for the person that's using it and using it on different sorts of mobile phones as well okay you first create a website you should submit what we call a site map which is a gentle way of saying to google here's my website please can you read it okay google will find pages through links they might have visited certain pages before and it might be referred by certain other sites but you can also you can request that google re-reads your site if you've made changes to your page buy a free tool from google called search console and we'll look at that more in um next week so these links to these pages will be in these to these sites sorry will be in the slides as i say you want to have a good navigation system with an internal linking structure and what i mean by that is when somebody comes onto your website can they find what they want to do okay get people to test it come in and say to them can you go have a look at this book this event do you know book a room or whatever and see how easy it is for them to do it to find your content again if you go back and have a look at and graham's website you get more information on doing that the reason why that's important for search engine optimisation is because when we're talking about google wanting to give people the most relevant results it also wants to give people useful results okay if you have got people coming in on your page and finding it useful they're going to spend time there they're going to spend time having a look around completing and watching videos doing whatever it is they want to do and that is going to send a signal to google to say this page is important people are finding it useful okay people are finding it useful let's show it to more people right so the whole user experience and navigation system as well as making your website work that's how it comes into search engine optimisation this has gone into in more detail next week and but just to give you a summary of it to increase your chances of your site being indexed google needs to know and understand the information that's on your website if you have got a lot of content on your website it's all jumbled up it doesn't read properly for normal people let alone search engines it's not structured in a certain way and the content on it really is quite spammy you maybe think that the words that you've written were useful for search engines and but it's sending the opposite signal google is not going to necessarily index that okay because it won't find it useful make it as easy as possible for google to understand short titles structured content headings paragraph and useful information and then having a look at increasing the chances of the site being served and ranked in the in the first place again it's like a combination of these two things that we've just looked at nobody is going to wait for a slow site you know that yourself there's too much competition if something's taking it's time to load straight off onto the next one okay you're not gonna bother trying to navigate yourself um around a mobile site that's not friendly either you're not going to want to blow up the text to have a look at it again too much competition okay so the user experience useful content and a fast page is going to help you a lot with your search engine optimisation so we talked a lot about keywords um and the relevance of that so we're just going to quickly go over then what they are and how you find them when to use them so keywords are words that you put in or your potential customer is going to put in when they're looking for a search query and they're also words that you're going to use on your website to encourage people a to find you in the first place and b to take an action in the second place once they're there okay all the words on this slide are keywords so any combination of words that you put in is a keyword but they're different types of keywords and different types of keywords will show you different sorts of results okay so when we're looking at a keyword that has between one and two words in it we call that a short tail keyword okay these are automatically not obviously can't speak for everybody but people want to want to rank for these short tail keywords it's a natural you know a natural tendency to want to do and i understand that but the fact of the matter is when you can go back and realise that google is going to show results on intent okay there is not much intent behind this keyword Scottish tour it's too short it's too generic it's massively competitive and if you get traffic to your website for Scottish tour the likelihood of it converting is really low okay because the person that's put in that doesn't hasn't really nailed down what it is that they want yet and the results that you see will you know reiterate that okay so here you're having Scottish tours official tours of Scotland since 1907 really generic it's not it's not anything special you've got um obviously VisitScotland there that's got a variety of Scottish tours on its wall to try and get somebody um interested and give them ideas of types of tools that they want and really that's what this keyword is they're looking for ideas they've not necessarily made up their mind yet okay when you get a longer search term like you're starting to narrow down and it's becoming less competitive and there's a lot more intent behind this this person that's putting in tour of Scottish gin stories knows what sort of tool that they want to go on and again the types of results that you see in um their search results are going to be more tailored to this sort of query okay the competition for this is less and the intent to buy is a lot higher so the more detailed a description that somebody's putting in in terms of a long tail keyword the more they're the higher their intent to buy and the higher the chances of them converting if they land on your website okay so you would use these for targeted pages and specifically product type pages or really detailed um talking about your brand your product that you're selling the short term keywords i'm not saying don't use them you absolutely should use them but more kind of a sprinkle throughout your content okay in the days gone by we were ranking a website you would and i you know we went to the bank for Scottish tours okay well let's put Scottish tourist Scottish tours Scottish just a few times at the top sprinkle it loads of times in the in the paragraphs and the content let's make sure there's some at the bottom and that years gone by google obviously is a lot more intelligent now um and the it's almost working on a human based type of understanding it can ha it can understand what people are looking for okay so it's not as simple as how it used to be so a graphical representation of long tail compared to short tail keywords so the ultimate short tail keyword one word tours is really high competition and saying on this charts where we're looking at high cost search engine optimisation isn't free a lot of people think it is free it takes time your time isn't free if you're paying another company to do it can be incredibly expensive depending on the again the type of keywords that you might be adamant that you want to rank for it's going to take a long time it might never happen for you to rank for a search term such as tours but when you say you decide and understand why you it's more important for you to rank for tour of Scottish gender distilleries obviously if you're in the gin industry but relative to whatever industry that you're in it's a lot quicker it's a high poverty higher probability of conversion and it's going to be a lower cost to you okay you have evergreen keywords and these keywords are its content made of these types of keywords that is going to be around for a very long time okay it's always relevant it's historical it's educational it's informative and it's perfect type of keywords for you to write in blogs posts um and to also if you have a page and you're just thinking i need to write more content for this page using evergreen keywords is going to send traffic to your site it's not only going to send traffic to your site but it's inadvertently you're going to be creating content that people like to link to okay we'll talk a bit more about linking and further on but the more edu educational informative interesting content that you have people like to link to that to share that sort of content and it just makes for nice pieces of content on your website okay and again if you have if you are creating content based on evergreen keywords and people come to your blog great as long as when they're reading it i think that's really interesting i actually be interested in finding out more about this business and going on one of their trips or excursions or whatever how do they do that make sure there is something on that blog post to say book now or contact us or whatever don't lose them when you've worked so hard to get them on your website in the first place now this slide is showing you the results that google thinks is relevant for when somebody puts in a product type keyword okay now the images at the top are adverts and again bear in mind you are not your customer just because you're sitting there thinking well i never click on ads it doesn't mean your customers don't okay but the point i'm trying to make here for search engine optimisation is google thinks images are relevant adverts obviously but images are relevant for product keywords and if you are selling memorabilia or you're selling gifts on your website whatever it's unlikely somebody's about going to buy a gift without seeing an image of it they want to visualise how what that's going to look when somebody opens it if you see what i mean so again you're looking at what's relevant and making sure you've got that content on your website the organic results that you see underneath um the ads again are very specific we're looking at how is this worded gifts virgin lovers gifts virgin lovers there's two different sites but still talking about and gin lover gift sets so i'd be thinking about in my content do i talk about gifs for gym lovers you know what does google what words does google think is relevant for what you're ranking for geographical keywords local seo is next week but just to explain what you see here you've got um at the top of the maps usually directory listings or review sites and you've got visitScotland there too to the right and there's adverts again and because they're selling these gen tours as products with people looking for them near the near me types of searches it's low search volume and it's highly high intent again if somebody is looking for something near them the intent to buy right now or order or book whatever it is a lot higher you're also going to see what we call the map pack okay this which is a group of listings underneath a map now these information is coming from your google my business pages and underneath that i know i've got it on the right hand side but there will be more um organic results okay nine times out of ten now you're going to see this people also ask section and i'll show you how to use that um to its full extent in a couple of slides time so we've looked at and hopefully makes sense the different sorts of keywords that you have and the way in which different keywords present different sorts of results okay now the keyword research then is figuring out which terms is it that you're actually going to concentrate on which terms is it that your tourists are using to find you online and it's one of the most important elements of search engine optimization if you don't do it you're just kind of fumbling around in the dark it is worth taking time to do this right so google's algorithm has evolved now to what we call entity based search so in the past as i said it was very much matching those keywords exactly to the what the person what you wanted to rank for but now you need to match the intent behind the search and what i mean by entity based search is that search engines have started understanding content like humans do okay so everybody searches in different ways from different devices and people's results are different based upon their history of their search based on their location and based upon the device that they're using and you once you're aware of that it's going to make it a lot less stressful to be honest because people get hung up and why does that look like that there and not like that there because it is different it's different for people and it's going to make it easier to understand what the right thing is to do okay now when you're looking at this slide if you come out of your tourist tourism head tourism business head and just go back into you as an as a sat at home on a Sunday afternoon head probably still thinking about your business to be fair but more as a hobby if you can look at this slide in a way that you would search for say a new camera then you can apply it to the way that your customers search okay so you're sitting at home thinking you need a new camera that's all you that's it was your first search gonna be maybe best camera best cameras to buy in 2021 that is a short tail keyword you know that is there's no intent behind that then you're looking for a good camera there's thousands of cameras out there if you know what i mean but that's where you start your search you've got no desire at this time to buy a specific one so you enter that search into the query it's like to careerbox it's likely that you're going to then see um paid and organic searches you're going to browse through the ones that you think are going to give you a good match click on something that's appealing to you probably read more about it well i don't know i could get a camera that does that come off your next search is going to be new digital camera that um can capture wings flying at whatever speed i don't know so your intent to look for a specific camera is a lot higher okay go on to the website you follow the same process again until you find that make of camera that you want okay and it's that product you're putting in because you've got had all these ideas you've looked now specific your intent to buy is a lot higher but the process that you've gone through hasn't been just one set one click one search one decision okay you're having a look around which is why you want to rank for specific search queries okay so where are you going to actually find these keywords ideas the natural place for me to tell you to start with will be google keyword tool so it's a free tool from google mostly used for um google ads and people looking for words to advertise on how much it's going to cost them what's the search traffic but there's a really basic how-to guide to use adwords for just the keyword tool at the end of the session for you so you can start with a generic keyword and it's going to give you an idea of types of words that you can use off that so what i would take from this although i'm only showing you a slide with five keywords in it depending on the industry depending on the keyword you put in you're going to see a lot more but i'm taking from this i put in gin tour i say all right okay there's a the word experience i hadn't used experience in my content i'm going to use experience you might call it a tour other people don't what you think is important in your business and you have pet names but words that you call what it is that you do i don't call them that i'm not looking for that when i search nor to other people there might be five or six different types of words that people use for the same thing and google is intelligent enough to bring in that context and recognise that what i would suggest that you do i recommend that you do is use these words when you're creating content to bring them in you can also put in a website so if you see a website that's always ranking higher than you and search to in um the results and it's frustrating there will be lots of different things that go into why they are above you and they might not be above you for the person next door for example but they're going to be high up there anyway put their website in look at only their page and get examples from that as well okay so here not only not only am i going to be targeting gin tour it's going to make me start thinking about gin tasting do i talk about that in my in my concept i know i do it but have i included that in my content use that as an idea too another tool you can use for free tool is google trends which is going to tell you which people are searching for and i know a lot of presenters will go into google trends in more detail what i'm wanting you to take from this slide today is the related queries part of it okay just because you are wanting to promote your hotel or your business around you okay people are also looking for things around you they want things to do near you they want to stay at your hotel and go for a walk or go and visit local shops so you talk about the things that are around you not just what you have obviously you are your most important priority of course you are but team up with people near you and think about you know can i talk about that walk so people are coming for a you know playing on my trampolines can i is there a maybe something they can combine with that is there a local cafe put the whole package together for them because it could be the turning point whether they book or not using google trends during the summer obviously people were searching for things to do near them and with the rise in the number of people either having to stay close to home or so the services you offer that used to be targeted maybe for people travelling in there's a higher need for things to do near you this is where local search is going to kick in and that's on Monday we look more at that google is your friend google is going to give you a lot of information if you know where to look for it okay so these are three things i use regularly the alphabetical searches in google suggest too put in your main keyword and literally keyword a keyword b keyword c go through when you find a keyword that you have that resonates with you um or you know that that's what you do put that in and you start the whole process again and what you're doing is creating a whole series of long tail keywords that have higher intent that are more likely to convert and that is brilliant content for your website people also ask section you'll see this time and time again these are questions people are asking if you can answer these questions within the content on your website you're inadvertently optimising your website for voice search too okay there's more that goes into it but this is a big part every time you click on one of these arrows more information another question will appear don't copy the answers you know your business better than anybody else you've got your own brand voice that's what resonates with your customers and your future customers and your repeat customers don't be anybody else be you but what i'm saying is take these titles of the questions and answer them because people are asking them and they're not just one person that's asking them okay bring that into your content if you've got a website where you're talking about specific services and products rather than having one big long page of frequently asked questions what i would recommend that you do is you map them out you plan them so if you're talking about if you've got a I don't know a trampoline and a bouncy castle and you're encouraging people to visit them your trampoline questions are on your trampoline page your bouncy castle questions on your bouncy castle page it's not just one long page of frequently asked questions okay coming to the bottom of the search results you're gonna have searches related to that query as well now when you're doing your keyword research it's not just about optimizing your website or the words and the content that you know about use it as well for ideas for um adapting your business so everybody's had to adapt their business in some way and you know desperately racking your brains of what can i do differently what are we going to do now so what i would be looking at these results for and saying right gin tasting at home and virtual gym tasting these are things that words you can incorporate into your site if you do them and if you don't do them then it's maybe ideas of things and obviously relative to industries totally get them using gin as an example that's all relative to different industries and these things aren't going to change because if you go back to your customer segments the person that used to be really you know wanting to go out and do gin tasting and now maybe shy maybe they've changed and even when they're allowed to go out they still would prefer for whatever reason to do at home okay or maybe they want to combine what it is that you can do and offer them at home now another example using hotels obviously going through same process every time but you know thinking a little bit differently in hotels with good yeah and then you can have hotels without you know might be without children without pets without whatever it is you can use this for as long and as much in-depth research as you want to and it's well worth spending the time doing it and it's free answer the public is another free tool you might have seen on other webinars you can use a couple of times a day for free and basically everything that i've just told you to do manually you can it's collated and answered the public but it's not as much detail okay when you are doing your own keyword research you're getting ideas all the time and one thing leads to another leads to another and it's um exciting when you get into the into the gist of it um but if that's not for you and you want some ideas quickly then i would suggest you use answer the public you put in a keyword and it generates all the questions not all of them a lot of questions off the back of that looking for synonyms for content on your website again just really reiterating what i've said there we don't want to repeat the same keyword over and over and over again people are looking for holiday they're looking for escape they're looking for vacation they're looking for a you know experience all of these different words you can incorporate into your content i totally understand it the thought of writing content for a lot of people is you sit there be head in your hands think that i can't do this it's just it's frustrating it doesn't come easy but everybody knows you know your business better than anybody else knows it okay and if anybody asks you about your business i'm pretty certain that you can talk about it but then when you sit down and start trying to write about it and think i need to bring these keywords in and it's too much okay so what i would recommend that you do and i do it myself now use um an app there's a lot of voice recognition apps i use one called otter and just o double t e r so i speak i answer questions as if i'm speaking to somebody um and i just talk and talk and talk and this app which transcribes it then i can send it to my email i can send it to word google wherever print it out and then i've done my keyword research so i know you know what words i really want to be using i don't know exactly when i'm set in front of the computer where they're going to go but when i've got my transcript and then you go through and you rewrite it and you edit it and you read it out loud again so you're putting your brand voice across in your content which is so important you're resonating with your customers because that's the way you naturally speak and then you've gone back and then you've optimised your content with your keywords okay don't try and just sit in front of a computer and do it because it's so destroying to be honest can we this graph and another free tool from google it's not a google tool so it's another free tool again just looking at different types of synonyms and semantic keywords that you can use to sprinkle through your content if you if you had to choose one way of doing it i would personally use google to do it okay and go through the alphabet and the questions people ask in related searches if the idea of all these tools is um doesn't appeal to you a good keyword research tool is ubersuggest so the seven day free trial i think before you get the paid version and a link to that will be in the slides at the end as well basically you can put in a keyword a short tail keyword and it will generate long tail keyword ideas and it will give you what this is going to give you above using google is an estimated seo difficulty score so it estimates how much competition there is for organic search but when you take into consideration the fact that everybody's searching in different ways etc it's a very um it's a generic number okay you want to be writing good content long tail keywords rather than focusing on just one short tail one as i keep saying but this is a good tool for more ideas this tool is one that i use on a daily basis and the reason that i like this one is because it will let you see the keywords that your competitors are ranking for and the ones that you're not okay so you can put in your domain name and then put in two of your competitors name and it will give you a spreadsheet where it will give you all the keywords everybody's ranking for this webs this website's ranking for three this one's ranking for two and you're missing out on these ones so it is there is a paid version of the two but you do get a 30-day free trial so if you're clever um not clever if you can set yourself a couple of days aside to do your keyword research and go through they have fantastic training on this tool you can really do a lot of keywords research within your 30-day trial okay now seeing where measuring your organic traffic um and the keywords that you're already ranking for because there will be keywords that you are already ranking for your site and you might be on page eight or you might be on page one but there will be keywords that are generating your website to show okay now a lot of people will have heard of google analytics and this is the obvious place to go for information on how people are behaving on your website how where they're coming from what they're doing what actions they're taking and you can measure the increase of your organic traffic your direct traffic referrals etc and again i would encourage you to go back to um the analytics webinar a couple of weeks ago last week i think um on google analytics and how to best use it you know analytics is a program again in its own right and it's easy to get a little feel a little bit overwhelmed when you first go into it you don't have to use every single part of it to get the information that that we want for this purpose okay when you click on organic traffic in analytics any blue link that you click on in analytics can take you further and further into the platform but i want to see what keywords we're ranking for now when you click on organic traffic organic search you will get a list of keywords that might have shown up twice or three times but you will get an overwhelming amount of this it's like not provided which is not that helpful to be honest but what you can do is get this information from a tool called search console now in search console again it said it is a free tool from google okay so analytics and search console working together is fantastic if you want to just look purely at keywords then just concentrate on search console for now okay this is an example of the slide is showing that these search terms have shown up this many times these impressions and search results you can also go deeper and you can look at the pages that are showing up for these search terms and the number of times people are clicking on them so search console again next week go into more detail on this but it lets you see quick wins so you can get ideas again for types of keywords that you might not have thought about and you can see in it there's a certain page on your website that might be at the bottom of page one maybe and there'll be some tweaks that you can make with your content and your keywords and the structure of your site that can bring it up a few places and the difference between the bottom of page one and the top of page one the amount of clicks you get is massive bear in mind though because of the way you know yourself when you go into search and you might you see ads and then you see maps and then you see videos and images and the standard organic results are going less further and further down okay so it's harder to say right i'm on page one number one it's difficult but it's possible okay so you can use search console for all of that information now i don't think there's any point in me sitting here telling you about different search engines and how many people use them and you know that mobile usability is up whatever we know lots of people using mobile and will continue to do so and google is the biggest search engine okay now i speak to a lot of people all the time and you know we talk about thing and different search engines and i am not by any stretch of the imagination saying that they're not important i'm not saying to ignore them but what i am saying is that google is the red line at the top of that um chart and there's a reason why we're concentrating on google today because that's where the majority of the traffic is coming from now you have also got Facebook and TripAdvisor on Instagram and YouTube and everything else that you feel that you need to be keeping on top of okay what you learn when you're doing your search engine optimisation you can apply to other places that you are um optimising for on the search engines okay Facebook is a search engine in its own right and all of these different platforms have their own sets of algorithms that change regularly okay it's really difficult to try and keep on top of them all near impossible but the one thing that they have got in common is they all want to give the person looking through them the most relevant results and the relevant results comes by the way that somebody searches and the way someone searches is coming from the words they use so take the keywords that you're going to be figuring out after this webinar and go back and have a look at your Facebook about section and you know how do you describe yourself on TripAdvisor or whatever and make sure that those keywords are resonating with the person that you're talking to okay now we have spoken a lot about the different sorts of results that you see and the different keywords that you use and it would be wrong for me not to bring in a little bit about um the growth of voice search voice search is a webinar in its own right it's a topic in its own right but when we spoke before about you answering questions that you see in google search results and you're inadvertently answering questions and optimising your um your site for voice search google brings these answers in from different places and all the search devices have to get their information from somewhere and then you think where is that information coming from okay so this further slide here is a brief overview of where the content is being pulled from what to take away from this is that you can see google not surprisingly brings its information in from google my business Monday and google itself okay Alexa we're talking about search engine optimisation is pulling information from other directories namely yelp and next okay and you can see also on their apple maps connect and thing so when you are looking at where your business is online and you're optimising your website take away from this as well if you wanted to start optimising for voice search make sure your business is listed in yelp and next and Bing okay and the keywords that you've learned and the type of content that you will be writing in on your website don't just keep it to your website you're putting a lot of time and a lot of effort into actually writing this content and thinking who your customers are when they google you make sure every place that you can be seen is given the same impression okay those customers might find you on yelp they might find you on yeah they might find you on google my business but they need to know it's the same business you don't just keep it for your for your website okay you've put in too much work to do that paid versus organic traffic really here is just to reiterate the point that search engine optimisation is not a quick fix okay it's absolutely 100 worth putting in the time and the effort to get the content right and to optimise your website definitely need to do that but you need to be realistic with yourself and these things take time and there's a reason why some websites seem to rank really quickly and some websites are going to take a bit longer to do that okay it might even be you've got a brand new website it's not going to end up on page one number one next week okay unless you are you know a really random keyword that nobody ever searches for yes and that's possible you can do that but realistically it's not it's not gonna happen it takes time it builds up but it's really well worth doing okay if you want really quick hits to your website the only way of doing that is really through paid search okay and that again obviously is another webinar another topic and that's something else to do but it's just to make sure that you set your expectations go back and let people know that your website is there as i say right in your social media channels talk about your website listen to what people are asking in these forums and in these groups because going back to answering um what content are you going to put on your website content that people want to know about okay com people are looking for recommendations for blah blah blah if you've got that talk about it on your website get ideas from where your customers actually are online okay and then just to recap before we summarise and go to questions if you have to take one thing away from today it's just one thing let it be that you get out of your head and into your customers head okay they don't know you exist they're looking for a solution to their problem and when you're writing your content or talking your content into your app or whatever it is that you do imagine them then saying what so what does that mean because you will then go on and answer those questions in a lot better way okay remember that long tail keywords are going to bring in more traffic that is more relevant higher quality and more likely to convert do not don't get hung up on the fact that you your website doesn't rank for the search term that you think is important it's not necessarily what your customers are looking for okay until you've done that keyword research and got into the head of your customer you you're not going to be able to figure that out so go through this here getting to know your customer i know i keep going on about that give them a name give them a face give them um children or not give them pets or not give them an income let them really know how they think and what they feel remember everybody is searching in different ways on different devices next week we're looking at local search more okay and local whether it's near me or whether it's a hotel in Dundee i'm looking for those types of searches are different to generic and my website is ranking for these types of searches okay we'll look at them as i said next week again long tail keywords have higher intent let your know let your customers know your website is there okay don't just wait for the search engines to read it send start sending traffic but make sure when they get there there's something for them to do don't do not take so much effort into what you're doing and so much care and effort to lose them either on the checkout page because it doesn't work on mobile or because there's no call to action or there's no downloader video inquire now phone us okay and remember it doesn't matter what page your customer comes in on as long as it's really easy as i said for them to take action as a result of finding you so hopefully that all makes sense and helps a wee bit and i will sign over back to Andrew now to take over thanks for listening to me Janine thank you so much that was not just informative but highly practical and i completely agree with you on the customer persona um customer profiling emphasis that you've just put across for so many businesses they don't think of it from the perspective of a customer but getting that mindset of what does a customer want from me what does a customer want from my website what should as you rightly point out help us all in terms of the how we set our website but also the content that we put on our website at all as well that's that question that he said so what question around and what customers will we'll be seeing it's so relevant so thank you very much for that and there's some things that i'd like to share with you at the moment before we just move on to some questions just a few um bits and pieces of information i'd like to share and i'll just um bring my screen up and firstly um Janine’s been talking about websites and some of you have asked this morning about or some of you in the process of setting up website
2021-04-02 10:44
