You’ve heard of building in public, but have you ever heard of ranking in public?
In an effort to give the SEO industry a bit more transparency, we’re going to be showcasing some of the techniques we’ve been using to try and reach page 1 for the term, “web design sydney“.
We started out on this little adventure only 3 weeks ago on the 24th of Oct, 2024. I posted a video over on our YouTube channel. In there, I highlight why we’re going after this keyword, the main players, and what we’re going to try in order to reach page 1.
We first analysed the big 3 players who have been ranking very well for many years – Milk Digital, JimmyWeb and Redback Solutions. Milk Digital was the most surprising to me as they only have 1 page…. yes, 1 page!! No other pages exist for these guys and it seems like an extremely bold move.
I don’t think we can replicate the 1 page strategy for Milk Digital, no blogs, no contact page, no about, nothing. Just a one pager. Seems extremely risky in today’s competitive environment, and I suspect they’re being propped up by a mountain of links that we just don’t have.
Rather than go for link building at this stage, I decided to then focus on the fundamentals in this early stage for our site.
We don’t have a page for Web Design Sydney!
It makes sense that in order to reach a local audience, we have a page localised to it. We didn’t have this, so the first order of business was to get this page created and localised with the right text.
Initially when I built the page, I copied what I’ve seen many other sites do online, and simply duplicate their existing ‘web design’ page, and attach the ‘sydney’ to the end of it. Easy right?
Google must have changed their algorithms with the latest wave of AI content farms as this lead to our page simply not being indexed at all. We also timed this so elegantly during the August update, and during the current November update so things have been very turbulent, not just on our site, but on the SEO industry as a whole.
On the site, we changed up the content to be less generic, and more Sydney focused, and after 2 weeks, we were finally indexed on Google.
Don’t forget about the Schema
Schema is one of the key on page pieces of information to get your site ranked. It provides rich information to Google and other search engines, and AI :| to help understand your site, the links to social media, the services offered, and of course, the location of your business.
Once we built this out, we simply dumped it in via Elementor code snippets. Easy!
NAP (Name, Address, Phone)
I’ve been in the SEO game since 2008 back in my time at Ark Advance in Auckland (was called Permission Website Marketing back then). And a lot has changed in that time. Directories used to be one sure fire way to get a link and some ranking points.
However, a lot of that has changed, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t useful as a signal for big G dawg.
We updated a few directory listings we had on Yellow Pages, White Pages, StartLocal and TrueLocal.
It’s not as important as back in 2008, so this was definitely the lowest priority, and not something we spent too much time on.
Google My Business
I realised one of the things we didn’t do on our GMB page was to add in the address. Then I realised, we didn’t do an address on our Contact page either. This was a quick and easy fix so I updated both our GMB and contact page quickly.
Finally…. we’re showing up…. somewhere
And after all that, we finally started showing
The journey of getting to page 1 starts on page 15 apparently, as we’re now showing up in position 153! Eeek!!
Though it’s not quite what we were after, but this just goes to show you what the state and competitiveness of the search engine market is for competitive keywords.
Keep posted here for more updates.
