Where you show up in Google search results is determined by an algorithm that evaluates many characteristics of your website. Those characteristics, or ranking factors — both positive and negative — affect how visible you will be in search results.
Google’s ranking algorithm is reported to contain more than 200 SEO ranking factors, each with its own weight or level of importance.
Nobody knows all of the Google ranking factors, but experience gives us a really good sense of which are the most important.
Categories of Google ranking factors
There are three groups of ranking factors that are important to understand.
Technical ranking factors tend to be mostly managed by your web designer. They have to do with your website’s level of performance and what I refer to as Google-friendliness. These are typically site-wide factors rather than factors relating to individual pages on your site.
On-page ranking factors are typically controlled by you and relate directly to the content of your web pages and keyword optimization.
Off-page ranking factors are things you have somewhat less control over because they’re not on your website. These typically relate to your authority or importance on the web, based largely on backlinks.
Here is what I considered to be the top 10 positive Google ranking factors today. This list isn’t in any kind of priority order for a couple of reasons. First, it would be pretentious to claim that I know which of these factors are more important than which others. Secondly, good SEO is a function of many small techniques that support each other. No one of them is critically essential to good rankings — it’s the sum total of all of them that matters.
Mobile phones now account for more than half of all searches done. As a result, it’s essential that your website be mobile-friendly. I typically recommend ensuring your website is “responsive” which means that its display varies depending upon the device connecting to your site. That ensures that the same information is available regardless of the platform your visitor may be using.
2) Security (SSL and HTTPS)
Whether or not your website is secure is a ranking factor at Google. Beyond that, many browsers will show a “Not Secure” warning in the address bar when someone arrives on your website. Some website plug-ins actually display a warning page instead of the page on your site, encouraging people not to visit your site. Many people mistake the “not secure” warning as meeting your website is dangerous or may load viruses on your computer. The result is a certain portion of the people trying to visit your site abandoning it, costing you business.
To be secure you need to arrange to have an SSL certificate and your URL needs to begin with HTTPS instead of the insecure HTTP.
High-quality content is essential. It has a big effect on whether people stay to read it or bounce away (which Google sees as a negative ranking factor. Readability is a critical part of quality content. Another is customer focus; it’s important to focus on what’s in it for your reader/customer. That means focusing on benefits to the customer rather than features of your product or service.
Keyword relevance is also essential here. Your page has to show search engines that it’s all about your target keywords. That means having your keywords and related words and phrases in your content enough to make sure Google easily understands what your page is all about. But avoid keyword stuffing as that detracts from the quality of your content.
5) Headings and meta tags
Having keywords in headings and sub-headings gives them some extra weight with search engines and helps readers navigate your content efficiently. For that to happen, they need to be coded within heading tags to search engines can tell they’re headings.
While meta tags are not visible on the page, two items in the HTML code of your page are very important: the page title and the description tag. The page title isn’t a heading on your page, but it acts as the headline for your listing in all search engines. So it’s a critical place to include your keywords. Google says keywords in your meta description tag don’t influence your ranking, but since this description often ends up in your search listings it has a direct impact on how likely a searcher is to click on your listing.
6) Image keyword optimization
Every image on your page provides two or three places to put your keyword phrases in front of the search engines without keyword stuffing your text content.
The image filename is most obvious. An image filename of img183572x6.jpg tells Google nothing. But one that’s got a keyword in it (like nj-real-estate-lawyer.jpg) can really help.
Alternate text is text describing the image for visually impaired visitors who have their computers read the page out loud. It’s a great place to show your keywords to Google.
And if an image acts as a clickable link to someplace else, a title attribute generates a little text box that pops up when the user hovers their mouse over the image. It’s meant to tell the user what’s at the other end of the link if they click it, and is another place you may be able to use a keyword.
7) URL structure
Your URL structure helps you in three ways.
It improves the user experience of your listings in Google:
Links can sometimes serve as their own clickable text of a link.
Here’s an example from Moz:
8) Schema code
Schema markup is a common short term for structured data, named after Schema.org, the website for structured data markup. It’s sometimes called structured data markup and it tells the search engines exactly what kind of information is on your website. It’s totally in the HTML code behind your website and doesn’t affect what visitors see on your site. If you’re a local service area business, it can be especially helpful to identify your location and service area for local searches.
You can easily check out your own schema code in this schema code validator. If it shows you don’t have schema code, it’s time to fix that.
Page and Domain Authority strongly impact your rankings. These are metrics developed by the folks at Moz that attempt to predict how well a given website will show up in search results. It’s based largely on the number and quality of other websites that link to you and is designed to correlate with Google’s internal PageRank scoring.
10) Local prominence
Prominence refers to how widely across the web you’re listed with a correct and consistent NAP (name, address, phone). It’s particularly important for small businesses to show up in local search results and in the Google Local 3-Pack. These listings are often called citations and citation management deserves ongoing attention from small local businesses. But don’t be misled by many of the common misconceptions about citations that are floating around.
Feel free to use our free tool to check on several dozen top citation sources to see how your own prominence looks.
Bottom Line
None of these are absolutely essential. But none of them can be ignored either. Where you rank is the result of all of these things (and more). Just do your best with as many of these as you can.
How’s your experience been with these issues? What other factors do you think deserve to be included? Start a discussion below.
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Every page on a website needs a title tag or page title (both terms refer to the same thing. Here’s a quick explanation,) It’s not the visible title or headline on the page. Instead, it’s in the code of the page. But the page title is visible in three important places:
The headline of your listing in search engines
This is often the very first thing a visitor sees about your website. It’s one of the most important factors in encouraging a user to click on your page.
The tab of your browser
This is most helpful for people who have many tabs open in their browser, making it easier for them to get back to your page. Having keywords for the page near the front is helpful here because your page title’s likely to be truncated.
Social media platforms
This is an example of a blog page that’s been shared on Facebook. Notice how prominent the title tag is here.
Your page title tags are very important to your SEO, but they also contribute, positively or negatively, to the user experience of searchers. They should be crafted with care. Here are some rules of thumb to keep in mind.
Length
Avoid truncation if you can. Search engines allocate a finite amount of space to listing headlines. If your page title tag is too long, it will get truncated, possibly hiding important words. I suggest keeping your page titles under 60 characters. The real limit is in pixels, not characters, because some letters (M, W) are wider than others (i, l, t) but the 60 character limit is a good, easy rule of thumb.
Uniqueness
Every page deserves — no, needs — its own unique title tag. Too often I encounter websites that have dozens of pages showing the same page title; often it’s just the company name. When this happens, it not only doesn’t help the page to rank highly in search engines, but also doesn’t compel the searcher to click on it.
Some micro businesses who don’t pay a professional web designer find themselves left with the default page title from the theme that they use. You can spot these sites because page title of their home page is “Home” or some pages on their website have a title tag that reads “New Page”. Let me just ask: how likely are you to click on a page that shows up in the search engines with the headline that simply says “New Page”?
Focus
To achieve high rankings in Google or elsewhere, your pages must have a clear focus. A services page that lists everything you do or products page that lists everything you sell isn’t really “all about” anything. And the page title of “Services” or “Products” is equally unfocused. It’s unlikely to rank highly in search engines and if it does show up for search it’s unlikely to encourage the searcher to click on it. Every product or service needs its own page with content that’s completely focused on that product or service. Similarly, each page is title tag needs to clearly reflect the focus of the page.
Keyword placement
A good page title with keywords for the page near the front can grab the searcher’s attention immediately and assure them that clicking on your listing will provide information highly relevant to what they’re looking for. If you feel compelled to include your company name in page titles, it needs to go at the end — with the exception of your Home page where your name is also an important keyword. or the About Us page which is all about you. I typically discourage including your company name in title tags for internal pages because it dilutes the power of the keywords you’ve carefully included in the title tag.
If you have a well-known brand, see the exception to this rule next.
Your brand or company name
If you have a well-known brand name that’s respected nationally, or even locally, it may be well to ignore the prohibition recommended above. A strong brand name can increase your conversion rates — the likelihood of someone clicking on your listing when it shows up in search results. I would still recommend using it at the end of the page title except for your Home page and perhaps your About page.
Keyword stuffing
I’ve written before about the dangers of keyword stuffing. Since the beginning of search engines, business owners have felt a need to throw as many keyword phrases as they can at search engines so the page will rank for almost any way people search for it. That tactic may have actually worked 20 years ago, but once Google came on the scene it quickly became wise to that trick. Instead of helping, keyword stuffing actually hurts your ranking chances. And if such a page does attract visitors, the user experience of keyword-stuffed copy quickly drives them away.
Similarly, a keyword-stuffed page title is unlikely to attract clicks. What is the value to a searcher of the listing with a headline that says “Best Car Repair, Auto Repair, Car Repair Shop, Local Car Repairs”? Title tags like this are bad for searchers and are very likely to hurt your rankings. Search engines understand variations of keywords and common synonyms (car, auto) and would consider a title like this to provide a poor user experience, making it counterproductive.
Spend a little more time on your title tags
When creating a new web page or blog post, it’s tempting to write your page title and then create your content. Once you finish the content, you’re eager to publish it and get it out there. That’s when you should stop and take a breath. Revisit the title tag and make sure it still clearly identifies what your page is about. Think about it with the above rules of thumb in mind before you finalize and publish your content. A little extra thought and care can make a big difference in how many people choose to read your material.
Want to dig a little deeper? Online marketing agency Distilled has an in-depth article on how to make your title tags the best they can be.
Update September 2021 —SEO Owl has a nifty little tool to see if Google is truncating — or even completely rewriting — your title tags before they appear in search results. Check out the Google Title Rewrite Checker.
Facing challenges with your own page title tags? Start a discussion below.
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We always recommend that our clients host a blog on their own website. Google loves fresh content, and a blog is the perfect place to add new content on a continuing basis. Blogs are perfect for answering long-tail keyword searches. Keywords are the search phrases people type or speak into a search engine. Long tail keyword searches are typically at least four or five words and are thus quite specific. They are also easier to rank for than broader keywords.
Start with keyword research
You want to base your blog posts around keyword phrases that represent questions your customers or potential customers are likely to be asking. Blog posts that introduce a totally new idea are unlikely to show up in search because very few people will know to be searching about that. But if your blog answers a question that lots of people have, it’s more likely people will be searching for it.
That doesn’t mean you can’t introduce new subjects in your blog, just that those posts are unlikely to bring in readers from Google or other search engines. Those posts will need to be promulgated through things like your email newsletter, your Facebook page, or other social media.
How does a small business do keyword research?
If you’re one of our clients, we’ll do the hard work for you. But if you’re not, that doesn’t mean it’s out of reach.
One place a lot of people use is the Google Keyword Planner. It’s actually designed for Google Ads, but doesn’t have to be limited to that. You can also search for a good keyword planning tool. In tools like this you can enter sample keyword phrases and see what related phrases are searched for frequently.
Be careful to avoid using keyword phrases that are jargon — terms that are common to you but may not be common to your target market. Google used to have a rule to help identify potential keywords; they called it “Ask Ten Taxi Drivers”.
What that means is to ask a number of people who might become customers or clients but who are not in your line of work. They’re likely to use terms you wouldn’t think of because they’re not as close to your business terminology as you are. What questions do they have? Are those questions lots of people might ask? If so, those are good questions to build a blog post around.
Check the search volume
Your keyword research should indicate roughly how many times a month each variation on your keyword phrase is searched. You don’t automatically want to pick the one that is searched most frequently. That’s because you need to balance that with relevance to your customers and your business. A good keyword phrase is searched often enough to make it worthwhile and is also focused enough to be of interest to your target market.
If your keyword phrase is a question, it might make an excellent headline for your blog post. You might also want to use it in the title tag and/or the description tag of your blog post.
Long gone are the days when the key to showing up for a search phrase was to repeat that search phrase multiple times throughout your blog post. Don’t do that; Google abhors keyword stuffing.
Instead, use variations on the keyword and linguistically related terms. For example if your post is about how to pick the best running shoe, you might explain the difference between running shoes and sneakers, tennis shoes, and jogging shoes.
Make sure your primary focus is on answering the question. Chances are you will almost automatically use related terms that will help Google understand how related your blog post is to that question.
Check out your competition and be better
Take a look at other material online that tries to answer your question or is all about your chosen keyword phrase. Figure out how you can answer the question better or more thoroughly. Identify what they didn’t explain well, and do a better job than they did. See what they left out and include it.
Google is getting better and better at identifying the best answer for a question. Make sure it’s yours.
Allow comments
If people can comment or ask questions at the bottom of your blog post, you can engage with them and leverage the value of your blog post in terms of converting readers into customers.
Promote your blog post
Share your blog post where you think it will find interest. I like to promote every new blog post I write on social media and in my email newsletter. It’s always helpful to jump start visibility of your content.
Questions? Share them in the comments below.
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“Alexa, tell me about voice search” “I found this information on: Boy George”
Virtual assistants may be far from perfect – just search #AlexaFail on Twitter – but they sure are popular.
A 2018 survey of over 90,000 internet users found that 17% currently own a smart speaker (such as a Google Home, or an Amazon Echo), with a further 34% planning to purchase one in the near future. 20% of mobile Google searches are also carried out using a virtual assistant such as Siri.
Voice search is clearly here to stay, and businesses need to pay attention. Why? Because while the Alexas and Siris of the world may be saving lives, they could be killing your SEO.
We’ll take a quick look at four foolproof ways to stay on their good side.
1. Siri Loves Structured Data
It’s true, she really does.
But first, what exactly is structured data? Structured data helps the Google bots to better understand your website, and the content you write. While humans can easily identify tables, lists and reviews by sight, robots need a little more help. When you add structured data to your pages, you’ll need to use what’s known as ‘schema markup’. This is a specific type of HTML code that lets Google recognize the format of the data you’ve added, and – crucially – pull this data through for search result snippets. Think of it like speaking to the Google bots in a language they can understand. And the better they understand you, the better chance your site will have of ranking.
That said, adding elements like ‘review schema’ benefits users, as well as robots. By pulling through a review’s star rating to the results page, users have a far clearer idea of the type of content they’ll be viewing, which in turn should boost your click-through rate. Plus, by adding a variety of types of content to your pages you’ll also improve the experience of those viewing your site online (nobody likes to be faced with a huge wall of text!), so it really is a win-win.
So why does voice search favor structured data so much? By adding schema markup in the right places, you’re spelling out to Google exactly where it can find the content it needs to answer a voice search query. The easier you can make its job, the better!
And keep your eyes peeled for the launch of ‘speakable structured data’. It’s still in its BETA phase at the moment, but if introduced it will let you wrap certain parts of your copy in a specific markup code to signpost it as the perfect voice search result for Google.
2. Conversation is Key
The way we type a search query is different from the way we search by speaking aloud.
Instead of typing ‘what is SEO’, or even ‘SEO what is’, we’re more likely to say ‘what’s SEO?’. This might seem like semantics (and technically, it is!), but bringing a conversational feel to your content is a surefire way to set you up for voice search success.
Here are three easy ways to nail conversational content:
Use contractions, such as what’s, it’s, and here’s. This is simply more reflective of how we speak. E.g. ‘You might be wondering exactly what SEO is. Here’s a quick breakdown…’
Use questions and answers. Why? Because it makes your content more engaging, and it signposts snappy answers to be picked up as voice search snippets. E.g. ‘So what is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s all about…’
Use natural language. It can be tempting to drift into complicated language in your copy, which can be off-putting to both robots and humans alike. Follow the easy rule: ‘If you can say it in a simpler way, do’.
But how does mobile responsiveness help with voice search optimization? With the vast majority of voice searches still carried out on mobile, your site needs to offer the best mobile user experience in order to compete for voice search snippets. That means a site that’s fast, and easy to navigate from your phone.
Again, this is something that will benefit all your mobile users, not just those using voice search.
4. Fish for Long-Tail Keywords
When it comes to targeting keywords, voice search presents an opportunity rather than a challenge.
People are lazy when they type. They rely on search engine intelligence to decipher the meaning behind their two or three word queries: think ‘best restaurant Washington’, ‘website cost’, or ‘find gas station’.
With voice search, people are a lot more talkative. You’re far more likely to see queries such as ‘where’s the best restaurant in Washington?’, ‘how much does a website cost?’ or ‘how far away is the nearest gas station?’.
First, the gift of extra information and a question word in these queries gives a much clearer idea of the user intent behind the search. By targeting these long-tail keywords, you’ll create more precise content that gives users the answers they’re really searching for.
Second, you can (almost) say goodbye to shoehorning awkwardly worded keywords into your articles. Voice search queries are generally fully formed sentences that will easily double up as engaging H2s and H3s. Get ready for your content to (almost) write itself!
So there you have it: four simple ways to set your site up for voice search success.
But the best part? As we’ve mentioned throughout, these optimizations will improve the quality of your site for all users, not just those finding you through voice search. That means happy customers, happy search engines, and a website that’s ready to face future Google algorithm updates head on.
About the Author
Hannah Whitfield writes for Website Builder Expert, the number one resource for getting people online. Behind every successful online business is a sound knowledge of SEO, and Hannah wants to bring you the latest developments that’ll keep you one step ahead of the competition.
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Owners of small (and very small) businesses are usually highly skilled in what they do. But they often have insufficient experience with SEO. Despite our company name, there’s no “magic” in SEO, but it’s not intrinsically obvious either. I hope it’s helpful for you to know these pitfalls and avoid these common small business SEO mistakes..
The Top 8 Small Business SEO Mistakes
1) Not starting SEO soon enough
It’s very common for small business owners to recognize very early on that a website is indispensable to their business. They will often spend a great deal of time and effort in creating a website that is robust, full-featured, attractive, and even sexy. Often it will include a blog with months or years of laboriously crafted information.
But without SEO, all of that information may be inaccessible to potential customers. It’s like a Billboard in the Woods. Want to find out if your site is a Billboard in the Woods? Conduct a simple test.
Once you realize that your beautiful website can’t be found, SEO becomes a priority. And at that point, it may require you to make major changes in your website design, structure, and content. The sooner you start your SEO, the less work you’ll have to re-do on your site.
2) Writing for Google
Your audience is people: current and future customers or clients. But out of zeal to achieve high visibility in Google, many small business owners focus on Google instead of on their customers.
That can result in practices that violate Google’s standards, like creating doorway pages. It’s always a bad idea to try to fool Google into ranking you higher than you deserve. But even without that, thinking too much about Google and too little about your customers often results in content that goes overboard in terms of keyword inclusion.
Keyword stuffing makes a web page read awkwardly and creates a poor user experience which may well drive people away. A few years ago in Google’s Penguin algorithm update, they specifically focused on penalizing keyword stuffing.
3) Not understanding the customer
As business owners, we’re always focusing on what we do and the advantages or features of our products and services. It’s natural to write about that on our websites.
But that misses the point.
Our natural temptation to brag about our features leads to one of the most common small business SEO mistakes.
Customers don’t care what the features are; they care about what it will do for them. To get customer to buy from you or patronize your services, you need to explain what’s in it for them. What benefits you offer, not what features you have built into your products or services.
It’s also important to write with a customer focus in mind. If your web pages talk all about what “I” or “we” can do, it misses the marketing message. Your web content needs to talk about whatever desire, pain point, or purpose the customer has in conducting the search that brought him or her to your website.
It’s natural to want to focus your SEO on search phrases that people search for a great deal. Optimizing for a phrase that people search for hundreds of thousands of times a month instead of phrases that people search for 20 or 30 times a month. The problem with that is that such keyword phrases are usually way too competitive for a small business to compete with.
On the bell curve, keyword phrases that fall in the middle of the curve get the most searches, but are also the most competitive. Long tail keyword phrases — those out near the edges of the curve — can be finely tuned to focus on your unique selling proposition and good rankings are much more achievable for them.
Don’t optimized for car repair. Optimize instead for brake repair. And transmission repair. And each of your auto services. Even better might be to optimize for brake repair in [your town or county].
Don’t optimize for New Jersey lawyer. Optimized instead for New Jersey workers compensation lawyer. Or New Jersey child support lawyer. Or NJ real estate attorney.
5) Not writing enough
Too often small business owners want to keep their pages short and “punchy”. You may recognize that people don’t have the patience to read a great deal of content. The Internet expression TL:DR has become popular lately. It means “Too Long: Didn’t Read”.
The mistake here is that people don’t read a web page the way they read a novel. They scan or skim, looking for subheadings to find the morsels that they are particularly interested in. If your copy is constructed well with frequent subheadings, it won’t be intimidating to the visitor on your site. And they can find what they need to know easily.
Beyond that, though, if you’re optimizing a page for two or three different but related keyword phrases, you need at least 300 words of copy to help Google understand what the page is all about. To include those keywords on the page enough with fewer than about 300 words inevitably requires you to do keyword stuffing
This is a critical error I see a lot. In order to present the website from growing too large, a business will include a page titled Services. On that page they may have a bulleted list of all the different things that they do, possibly with a sentence or two of description about each of them. This is an all-too-common small business SEO mistakes we see often.
If a page is about everything you do, it can’t possibly be “all about” any one thing that you do. Let’s say your car repair shop does transmission repairs. If that is only one item out of a bullet list of a dozen or two services you offer, Google is never going to want to show that page to somebody who’s looking for a transmission repair shop.
If, however, each item listed on your Services page links to another page that is truly all about that specific service, those are the pages that Google will like.
7) Forgetting about the code
This is understandable. As a small business owner, you probably know little about HTML code — the computer code that tells a browser or phone how to display your page — and care about it even less. But there are certain things in the HTML code which the visitor to your site never sees but have a critical role in your SEO.
The page title tag is the most powerful place to have keyword phrases appear. That’s in the code; it’s not the main headline on your page.
The description meta tag often appears as a snippet in the search engine results even though it doesn’t appear on your visible web page. That can play significant role in whether someone clicks on your listing in Google or one of the listings below you.
There are a lot of coding techniques that can help your SEO. You ignore them at your peril.
8) Failing to monitor results
Your search rankings are going to bounce around a bit, and that’s inevitable. But if you’re not paying attention to them, and your rankings begin to slide, you may not notice it in your revenue numbers until much later. You should always monitor your rankings, your web authority, your competitive position, your social media presence, and your citations across the web. It’s also important to run periodic site crawls to reveal whether Google or other search engines are running into difficulty understanding what’s on your website.
Sometimes changes in Google’s ranking algorithms can begin to hurt you even though everything you have done up to that point is effective. For example:
Having a mobile-friendly website that’s easy to use on a phone was unimportant just a few years ago. Today it’s critical, and is a ranking factor at Google.
A few years ago, secure websites with URLs starting with HTTPS only applied to websites that collected personal information like credit cards and email addresses. No longer. Secure websites now enjoy a boost in rankings compared to those that are not secure.
As a small business owner, you can’t be expected to stay on top of every change in how Google ranks websites, but if you monitor your results you’ll know when something is going wrong. Only then can you take steps to fix it.
Rank Magic can help!
That’s rather a lot of small business SEO mistakes to be aware of and to deal with. And as a small business owner we know you have your hands full just running your business. That’s where Rank Magic can help.
If you’d like us to explore your website over the phone with you and highlight any problem areas you may not be aware of, just give us a call. The call is free, but the advice can be priceless.
We welcome your opinion. Join the conversation in the Comments below!
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Prominence refers to how widely across the web you’re listed with a correct and consistent NAP (name, address, phone). It’s particularly important for small businesses to show up in local search results and in the Google Local 3-Pack. These listings are often called citations and citation management deserves ongoing attention from small local businesses. But don’t be misled by many of the common misconceptions about citations that are floating around.
Every page deserves — no, needs — its own unique title tag. Too often I encounter websites that have dozens of pages showing the same page title; often it’s just the company name. When this happens, it not only doesn’t help the page to rank highly in search engines, but also doesn’t compel the searcher to click on it.
To achieve high rankings in Google or elsewhere, your pages must have a clea
r focus. A services page that lists everything you do or products page that lists everything you sell isn’t really “all about” anything. And the page title of “Services” or “Products” is equally unfocused. It’s unlikely to rank highly in search engines and if it does show up for search it’s unlikely to encourage the searcher to click on it. Every product or service needs its own page with content that’s completely focused on that product or service. Similarly, each page is title tag needs to clearly reflect the focus of the page.
If you have a well-known brand, see the exception to this rule next.
We always recommend that our clients host a blog on their own website. Google loves fresh content, and a blog is the perfect place to add new content on a continuing basis. Blogs are perfect for answering 
You want to base your blog posts around keyword phrases that represent questions your customers or potential customers are likely to be asking. Blog posts that introduce a totally new idea are unlikely to show up in search because very few people will know to be searching about that. But if your blog answers a question that lots of people have, it’s more likely people will be searching for it.
If you’re one of our clients, we’ll do the hard work for you. But if you’re not, that doesn’t mean it’s out of reach.
If your keyword phrase is a question, it might make an excellent headline for your blog post. You might also want to use it in the 
Take a look at other material online that tries to answer your question or is all about your chosen keyword phrase. Figure out how you can answer the question better or more thoroughly. Identify what they didn’t explain well, and do a better job than they did. See what they left out and include it.
Allow comments
“Alexa, tell me about voice search”
When you add structured data to your pages, you’ll need to use what’s known as ‘schema markup’. This is a specific type of HTML code that lets Google recognize the format of the data you’ve added, and – crucially – pull this data through for search result snippets. Think of it like speaking to the Google bots in a language they can understand. And the better they understand you, the better chance your site will have of ranking.
The way we type a search query is different from the way we search by speaking aloud.
Mobile responsiveness is no longer the secret of clued-up web designers; all the 
About the Author
SEO Mistakes Are Easy
It’s very common for small business owners to recognize very early on that a website is indispensable to their business. They will often spend a great deal of time and effort in creating a website that is robust, full-featured, attractive, and even sexy. Often it will include a blog with months or years of laboriously crafted information.
Your audience is people: current and future customers or clients. But out of zeal to achieve high visibility in Google, many small business owners focus on Google instead of on their customers.
It’s natural to want to focus your SEO on search phrases that people search for a great deal. Optimizing for a phrase that people search for hundreds of thousands of times a month instead of phrases that people search for 20 or 30 times a month. The problem with that is that such keyword phrases are usually way too competitive for a small business to compete with.
This is a critical error I see a lot. In order to present the website from growing too large, a business will include a page titled Services. On that page they may have a bulleted list of all the different things that they do, possibly with a sentence or two of description about each of them. This is an all-too-common small business SEO mistakes we see often.
This is understandable. As a small business owner, you probably know little about 
Your search rankings are going to bounce around a bit, and that’s inevitable. But if you’re not paying attention to them, and your rankings begin to slide, you may not notice it in your revenue numbers until much later. 