SEO in under 10 minutes (Video)

Search engine optimisation is hard. You can’t stuff keywords into posts and pages, buy thousands of backlinks and do other shady practices that you could once get away with. Today, Google is very sophisticated with respect to its search algorithm and is heavily focussed on a content strategy.

We liked this brief video overview to on-page search engine optimisation from Neil Patel. Its quick for busy people and, although it doesn’t cover all the factors included in Google’s search algorithm (there are over 300), it does give a good place to start.

Neil Patel’s video above focuses on 3 key areas of SEO. These are:

Focus 1: Focus on content.
Most businesses operate in a niche market. To make a digital content strategy work for you, you need to do deep dives into niche topics. In our case, this means talking about digital strategy, digital audits, campaign optimisation and related topics.

A content strategy is resource-intensive. It takes time to write good quality content. You need to be able to write well and in a form that flows naturally and is conversational (the days of “corporate speak” disappeared with mullet haircuts). If you’re after ideas for topics to write about, try Google’s predictive search or log into your Google’s search console to see what people are looking for when they find your website (see focus 3 below).

Focus 2: Optimise your titles and descriptions.
A listing in a Google result is called a snippet. The larger blue text is a title, the two lines of explanatory copy beneath is a description. Make sure you keep within character counts: 60 characters (including spaces) for titles and 150 characters (including spaces) for descriptions. The description should describe what a visitor can expect when they visit the page.

If you go rogue and ignore character counts, your snippet will be truncated by Google (appear with dots on the snippet where Google has resized your copy).

Focus 3: Use Google’s search console (formerly Google Webmaster).
In our Beginners guide to SEO, we cover off the importance of adding your website to search console. Not only does search console enable you to submit an xml sitemap (yes, your website needs one of these), it is also where you can access the keywords and phrases that people are entering into Google to find you.

A listing in a Google result is called a snippet. The larger blue text is a title, the two lines of explanatory copy beneath is a description. Make sure you keep within character counts: 60 characters (including spaces) for titles and 150 characters (including spaces) for descriptions. The description should describe what a visitor can expect when they visit the page. If you ignore character counts, your snippet will be

Additional Resources

Check out our Beginners guide to SEO

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Digital Koalas is an Australian-based team of digital strategists and auditors. We provide digital marketing consultancy, digital strategy development, independent audit plus digital media buying and campaign optimisation services. Everything starts with a conversation. To begin, say hello.