31 July 2022 IN Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Development, Wordpress

A Beginner’s Guide To Create A SEO Friendly Small Business Website

SEO Friendly Small Business Website

Building a website for your small business is a complicated task. It can be difficult to know where to start, what you need to know, and what it will cost you.

The good news is that there are plenty of options out there for you to choose from, and if you follow this guide, you’ll have a website that’s optimized for SEO from day one! In this article, we’ll cover the basics of how to create a great SEO-friendly website for your small businesses.

In order to create a successful small business website, you need to know what keywords to target and how to weave them into your content in a way that won’t detract from the original message.

In today’s world, people are bombarded with solicitations for this and that on the internet. But how can you tell what is worth your time? We have put together a guide for small businesses to help them create a website that customers will love.

A Little About Us

Volt Studios is an Award Winning Web Design and Local SEO Company In Toronto. We are dedicated to providing our clients with top-notch services. We provide personalized attention and advice that will help your business grow at an exponential rate. You will also benefit from our service as we guarantee results, which means that even if you do not get what you paid for, we will make it right. So if you are looking for an ALL in One Marketing Agency that offers World Class Web designing , Web developoment and Digital Marketing in Toronto with guaranteed results, then we are the ones for you!

Let’s get started with PART 1

Important Roles of SEO and Persuasion

PART 1  – The Important Roles of SEO and Persuasion on Your Website

if you want to create a website that appeals not only to your prospects, but to Google and all the other search engines out there, you are in the right place. So, when you’re planning out a new website for your business that will actually help your business, I’m talking one that will actually fill your pipeline with customers now and pave your one way for future customers. You really need to be thinking about two distinct, but equally important factors: traffic and conversions.

And in this exclusive post, I’m going to help you out with both. I’ll help you get traffic in the form of search engine optimization. In other words, all the important things you need to include on your website to let Google know that you are the authority in your niche and that you should be showing up right here for anyone who’s looking for a business like yours.

I’ll also help you boost those conversions by starting with really persuasive content that your prospects will need to see, in a very specific order, before they’ll ever be sold on working with you or buying from you. Now, both of these elements, SEO and persuasive content are equally important. But, if you’re not careful, they can actually be at odds with each other.

So, if you focus too much on persuading your site visitors to take the next step with you, you may just miss a lot of ranking opportunities, making your business really hard to find online. On the other hand, if you put all your focus on being found for your best keyword phrases, your website can suddenly come across as robotic and pretty cold. So, you’ll get the traffic—but what good is traffic, if they’re immediately put off and they never buy? So yeah, balancing these two competing elements can be tricky, to say the least.

That’s why I created this post to show you step by step how to handle these seemingly competing agendas so that they work together rather than against each other.

So, let’s start out by talking about why Digital marketing/SEO is so important for small business and why you really can’t afford to ignore it when you’re creating your website.

Why SEO is the Most Powerful Strategy?

First of all, SEO is the most cost-effective way to reach new customers. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty much free. But fair warning here: You will need to put some serious time into it to see the real benefits.

Next, it builds credibility. If you’re able to show up in the top few spots in a Google search, it shines a really positive light on your business, helping your potential customers see you as the top choice in your industry.

And finally, it connects you to the right person at the right time, while other forms of traffic—like paid ads—essentially interrupt people who were busy doing other things. Online SEO is different, because when people need something, they search for it.

And that’s the moment that your future customer discovers your business. You didn’t interrupt them or force yourself on them. You answered them when they actually asked.

And that is why SEO traffic is arguably the most powerful kind of traffic.

SEO is made up of two main parts: on-page/technical wordpress seo and off-page.

So, what exactly does on-page SEO involve? Well, among other things, choosing keyword phrases that you want to rank for; creating written content on those overall topics, including those phrases in strategic places; and, more recently, user signals such as time on page, bounce rates, and click-through rates.

SEO is also made up of what we call off-page optimization, which is mostly to do with getting back-links from other websites to the pages on your website. But in this course, we’re just going to be concentrating on all those on-page factors—things you can actually control right on your own website. And I do want to clear up a common misconception right now, since this is going to be very important to keep in mind in the rest of the course.

SEO operates on a page-by-page basis. So, never think about SEO as ranking an entire website, but as ranking individual pages independently. However, when you’re successful at getting some of your individual pages to rank, that can have a compound effect. When your pages start to rank, you start to build authority with your website, and that can help more and more of your pages rank as a result.

So that’s what SEO is all about.

But what about the importance of persuasive content? Isn’t it enough to just have a website that’s easily found online? Absolutely not. Your future customers have lots of choices—your competition—and they know it.

So it’s your job to clearly communicate what you do and how you help, or you’ll just be lost in the noise. And good, solid, persuasive content involves a strategy for which pages you actually need. And it’s generally fewer than you think—specific sections on each page, designed to give out the right information, at the right time, in the right order to help increase desire and decrease doubt in your business; written content that emphasizes what your customer will get, not just a big brag board for your business; and proper formatting that leans into proven online and sales behaviors.

Always remember this: people don’t read websites, they skim them. They peruse and pick out little bits of information that they can easily see and understand. And that’s why we want to make really good use of headlines, sub-headlines, short paragraphs, bullet lists, bolded text to highlight important points, and, of course, images and video.

So, now you know the separate benefits of SEO and persuasion. But here’s where it gets a little tricky. How do we put both elements together into one cohesive website that fulfills both objectives?

Now, there are really two ways that you could approach it. First, you could do all your keyword research, then start writing your content while shoehorning your phrases in as you go, checking all those little SEO boxes. But I’m going to suggest a second option. I highly recommend starting out creating your page content as if SEO didn’t exist at all. And the reason for that is simple. I want you to be able to freely form your thoughts and make an airtight case for your business without keywords splitting your focus. Because if you were to start the process with your keywords in mind already, a funny thing happens. You start concentrating and fixating on them, trying to work them in as many times as possible.

And when your brain is busy, concentrating on that over there, you won’t be connecting with your customers over here and saying all the things that they need to hear to be convinced that your business is exactly what they need. So, that’s where we start with creating customer-focused content first. Then and only then will be researcher keywords.

And finally, I’ll show you how to strategically layer them in, in a way that feels natural for humans to read while still checking all of Google’s boxes. So join me in the next section, where I’m going to show you how to create the content for your most important pages in a proven, optimal way. And we’re going to go step by step, section by section. I’ll see you there.

Creating-a-Persuasive-Page
PART 2 – Creating a Persuasive Page Your Customers Will Love

welcome back to part two  where I’ll be walking you step by step in how to create the content for the pages that will be most important for your SEO and for your customer conversions. And when I say that, the emphasis here is going to be on your homepage and your service or product pages, because these are where your prospects will go when they’re actively looking for what you’re selling.

So the content we’ll be covering here isn’t meant to educate your prospects on the finer points of your industry. They’ve already searched for businesses like yours. So, we can safely assume that they’re close to making a buying decision. At this point, the only thing left to do is sell them on your business specifically. And I do want to kick things off here by dropping a few golden rules of persuasion that have been proven, time and time again, to help connect more effectively with prospects.

Remember these principles and let them guide the tone of your content. First, write casually and conversationally. Now more than ever, people are looking for human connections, even with the businesses they want to work with. And stuffy, corporate speak doesn’t help to humanize your brand. And yes, even if you’re in a more buttoned-up profession, writing as if you’re speaking to a friend will always connect more meaningfully and with more personality. Being professional isn’t nearly as important as you think it is.

And believe it or not, being able to speak about your industry in an easy-to-understand way actually makes you seem like more of an authority, not less. Golden rule two: keep the emphasis on your customer, not on your business. One of the worst mistakes businesses make over and over again with their websites is treating it like a big brag board, touting all their accomplishments, their mission, and their biographies as if their customers actually care about any of it.

They’re coming to your site because they have some type of problem that they need solved. So make your website about that, along with your solution–what they get and how their life will be better as a result. All right, next: people don’t buy products and services.

They buy results.

It’s important to keep the focus on the end benefits that you bring to your customers. For instance, if you’re a hardwood flooring installer, your customers aren’t buying wood or even installation. Believe me, nobody wakes up saying, “I want my house ripped apart and my life turned upside-down today.”

No, of course. They want the result that comes at the end. So don’t show photos of a half-finished construction zone; show the end result–the happy family, loving the look of their new flooring. Okay, next: buying decisions are made on emotion first, logic second.

For that reason, you never want to miss an opportunity to talk about how your customer will feel after they use your product or your service. To go back to the heart of it–installer example: if your website were to only talk about the density of the wood and the three-coat stain process you use, you’re really missing out on an opportunity to tap into something much more primal.

So talk about how they’ll find themselves admiring their new home and the compliments they’re going to get from all their friends. That’s what gets people excited to buy. And when you create your pages with these principles in mind, you’ll be much better at communicating on a human level, which results in more connection and higher engagement.

And guess what? All that extra engagement means more time spent on your website, more pages being looked at, and more scrolling. And all those things are really strong signals to Google that people like your pages and that they should show your website to even more people when they search. It’s almost as if writing for humans is what Google wants you to do.

A well thought-out sales page

And the rest of this post, we’re going to walk section by section through any well thought-out sales page. Now, for simplicity’s sake, this example is going to be a homepage. But this is the optimal flow I recommend for service or product pages as well. Because it’s important to remember–not everybody will enter your website through your homepage, especially if you’ve handled your SEO correctly. So one of your service pages or a page that’s specific to one of your products might very well be the first impression that any future customer has with your brand.

For that reason, you don’t want to treat those pages as an afterthought. Believe me, every service you offer and every product you sell needs a page to lead them down this path. If you want them to sell, right, you can choose to simplify this format for those types of pages, if you want.

But the more of these sections you can at least touch on, the better off you’ll do. Okay. So let’s get right into the persuasive page format that I’ve personally used on hundreds of my clients’ websites over the years. And, I can tell you, it works way better than any other layout that I’ve ever tried. So we’re going to start off right at the top of the page, what we call the hero section.

And since this is the very first thing any new visitor’s going to see, it has a pretty big job to do. It needs to communicate exactly what your business does, how that will make your customers’ lives better, and what they need to do to get it. And, as if that weren’t enough, this all needs to be made painfully obvious within 10 seconds, max. In a study from the Nielsen Norman Group, which is a user experience research firm–they’re pretty smart–they concluded that users often leave webpages in 10 to 20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer, to gain several minutes of user attention.

You must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds. In other words, if you want more than 10 seconds, you’ve got to give them a reason to stay. And that reason is all to do with how you will help them solve their problem. So, the trick here is simple. Just use the main headline here to state clearly and plainly what you do or provide. In our example here, that would be something like ‘accounting services for small business.’ It’s not clever or cute, but it is clear. And here’s the thing: clarity beats cute and clever all day long. Then, use the supporting sub-headline to bring up the main problem you solve or the main benefit you deliver. Something like what we have here.

‘Our team of financial experts can bring peace of mind to your finances, so you’re freed up to spend your time where it counts most on growing your business.’ And this is really important to include because, at the end of the day, that’s what their client wants.

Nobody wants accounting services for the sake of collecting accounting services, right? They want the service because it frees up their time, and because they want that peace of mind that comes with handing off an intimidating task to a true expert. And since we need the viewer to get all this information in a really tight time span—remember, 10 seconds—this background image needs to help sell the idea. Visually, what many businesses would do here is they would show a photo of their team or a stock photo representing an accountant with a calculator, or sometimes even just a skyline or something like that.

But none of those things work particularly well, because showing you and your team in the photo puts the emphasis on you as a business, when we already know it should be on your customer. And skylines, landscapes, and corporate handshakes don’t say anything meaningful at all. So, what you should put here instead is a happy customer photo that showcases the emotion that your customer feels as a result of working with you. So here we have an image of happy small business owners who are now able to do what the sub-headline promise is: grow their business.

Then finally, you’re going to finish the section off with the third crucial piece, which is ‘How do I get it?’ This is where you want to include your call to action button that clearly states what happens next in the process. And it shouldn’t say’Contact us’ or’Get started.’ It should be much more descriptive than that. Something like’Buy it now,”Download the app,’ or’Schedule your free consultation.’ So, once you’re confident that the hero section is super clear enough to pass that ten-second test, we’re free to move on to the next section. It will be called’The problem solution.’

Now, I know we always want to keep things on our website bright and cheerful and upbeat, but here’s the truth. If you don’t bring up the problem your customer’s already experiencing, they won’t know why they need you in the first place. And doing this shouldn’t be considered going negative, either.

They already know they have a problem. So when you bring it up, you’re actually relating to them in a really meaningful way. And since you brought up their problem, they’re going to assume you already know how to solve it. It’s actually really easy to do this. Just bring up the big problem in the headline like I’ve done here, in this case. The problem is that accounting is not the fun part of running a business, but yeah, you actually need it to succeed.

Then, just take two or three short paragraphs to expand on the problem. You might want to give two or three examples or symptoms of that problem.

Then you want to add another couple of short paragraphs where you switch gears and you talk about how you solve that for your customers. And remember: images are important to help sell your ideas.

And this one is your choice. You can either show another happy customer photo here if you want to emphasize the positive, or you can really double down on the pain your customer’s experiencing in the moment by using a photo more like this one. Just be really careful to choose photos that aren’t cheesy. You really want to go as natural as possible for this—and for all your photos, for that matter.

Okay. Moving right along. Next, we have a really simple, useful section, which is just a showcase of your products or services. Now, of course, you really only need this if you happen to sell multiple products or multiple services. If you just sell one thing, you can skip this; but if you have more than one, it definitely makes a lot of sense to try to funnel people as quickly and efficiently as possible to the offer that matters to them most, so they can get a version of this page that is much more tailored to what they need. So, let’s take a look at how I’ve organized this—and it’s probably how you want to do it, too. Notice how, on this homepage I’m walking you through, it’s all about accounting services in general.

But then these individual services link to pages that are much more specific. So if you have a big general umbrella that all your services fit under, that should be the focus of your homepage. Then you’d list out your more specific products or services here, and you’d be ranking those keywords on those pages here. So, the thing to remember for this section is to give each a simple name, a short one-sentence description, and a button or a text link that people can click to take them to that page.

Okay. Moving along. Next, we come to possibly the most important section when it comes to pure persuasion power. And that’s the benefit spotlight. Now, this is actually my secret weapon section, because by talking about the actual benefits you deliver to your customers, you increase the perceived value of your offers.

And when what you sell becomes more valuable in the minds of your customers, guess what? It becomes much more of a no-brainer to want to work with you or buy from you. And not only that, but you can actually charge higher prices as a result. So I do need to make sure we’re on the same page here. When I talk about benefits, this is probably the most commonly mishandled and misunderstood element I see over and over again, because most people just don’t understand the fundamental difference between a benefit and a feature. And this is really important, because benefits sell way better than features do.

And probably the easiest way to remember the difference is: features are things; benefits are actions, outcomes, or transformations. Take a look at the benefits I have here, if you want some examples.

So for the first one,, I could have simply said ‘Simple monthly reports,’ but that’s really just a feature. So, the benefit of the feature is that you can make more informed decisions based on those reports. So, the easiest way to do this is to just start a list of all the things that you include on your offerings, then dig deeper into each one. Try to fill in the blanks to this sentence:’We offer ‘feature’ so you can ‘blank.’ And that blank is your benefit.

‘We offer 24 hour support so you never have to feel stuck.’ Again,’We offer a 37-point inspection so everything gets fixed.’ Right? The first time you get the idea, then just pick your most compelling three benefits that you think would interest your customers the most. Then, write them here with a short one-sentence description and an icon or an image to help depict it visually.

Okay. And next, we have another really important and often mishandled section. And that’s the testimonial spotlight. I think we can all agree that reviews and testimonials are non-negotiable these days.

I can’t even remember the last time I bought anything or hired anyone to do anything for me without seeing some really positive five-star reviews first. Then, I’m betting it’s the same for you, too. But not all testimonials are created equal. What you don’t want is just some random, vague reviews that don’t say much more than Friendly service, highly recommended.’ You want to be really picky about the handful of testimonials that you choose to feature here.

First of all, if these are on a specific product or service page, the testimonials here should be specific to that specific offer. But for the homepage, they can be more general. So,, for each important page, you want to choose three to five that address an objection, or that talk about a specific problem that you solved or an outcome or a result that you helped them achieve. Then, you want to make sure that you use their name and a photo, if you possibly can.

That’s going to help sell this much better, because people will always put more weight on a testimonial—if it looks like a person is willing to stand behind it publicly. And a photo helps give that impression. And I always like to add a five=-star graphic to each one, just to help it read as a testimonial at a glance. And that way, even if no one reads the testimonial itself, they’ll still see the stars.

And for some people, that’s enough. And if you have a bunch of testimonials, again, just pick the best ones to feature on your important sales-focused pages. And then go ahead and add the rest to a dedicated testimonials page. Okay. Now, remember how I told you earlier that buying decisions are based on emotion first and logic? Second, if you notice—nearly everything up till now has been hitting on that emotional part of your customer’s brain.

So, they’ve bought in emotionally, but now for some people they’ll need to justify that decision they’ve already made with something more concrete. And that’s where the features section comes into play. You’re simply going to list out all the features. And remember: features are simply the things that people will get, included with your offer. And the good news is you should have already listed these out back when you created your benefit spotlight section.

So, I like to include about 10 to 12 features, things like—you know—twenty-four-seven phone support or free shipping. You get the idea. And if it’s a product, this is probably where you’d want to list out any relevant specs, like,, dimensions, what’s in the box, that kind of stuff. And you could stop there. But since this course is all about maxing out the persuasion on your website, I recommend going one step further and adding a really short description for each feature. That gives a bit more context and emphasizes the benefit behind the feature.

Okay, we’re getting close to the end of the page now. Thanks for sticking with me through this. Now, the next section is all about those FAQs. Now, this section is really helpful for helping people self-select whether or not they’re a good fit for what you’re offering.

And it’s also a powerful section when it comes to busting those common objections. And, spoiler alert: It’s also going to be a great section when it comes to sneaking in some of those keyword phrases. But I’m getting ahead of myself.  All you need to do here is list out the most common questions you get all the time, and the top objections or hesitations people typically have before buying. Once you have that list, just pick the five or six that feel the most relevant for the particular page you’re on.

And then write them out in a question-answer format like you see here. And for those objections, just restate the objection as a question, then your rebuttal or your argument against that. Objection becomes the answer. And if you have more FAQs beyond six, just put your best six here, and then go ahead and list the rest on a separate dedicated page. Okay. Time for our last section. And this is where the rubber meets the road. It’s a really simple, but direct, call to action block. Up to this point, we’ve meticulously made the case for your business’s product or service.

So now, let’s hit them up with one last opportunity for them to schedule something with you or buy from you. All we really need here is a simple and direct headline, like this, and a repeat of the call -to-action button you already created way back up in the hero section. Just copy it. Make sure it says exactly the same thing and looks exactly the same in terms of color and shape. Consistency is key when it comes to your calls to action. So, that’s the overall layout and the flow that I have found works best.

And you’ll want to repeat it for all your important service or product pages. And I know what you’re probably thinking: ‘I need to do all that for every single product I sell.’ And of course, if you’re a marketplace that sells thousands of products, you may not need anything this elaborate for all of them. And you may choose to simplify this structure for those pages. But, like I said earlier, the more of these sections, the more of these beat you can at least touch on, the better—when it comes to boosting your conversion power.

So, we’ve already applied what we can in terms of connecting with and persuading our prospects. But now it’s time to add in what we’re missing: on-page SEO.

keywords

PART 3 – Uncovering Your Most Profitable Keywords

In the last part, we showed you the optimal page layout for maximum persuasive impact and conversions. But that’s only half of what this course is about. So, the next step is to start layering in the keyword phrases that are going to help you be found in the first place, specifically in all those Google searches. So, in order to do that, we need to do a little bit of research to figure out what keywords and phrases should you even be trying for, because you don’t just want any keywords.

SEARCH-INTENT-BEHIND-SEARCH-QUERIES-SEARCH-INTENT

You want to concentrate on the ones that will be the most profitable for your business, and truly profitable keywords all have three things in common. They have to have high enough search volume to be worth it, have low enough competition to be realistic, and have the right intent behind them.

Now, when I say intent, intent just refers to what the searcher has in mind when they’re performing that search. Some searches are purely informational, where they’re looking for general information or an answer to a question.

Or, a search can be navigational, where they’re searching for a specific brand or a specific page on a website that they’ve maybe already been to and they want to get back to. And both of those intentions have their place in a search strategy. But for this course, we’re much more interested in the next two search intents, starting with commercial.

Now, commercial searches happen when someone’s looking for a particular product or service. This can include information that supports their decision to buy, like reviews or comparisons between two brands. And finally, probably the most useful search intent for your sales pages is what we call transactional intent. So, when someone performs a transactional search, they’re showing all their cards and saying, ‘I’m looking to make a purchase.’

And when choosing your profitable keywords, it’s all about striking the right balance between those elements. And, you know, the difficulty level in doing that’s going to be determined by your industry and location. In other words, if you’re in a competitive industry in a tough location, you might have a harder time and it might take you longer to get the results you want.

Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets here. It ultimately just comes down to the fact that you need to do what we’re about to do here better than your competition if you want to outrun them. And you’ll almost always want to concentrate on what we call long-tail keywords, which are just keyword phrases made up of at least three to four words, because these are easier to rank for.

Plus, long-tail keywords are usually easier to just dial in that search or intent. For example, if you were to simply search the word accountant, you might be looking for an accountant to hire, but you also might be looking for what an accountant does or how to become an accountant yourself.

And, oh yeah—Ben Affleck made a movie. So even if you could rank for this incredibly competitive keyword, it probably wouldn’t be very worth your time investment to go after it, because you probably wouldn’t convert very much of that traffic you got from it. Because only a small fraction of the people searching for that word ever had the intention of hiring an accountant in the first place.

But what if you were to try for the longer-tail version of it, with the right intention attached—something like ‘Local SEO services in Toronto?’ Now, a keyword phrase like that means business. You’ll have a much easier time ranking for it, not to mention the traffic you’re going to get from that search is going to be much higher quality, and you’re going to convert way more of that traffic into paying customers. So, to get us ready for the keyword research we need to do, your first step should be to start a simple spreadsheet or even just a Google doc.

And you want to list out all your important SEO pages separately. For instance, your homepage service A, product B—just list out all the pages that you want to rank for a particular set of keywords. Then, for each of them, just write your best initial guess of what you think people would be typing into that Google search bar when they’re searching for it.

And always remember, people don’t know as much about your industry as you do. So try your hardest to really put yourself in the headspace of a total lay-person. That means no insider jargon, nothing complex. And if you’re a local business, you’d probably want to include your city name in the keyword phrase.

Now, for your homepage, you’re going to want to go very general. So, just so we can stick with our mold removal business example, let’s say you’re an accounting firm in Toronto who handles tax prep, bookkeeping, and outsourced CFO services.

You’d probably have something like this for your homepage. You’d concentrate on the general overarching service you provide, which in this case would be ‘accounting services, Toronto.’

Then for your tax prep service page, you might start with ‘tax prep, Toronto’ is your guess. And for your bookkeeping page, ‘bookkeeping,Toronto.’ And for outsourced CFO, ‘outsourced CFO, Toronto.’ You get the idea. So these will be your best initial guesses, and they’re just going to serve as our jumping off points to find your best, most profitable opportunities.

So, now that you’ve got your list filled out and opened up, let’s jump over to Semrush.com and find you those keywords. Okay. So once you’re logged into your Semrush account, you’re just going to go over on the sidebar, where it says keyword magic tool. That’s what I like to use here. And we’re just going to start with the main homepage. So what we’re going to want to do is enter in the guesses that we made for that keyword phrase. So in our case, that is going to be ‘accounting services, Toronto.’ And then we’re going to click on ‘search.’

Now, once you’re here, you’re going to see a lot of different stuff. So basically, these are all of the different keyword phrases that they’re recommending, you know, as an offshoot of what you put in to begin with. So you’re going to see not only the keywords, but you’re going to see the intent behind them. Remember how we talked about commercial versus transactional versus informational intent? So those are all going to be listed here as abbreviations followed by volume.

So this is really important. This is what tells you how many monthly searches people are actually doing every month based on each of these keyword phrases. And remember how we talked about you want to make sure that the volume is high enough to be worth going after?

Now, trend shows you kind of, over time, a little graph of how popular these keyword phrases are.

Keyword Difficulty Score

A Beginner's Guide To Create A SEO Friendly Small Business Website

And this next column is also very important. This is the keyword difficulty score. So it gives you a number between one and a hundred of how difficult it’s going to be to rank for this phrase. And they’ve color-coded it, which makes it really nice. Anything that’s in the yellow zone is kind of borderline. Anything green is pretty easy. Then, as we get into orange, it gets more difficult. And I’m not seeing any reds here, but it does get up to red, and that means you probably don’t even want to try it.

So those are the columns we’re going to be paying the most attention to when it comes time to choosing intent, volume, and keyword difficulty. So there’s a few things we can do. We can kind of just eyeball all of it and start weighing out, you know, intent with the volume, with the keyword difficulty.

But what I’d rather do is I want to just kind of make things a lot easier by using filters. So, the first filter we want to use is intent. So let’s go up to right here where it says ‘intent,’ and we’re going to filter this based on only commercial and transactional, because it’s action.

Because these ones signify that the searcher is beyond that informational research phase, and they’re actually ready to buy, or at least to see a sales page. So I’m going to choose those and then click on ‘apply.’ Definitely weed out some of it right there. And since this doesn’t leave us with very many choices, what I actually like to do is go over to ‘related.’ This is going to broaden this search out a little bit while keeping the same general intent. So I’m going to click on ‘related.’

Now we’ve got 135 keywords to play with, so that’s much better. So from here, there’s a few different ways you could play this. So, we could just start ordering them in order of volume. So if you click on volume over here, it’s going to order them from top to bottom. This one has the most monthly volume, or if you do it again, that’s going to put in reverse order. This is the least, so I’m going to put it back on the most.

Free Keyword Difficulty Checker – Ahrefs

Or you could search by keyword difficulty. So if we click right here, it’s going to start with the easiest, but then of course the volume gets screwed up. So what I want to do is I actually want to use another filter. So I want to basically filter out anything that is not in that easy or moderate category of keyword difficulties.

So I’m going to go over to where it says ‘KD percent,’ and I’m going to do a custom range. I’m going to do zero to 30. Now, your mileage may vary here. And if you are more of an authoritative website, you can probably get away with going maybe up to 50. But if you’re brand new, I would definitely rather see you in that, you know, 20-something range to start. So I’m going to go from zero to 30. I’m going to click ‘apply.’ Now I’m going to reorder based on volume from highest to lowest.

So now we are left with only those keyword phrases in that easy to moderate score zone. And ordered from top to bottom by, you know, the most searches to the least. So this is really going to help us decide here, but now we still have to kind of look at a few more things.

So right here we have the top one, which would be great to go for based on the scores. But then we have it. This is basically a name of an accounting firm. So that’s probably not one we want to go with. And then ‘easy tax and accounting.’ That might also be the name of a company. So we would want to do some research there, and same with this one.

And then, now we’ve got the term ‘bookkeeping,’ and remember that is going to be the focus of one of our service pages. So for our homepage, we just want to focus on the general term of ‘accounting services.’ So what I’m actually going to do here is I want to get rid of that phrase. So we’re going to exclude keywords, and I’m going to type in ‘bookkeeping’ and ‘bookkeeper.’

And then click ‘apply.’ So it’s going to get rid of that for all of our results here. Okay. So, now we’re left with a clear picture.’Computer tax service.’ That may not make sense, but here’s one that does: ‘small business accountant Toronto.’ It has 110 monthly searches, and it’s got an easy score at 28. So for me, I think this is probably going to be our primary phrase. So what I would do then is I would just simply write that down in my document as the primary phrase: ‘small business accountant Toronto.’ Then, I would keep going to find a few more that we can use as our secondary phrases. So let’s keep going here.

Let’s check it out and see what we can find in ‘accounting services, Inc.’ That sounds like another name of a business, so we’d want to skip that. So we’ll skip over all the ones that look like they’re the names of specific accountant offices. So here’s one that I really like. It has 50 monthly searches and only a 16 score, meaning it’s going to be really easy to rank for. So I’m going to click on this one: ‘Toronto small business accounting.’ And let’s keep looking.

And then, how about ‘affordable tax services Toronto?’ And we’ll round it out with ‘Toronto small business accountant’ and ‘Toronto small business CPA.’ So, to recap: we now have one primary phrase.

This is the one we’re going to go for on the homepage, more than any of the others, because it has the biggest search volume. And then this one, and these three will now be our secondary phrases. So you’re just going to want to write all of those down in your document. And then, you’re going to want to go onto your next page for your next service.

So that— our case that could be, you know, ‘bookkeeping,’ ‘bookkeeping Toronto.: And we could just repeat this process for that. But then for each, what we also need to do is we want to analyze our competition for each of our primary phrases for each page. Remember, each page has one primary phrase. We want to get a few key things here.

We want to get some closely related words that we should be sprinkling into our pages if possible. And we want to get a recommended minimum word count for each page, as well. In order to do that, we’re going to go all the way over to the left. We’re going to go down to where it says ‘SEO content template.’ So then,, here’s where we’re going to enter in our primary phrase that we just found.

And remember, that was ‘Small business accountant Toronto.’ And then, we’ll click on ‘create content template.’

And what that does is it analyzes the top 10 results for that phrase. You know, you can see those here, and it keeps going down to 10. And what that comes up with for us is some really interesting stuff that we want to use. So, we have semantically related words. And the idea is we want to use as many of these as possible if it makes sense in our content, just because Google is going to expect to see these kinds of words and phrases on your page. And that signals to them that you’re covering your topic extremely well.

So what you want to do is you want to write down each of these that makes sense, and you want to list that in your Google doc as well. And this is pretty much what this is going to end up looking like. So for your homepage, you have your guesses, which was accounting services, Toronto.

And then you have your primary phrase, which ended up being—based on our research—’small business accountant Toronto.’ And then we had our secondary phrases that we found, followed by all of the related words that we found. So that’s what you’ll do with all of these.

And then, here’s something else that’s important: text length. So that says the recommended text length is 376 words—which by the way, that is very low. It may be much higher for you, depending on your level of competition. And the idea here is with your page, you want to beat this number if you possibly can.

Keywords layering

PART 4 – Layering Your Keywords

In the last section, we gathered your most profitable keywords and phrases that you want to rank for on your website. Now’s the fun part, where we actually get to begin layering those into the pages that you’ve already created in a natural, easy-to-read way that won’t turn your human visitors off.

Now, I do want to start with a big bold disclaimer right off the top: Your humans come first. What I mean by that is, if you’re in a spot where you’re really struggling with a keyword phrase and working it in, and it’s just not going to read naturally—particularly if it’s in a prominent place on your site—you should probably pick something else, as in a different keyword, or not use it there at all.

At the end of the day, your pages need to actively persuade your human site visitors, AKA your future customers to do business with you. And brazen keyword-stuffing is going to actively work against that goal. And not only that, but Google is getting smarter every day.

They don’t rely on keywords alone. They can figure out what your pages are about regardless. And they also put a premium on pages that do the best job at satisfying the needs of the searcher. In other words, if your human visitors like your website, Google’s going to keep showing it to more and more people. So when you get to a spot where you have to make a tough choice, just promise me you’re going to choose a people-first approach.

Got it? Good. But I do have to say keywords do still matter. And I promise I’m going to show you some of my best tricks and tactics that are going to let you insert most of your phrases in a strategic way that’s going to optimize your SEO while still reading naturally for your human visitors. So, you’ll want to start with your list of pages and their accompanying primary phrases, secondary phrases, and those related phrases as well.

And here’s a 3000-foot view of what we’re going to be doing in the rest of this post.

So, we’re going to strategically work your phrases into your page, starting with your primary phrase, which will go in your page title in your URL when possible; your H-one tag, which is the main headline of your page; your first or possibly second H-two, which is going to be the headline for your problem-solution section, most likely the first sentence of your first paragraph (because your keywords do count for extra the higher up on the page they are).

So, for that reason, we really want to front-load your page as much as we can without being spammy with it.

Of course, we want to use it a few more times, wherever, whenever it makes sense and reads well. And we also want to use your primary phrase in the alt text of your most prominent image.

Now, alt text is really just the hidden text description of images that only the search agency sees. And just in case you’re an overachiever (which I’m guessing you are, cuz you’re here with me now) and you want to go for some extra credit—you can also include your primary phrase in an embedded YouTube video.

Now, this is completely optional, but it really can help to embed the right YouTube video with your primary phrase included in both the title and the description of the video. Don’t worry, we’ll get to it. So that covers our primary phrase on the page. What about your secondary keyword phrase as well? We’ll try to work each of those into at least one H-two or H-three.

Remember those are your sub-headlines on the page—once or twice in the body copy, wherever we can get it, and in one of your photo’s alt text. And for those related words and phrases?

Well, for those, we’re going to try to sprinkle them wherever, whenever they make sense to use them, as well as putting them in one photo’s alt text.

Now, let’s just jump into our website and actually layer in those keywords in real time. Okay. So, here we are back on our mocked-up homepage that, so far, we just have all that persuasive content here.

So now our job is to smartly layer in our keyword phrases, starting with our primary phrase. And ideally speaking, in an ideal world, we would want to put that in a few different places. We would want to put it in the main heading here, to the H-one tag.

It would be great if we could also put it in right here, in our first H-two in our problem-solution section. And if not there, then we’d want to put it in here. The idea being, we just want it to be in a heading more toward the top of the page, as well as—it would be great if we could put it in this first sentence in the first paragraph here. And then, from there, just anywhere else it’ll fit. Just a couple times if it’s possible. So let’s go ahead and refresh our memory.

So let’s go to our keyword list. Our primary phrase we’re going for here is ‘small business accountant Toronto.’ So here we go. Let’s try to get that in here where it makes sense to do it. And I should mention here—I happen to be using the element or page builder with WordPress.

The way you change the text on your site may be very different from this, but this tutorial really isn’t about the technicalities of how to change the text. It’s more just content-based. So with that in mind, let’s get customizing here. So here we have accounting services for small business.

But if we want to get in our phrase, ‘small business accountant Toronto,’ I actually have a pretty clever way to do that even with including the city name, which generally speaking can be very cumbersome when you try to do it. bBut I’m going to change this to something like

‘The small business accountant Toronto can count on.’ And you see what I did there. So basically, I used ‘small business accountant Toronto’ in a clever way to where it actually reads like a real sentence. And it also includes, like, a soft benefit that they can count on us. And you’ll notice over here, this is the H-one for the page. So it’s really great if you can get your primary phrase in the H-one. But again, it has to read well for your human visitors.

So if you can’t really shoehorn it in, in a way that reads well, I would say skip it here. And then just move on to try to get it in here instead. So let’s see what we can do here. We have ‘Accounting may not be the fun part of running a business, but try succeeding without it.’ So, I can tell you right now, it’s going to be very hard to get ‘small business accountant Chicago’ in here in a way that reads well without kind of repeating what we just said.

So what we can do instead of using the entire phrase is—what will help to some degree is including certain words in your keyword phrase. So again, let’s take a look at what we’ve got: ‘small business accountant Toronto.’

It’s four words. What of these words could we get in there, even if they’re not completely in this exact sequence? So let’s see what we can do to get a little closer. So we’ve already got ‘accounting,’ which is close to ‘accountant.’ and we’ve got ‘running a business.’ We could add in our keyword phrase of small business right here.

And that gets us closer. And we probably could work in our city name as well, which is good to do whenever you can, if you’re trying to rank locally. So we could say something like,’But try succeeding in Toronto without it.’ So do you see what I did there? I did not use our exact phrase, but I worked in elements of the phrase as it made sense to do it. Okay.

So we are making some progress. Now, again, the next place you want to try to add this is going to be in the first sentence or the second sentence right in here, somehow. And we’re probably running into another case where it’s going to be hard to repeat the exact phrase. So let’s see if we can at least get in some of the elements in here, in these first two sentences. So I have an idea here. I’m just going to change this to—what we were able to add in here is ‘small business accountant.’ And then, what we can do is we can add in Toronto right here.

So we’ve gotten it pretty close here. So rather than ‘small business accountant Toronto,’ we now have ‘small business accountant in Toronto,’ which is actually very close. And we’re definitely off to a good start here. And then we would just want to see if there are any more opportunities anywhere else that we can add it in, in a natural way. And again, if it’s cumbersome, you might want to go further on down the page.

Generally speaking, the features section, as well as the frequently asked question sections are good areas to kind of work in phrases that are a little harder to work in in other places. You know, I might be able to work something in down here. And generally speaking, the reason you can add these more awkward phrases down here is because people are generally not going to—they skim these. It’s more likely to not even be picked up on by people.

That’s why I like to use this particular section to work in some of those keywords. So I might change ‘a great monthly accounting service’ to ‘a great small business accountant in Toronto.’

So, is it perfect? No, but the human eye is not likely to really notice that being worked in there, so you’re good. So, you just do that once, possibly twice, and then we still have something else that’s really important we want to do, since this is our primary keyword phrase.

We want to name our most prominent photo on the website with that alt text. So, I’m just going to choose this background image here. And again, how you do this will depend on what you’ve used to create your website. I’m just going to choose the image here.

And then, and I’m going to go to alt text. And I’m just going to type in our primary keyword phrase, just like so, and then click on ‘insert media.’ And now this image has our alt text, and we are pretty good to go with our primary phrase. But there is still one more thing you can do for some extra credit for that primary phrase, if you want to choose to do it. So that would involve creating a YouTube video that you upload to YouTube.

And you have to title that video with your primary phrase. What I like to do is: primary phrase, then like some kind of divider line, and then the name of your business next to it. Then you also want to include your primary keyword phrase in the description, as well—super important to have in both places because, the thing is, Google owns YouTube.

So whenever you upload a video to YouTube, and then you embed that video on your website, you’re creating a really strong link between your keyword phrase and that video. So all I’m going to do here is copy this video link. I’m going to go back to our website and, for our case, I’m actually just going to delete this image and replace it with a video.

And I’ll just paste in our—okay, so now that video is embedded on the website and we’re getting all the benefits from our keyword phrase being part of the title and that description.

Okay. So that takes care of our primary phrase. What about our secondary phrases?

So for the purposes of this video, I’ve simplified it down to just two: ‘outsourced accounting services, Toronto’ and ‘Toronto, small business accounting.’ So what do we want to do with those? Ideally speaking, we want to use each one of them in either an H-two, like a headline like this or like this; or an H-three, which would be a subheadline like this, this, or this.

As well as, once or twice, just in any body copy, anywhere—any of this text here or this text here or this or this. We want to use each of them once or twice there as well.

And we want to use it as the text in some kind of an image. We’ve got images here. We have images here. So as long as we can get each secondary phrase as the text of one image, we’re good. So, let’s just see what we can do.

So let’s go ahead and use our first phrase, ‘outsourced accounting services, Toronto.’ And again, it’s going to count for the most the higher up on the page it is. So let’s try to get one instance of it in this section right here. Let’s read through it and see where we can do it. So we have,’So whether you need monthly bookkeeping, quarterly tax support, or an ongoing outsourced CFO, we’ve got you covered.’ So let’s go ahead and just make that one change right there.

So we’ll change an ‘ongoing outsource Toronto’ to ‘ongoing outsourced accounting services, Toronto. We’ve got you covered.’ So again, it’s kind of a clever way to use the city name in the sentence in a way that kind of reads not only naturally, but kind of casually and conversationally as well. But we don’t want to stop there. We probably want to put that in a headline as well, for maximum benefit.

So let’s try to work it into this headline. It just—it’s very basic. It just says ‘our services.’ But what if that were to say something more specific, like ‘outsourced accounting services Toronto businesses rely on,’ then we would just want to choose an image, and we’d want to make that the text.

So I’m just going to choose this first benefit icon and I’ll go up to ‘choose image.’ And there I’m going to add in our all text. So we have ‘outsourced accounting services Toronto’ is the text. And I’m going to click on ‘insert media.’ Cool. So that takes care of our first secondary keyword phrase. And now, let’s concentrate on our second: ‘Toronto small business accounting.’ So since we’re right here, let’s go ahead and make this headline incorporate that.

So rather than’Why choose us?

it could be something like, ‘Why do Toronto’s small businesses choose us to do their accounting?’

Now again, this is an instance of it not being perfect. But we do have ‘Toronto’s small businesses’ and we have ‘accounting.’

Now, if I really wanted to try to get that phrase exactly as is, I could have forced it, but I feel like this reads better. And it still includes the keywords well enough for Google to really understand what it is.

Again, writing for our humans first. Right? And let’s try to get that in somewhere—in a text, in just a body text where it makes sense. So let’s try it in this section, that’What will you get?’ The features section. So I’m seeing an opportunity right here. I’m just going to click on this guy and I’m going to change everything. You need to file it packaged up perfectly come tax time. I’m going to just add something.

‘As one of our valued Toronto small business accounting clients, you’ll have everything you need.’ So sometimes it’s just a matter of adding something kind of inconspicuous like that to get the job done. Then let’s give it an image that we can add some alt texts to. So we’ve already used this one. I’m going to use this one.

And let’s choose an image. And I’ll just pop in our alt text there, ‘Toronto small business accounting.’ Insert media. So that takes care of our primary and secondary phrases. Now what about all these related terms that we found?

So all we really need to do here is just try our best to use them on the page wherever possible. And the good news is you’ll probably find that your page is probably already using some of them. We don’t need to keyword-stuff these.

We just want to work them naturally here and there. So let’s just take a look at what we’ve got. ‘Tax return accounting services for small business accounting firm,’ ‘business owner,’ ‘long term,’ ‘public accounting,’ ‘CPA firm,’ ‘financial statements,’ ‘tax preparation,’ ‘small business accounting.’ So let’s just try to work these in where we can, starting at the top of the page. Let’s just try to find some opportunities. So, ‘tax preparation.’ That’s one of our terms already. So we already have it, and we can probably work on our term, ‘tax return.’ We have two: ‘filing.’ We could do two: ‘tax return filing.’

So a lot of times it’s just about making things more specific with adding these keyword phrases. And we already have the term ‘financial statements’ down here, which was one. And over here we could add in ‘high impact.’ We could add in ‘long term,’ which is one of our phrases then going on down. And I know that ‘CPA’ was one of our phrases. So rather than ‘our seasoned tax pros,’ we could say ‘our seasoned CPAs.’ And going on down here, ‘What will you get?’

So, we have ‘crystal clear statements,’ but ‘financial statements’ is one of our phrases. So let’s just clarify that: ‘crystal clear financial statements.’ And if you remember, ‘business owner’ was another phrase.

So maybe we can just work that in here:’As a business owner, you’ll always know where you stand.’ And I could go on and on with this, but you get the idea by now. Just look for little opportunities as you find them, and any images that you have left over that you haven’t already included alt texts on.

Go ahead and just add some of your related phrases to that. So I’m just going to choose this one. I’ll go to ‘choose image.’ I’ll put in, you know, maybe ‘accounting firm.’ And then, insert. And then here, for an image for a testimonial I might put in something else. I might put in, you know, ‘CPA firm.’ And then for this one I might put in ‘public accounting.’

You get the idea. Just max out all your images.Make sure each of them has a unique alt text. Do not use the same alt text on multiple images. That’s really important. And if you’re a local business, I have one more tip for you: to work that city name in at least a few more times.

And that’s to utilize your testimonial section. So simply add the city name, right next to or beneath the person’s name. Super simple. Now, at this point, you may be done with this page, depending on if you were able to naturally work your keywords into all the recommended places and if you’ve hit your recommended word count.

So, remember in the last video where we looked up how long your page should probably be to give you the best chances for ranking Well, now is the time to put that to the test and see if your page beats that number, or if there’s still some content left to add.

So, if your page is live on the web, you’re just going to go to the website, ‘wordcounter.net/WebsiteWordCount, and then you’re just going to paste in your webpage and then click on ‘count words.’

And it gives you the grand total right here. Or, if you’re just working with Google docs, you’re going to go up to ‘tools’ and ‘word count,’ and it gives you your count right there. And if you’ve hit your word count goal, congrats! You can move on to your next page.

If not, or if you weren’t able to get all your keywords in as many places as you should up till now, here are a few tips that are going to help you pad it out a bit, both for length and for those keyword opportunities.

The first thing you’ll want to do is try adding a few more FAQs, particularly ones that are going to let you use some of your keywords a few more times. You could also try adding a few more testimonials, but this isn’t as good for those keywords, since you can’t really ethically add words or phrases into somebody’s review. But it can still be good for adding a bit more length.

And if you’re still not there, you might need to bring in the big guns and add in an extra section to the very bottom of the page, right between the CTA block and the footer. So this section can really be just about anything, as long as it’s long enough to get the job done. I’d probably recommend adding a few columns with simple headings and text blocks that give a bit more background on some of your secondary phrases or related phrases.

Now, I should say, this is mostly going to serve as SEO-first content. And it’s the one place where I’m going to give you a pass to break the rule that I started this post out with.

And the reason being: by the time most people get all the way down to this point on the page, they’re probably not actually going to read all that text. But it still can give Google enough to grab onto to put you over the top.

And once you’ve done all this for your first page, you’re just going to rinse and repeat the process for the rest of your important products and services pages that you want to rank for. But we’re not done yet. There’s still one really important thing you can do to help your chances of ranking even more, and that’s properly optimizing the listing. That’s going to show up right in the search results. So if you get this right, it’s a huge signal to Google.

PART 5 – Supercharge Your SERP Listing

PART 5 - Supercharge Your SERP Listing

Welcome back to the final section, where we still have one very important job to help you. Not only rank higher, but get more qualified clicks to your website, too. I’m talking about optimizing your page’s MEIT and description. It’s what shows up in search results. And just like we’ve already done with your pages themselves, we need to strategically balance keywords and persuasive messaging.

Now, it is important to point out here that Google no longer factors in your meta-title or meta-description directly in their search algorithm, but using your keywords here still has an indirect benefit when it comes to your rankings.

We want to use your keyword phrase purely to create a sense of relevance that carries all the way through, from the search to your listing. If your listing doesn’t include the phrase that was searched, your prospect may feel like it isn’t going to deliver on what they’re looking for after all.

It’s not enough to show up at the top of the results page. You need them to click on that listing overall, the other choices too, right?—by including your keywords, which signal relevance as well as benefit and results-driven language that’s meant to persuade. And by doing it even slightly better within your competition, you’re going to get the clicks you need.

Not only does the initial click kickstart the entire buyer’s journey for your potential customer, but it’s also a really strong signal to Google, too. So, let me explain what I mean. If you perform any search on Google lets say local seo company toronto, they’re going to order the results in whatever order they predict will suit your needs the best. And Google’s all about data, right? So they have certain data-driven expectations about how likely you are to click on each one of these listings. For example, let’s say they expect that the number one result will be clicked on 31% of the time.

Number two will be clicked on 25% of the time. And number three will get 18% of the time. And, by the way, they have these kinds of expectation numbers for every position, all the way down. And if every listing is always clicked, according to their expectations, the list pretty much remains unchallenged and everything stays in the same order.

But let’s say you are in the number three spot, but you are able to write your title and description to be more intriguing and more clickable. And as a result, your listing gets clicked on 26% of the time. Instead of the 18% they expected, well you, my friend just shot up to the number two spot. Now this is a simplification of how it works, but I think you get the idea here.

I would perform their expectations of how often they think you’ll get clicked on and you start to climb through the ranks. So can you see why this is an opportunity that you don’t want to pass up? And the best part is this is actually really easy to do because most businesses don’t give this much thought at all. So here we are on our page within WordPress.

Now, depending on what you use to create your website, this may look different for you in terms of actually adding in your MEIT and description.

So it allows you to really quickly and easily take control over your title and description, among a few other things, but that’s what we’re going to be focusing on right now. Now, the only tricky part here is just packing in as much of a punch as possible with this extremely limited real estate that you’re given.

You’ll notice you have, you know, kind of a short space for your title, and then this is what they give you more or less for your description. But just like your page itself, you really want to keep your listing benefit-driven and customer-focused, while ideally working in your top keyword phrase as well.

And since we likely already worked that primary phrase into your H-one tag in the hero section, if you remember, let’s just go ahead and repeat that for your headline. And the way you’re going to do that, if you’re working with WordPress and the Yoast plugin—here, see where it says SEO title?

It’s given you, like, some things here. Basically, it’s going to pre-populate based on these elements. I’m just going to delete all of them. And I’m just going to paste in the exact text that we had in our H-one, ‘The small business accountant Chicago can count on.’ Because, if you remember, we worked in our keyword phrase, ‘small business accountant, Toronto,’ that way. And it also has a little bit of a benefit here with, you know, ‘can count on.’ And the reason I like doing it this way is because this creates a lot of consistency.

So when they click on this listing, they’re going to be greeted with the same message in that H-one tag really showing and solidifying that they’re in the right place. Now, if you have room here, which it looks like we do, because we’re still in this green zone. So what we could do is we could then add our branding here with our name.

Now that takes us into the red a little bit. So it’s up to you. We could either keep it like this. It’s fine. Or we could get rid of accounting. You could do any kind of divider line. You could do kind of like this or a colon, whatever you choose.

But I like this approach because it blends everything. Plus the name of your business, which is good, if you can fit it in there. Now for your slug. Now, this is actually going to be important on any, any page. Other than your homepage, you don’t really get anything. So if this website were AscendAccounting.com, the homepage obviously has no backslash after that. But if it was Ascendaccounting.com/BookkeepingToronto, that is going to be good for SEO. So, only do the slug on your interior pages. It’s not necessary on your homepage. So, I’m just going to delete it here, but now let’s talk about our description.

So, you’ve got some choices here. What you can do is you can either reuse your hero section sub-headline, which—I like that. Because again, that creates that consistency. So people know they’re in the right place. You can highlight the problem you solve, or you can use two or three of your benefits, or any combination of these elements that fits into the space.

So, I might type in something like, ‘Our financial experts will help you keep more of your money and get more of your time back.’ So you can focus on growing your business. I took these right from our benefits, and now we have a really strong search engine result, title and description. That really makes a case for why somebody would want to click on our listing over some of the other ones that are just more basic. And they just kind of—they take a ‘just the facts’ approach, which never works that great.

And it is worth mentioning that if you were to skip this part and not create your own MEIT and description, Google might just create one for you pulling in any random snippet from your page. Not super clickable, is it? And there you have it. These are all the steps that I personally take on any new small business website we create. And in my opinion, it is the best way to get big-time SEO results while still keeping all the elements in place that are proven to lead to lots of conversions, customers, and yes, profits. So, I hope you enjoyed following along with me.