5 Easy Google Start-up Marketing wins – even you can grab

Speed or lack of it kills your ranking performance. Since 2018, Google has considered speed a significant ranking metric and a poor score on their Page Speed Insights tool tells you why you are not topping the charts.

Head over to the tool to test yourself. It’s completely Start-up marketing friendly (As in, it’s free.) and is direct from the horse’s mouth:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

You can see your mobile and your desktop score. It will give you a load of gobbledegook to fix but the bottom line is this:

– Reduce the number of unused apps or plugins and ensure the leftover code is gone.
– Compress your images down and use a tool like Cloudflare on Shopify or Imagify on WordPress to turn them into WebP.
– Move a block of SEO valued text above the fold, so when the site loads for a new user, there is something easy to paint on the screen.
– Try to build natively into a platform and reduce the number of page builder tools that paint onto your site.
– Minify CSS and Java code using a content delivery network or a tool like SGOptimiser available from Siteground with their cheap hosting service.

Will this fix everything?

No, but it will make a hell of a head start. In fact, it’s not just ranking factors that matter with site speed, it’s conversions at the basket and checkout too.

Your sales will benefit most likely if your site becomes quicker to load, which is a key target in any start-up marketing strategy.

Is your site logically laid out?

Do you have blogs and guides on specific products you are trying to rank for, in other areas of your site?

What this can lead to is keyword cannibalization which can confuse search engines over which page to rank for. The result is you end up with 2 or 3 poorly performing pages, whereas 1 optimised page may mean page 1 results.

If you want some tips on how to do that, there’s a great post from the team at Ahrefs here.

If you don’t have the tool or the understanding of how to do it, you can always use our zoom/telephone consultation service and we can run through it for you over the video and leave you with immediate tasks to work on.

If Google can’t be clear what order your site should be in, then there is a good chance too, that user’s may miss valuable information you have spent time and money on.

We all do this, we name products on our website how WE in an industry refer to them. Your customers probably don’t.

This means you have a website that is targeting words, only your competitors use, NOT your potential shoppers.

A little bit of keyword research can mean a good site, ranking badly, will become awoken. I’m talking about you guys.

Awaken your beast – do some keyword research. Need help? Check out our easy guide to keyword research here:

– Keyword Research and how to layout a website

Some tools that help with keyword research are SEMRush, Ahrefs and Answer the Public. They are all paid services but the value you can gain from them can be immeasurable.

We all love a pretty website with lots of pictures, but the truth is, search engines don’t.

This is because these search engines can’t read much from the pictures, so they rely on Html code and meta-information to explain what the page is about.

Add a section of text to key pages on your site that focused SPECIFICALLY on the word/s that you want that page to rank for. You don’t want every page ranking for ‘Terry’s Hardware Store’ do you? You want your homepage to win that battle, while your ornate Hammer Collection, will want to win for words like:

– Hammers to buy
– Buy hammers near me
– Buy hammers online

etc, etc

Make sure the text you add to a page is at least 300 words or more and uses variations of that word too. This covers all bases and shows a more unique content depth also.

Not sure what other terms are similar?

Use a thesaurus or a tool such as LSI Graph and SEMrush. A Semrush free trial can be got here too.

What SEMrush lets you do, is plug in a term and it will give you a truckload of ideas of similar terms and some suggested writing ideas for new content. So, if you’re scratching your head over what to write next, this will smash that mind-block for you.

Once you have added written content to your pages, it is clearer to Google, what the page is about and if your competitors haven’t taken the time to do this, then you already have an advantage over them here.

Improvements won’t be immediate, but if you jump up a few spots, it will validate the work you have done, so you start to do it more. Doing this will also make you less likely to cannibalise key terms.

Which brings us to number 5

What the hell is the largest contentful paint when it’s at home? Start-up marketing plans need to be including this sooner rather than later.

Good question and it relates to a new set of ranking criteria that the Big G will roll out in January 2021. Largest contentful paint is the bit that sits in the initial browser window when a visitor lands on your site. This area is known as ‘above the fold’. The largest piece of visual content is the LCP.

The time it takes for this LCP to load is your LCP time and if it’s below 2.5 seconds you are okay, if it’s longer, then you need improvements and it will likely have a negative effect on your search appearance.

How do I fix my LCP time?

The easiest way to do this is having already compressed files, to move your text block to this area. If the largest screen object is a text block, then it’s easier for this to load than a big hero banner.

The added benefit of doing this is text content is considered of higher value the higher up a page it is.

Text in your footer offers little value to your site, the text above the fold says “THIS IS IMPORTANT STUFF!”

There you have it, a way to improve what will be known as a Core Vital metric from Google and help yourself with an easy to do DIY SEO action plan.