SEO fumblings

Part 5

Me, first encountering SEO resources

Baby steps

Let’s try and get some traffic

In Part 4 we got some insights by putting the product in the hands of our users and being poker-faced researchers.

While we were considering improvements based on those insights, we wondered how we could get strangers to discover our calculator.

I know nothing

Before starting this project, here’s what I knew about search engine optimization (SEO):

1. There are some HTML tags you need. They make it easier for search engines to find your site.
2. Other people linking to your site is a good thing. If everyone’s pointing at you, Google thinks you’re important.
3. People write books on SEO and there’s someone at work who’s entire job is SEO. There’s clearly a lot I don’t know.

I started by Googling for “how to improve SEO” and got loads of crap, which was a little surprising. I assumed that the people who have the best SEO resources would be the ones who are best at SEO, meaning I’d find them 🤷‍♂️

Just do something

Still, I found out what those HTML tags I needed were. That turned out to be one HTML tag, which was popped in. Here it is:

<meta name="description" content="A simple furlough pay calculator. Find out how much monthly pay you're entitled to in the UK" />

Then I thought about links. I think we have some control over that. How can I get other sites to link to our site, and expose those links to lots of people?

How about…writing a Medium blog 🙊

We’ll link to the site in each post and share those posts everywhere, spreading links to our product around the web for Google to find.

Baby impact

Blogging

I’d already linked the site up with Google Analytics, and after writing the first blog post and sharing it on Linkedin and Twitter, I watched the numbers.

Shortly after we got our peak amount of simultaneously active users on the site. 12! 🍾

Getting indexed

At this point, our site was up on the web. If you typed in http://furloughpaycalculator.co.uk/ to your search bar and hit enter, it appeared.

But was it searchable?

I learned that you can search site:furloughpaycalculator.co.uk in Google to definitively see if it’s there or not. It was not 🤔

After a bit of digging, it transpired that Google doesn’t index new sites instantly. It has things called “crawlers” that search the internet for sites. When they find a site they “index” it, meaning they add it to the sites Google knows about.

But the internet’s a big place. If you search “how long to index in google”, the first answer is “between 4 days and 4 weeks”. That sucks.

Whilst pondering about that, I wrote the first blog post.

Within 2 hours of publishing Part 1 our site started appearing on Google search. We’d been indexed! The site was still only coming up by searching site:... and was nowhere to be found with keywords like “furlough pay calculator”, but still, that’s something! 🍾

Still not sure if that was a coincidence or if the blog traffic gave Google’s crawlers a poke 🤷‍♂

Bigger steps

Making your own luck

More and more people seemed to be looking at Part 1, particularly on Linkedin.

That first post now has 2.5k impressions, which I was not expecting.

Someone asked if I’d like to give a talk on the project. Someone at my girlfriend’s work asked if this chap they’d seen on Linkedin was her boyfriend. A bunch of people reached out and offered tips.

Even though the traffic wasn’t growing that much, it was trending in the right direction and sharing blog posts on Linkedin seemed to be making random things happen.

In the absence of any other clear direction, I decided to keep writing small posts every day to increase the chance of more random helpful things and to get more pages on the web pointing at our little calculator.

Our first marketing failure

I also tried a Google Adwords per-per-click campaign on their most cheapskate pricing for a few days, just see if that’d boost us up the search rankings and get some momentum. It was lame.

The worst campaign ever

What next?

Still feeling a little lost about SEO, I put a call out for any helpful advice on a couple of Slack spaces I’m in.

One got ignored, the other one hit gold, and, at the same time, my work pal Jack Cully got in touch on Linkedin, saying he’d be up for practicing his marketing skills on the site. Minutes later, he was head of marketing.

Some real swell things were shared with me, mainly from Nikesh 🙌 🙌 🙌

1. This blog post, which has a list of SEO essentials to consider.
2. This magical site, that gives your site an SEO audit and lets you analyze the traffic of your competitors in really great depth. I can’t believe it’s free.
3. A presentation on SEO from work, which I can’t share externally but it had a quote which I’m finding to be a nice way to think about all this:

“SEO is about getting search engines to love our content and product as much as our users do”

Little learnings

While there’s a bunch of little things you can do to improve the chances of Google’s crawlers finding you, such as…

1. Including a meta description tag in your HTML (with keywords for crawlers to latch on to)
2. Minifying all of your code to make your site more performant (speed is valued by search engines)
3. Adding a sitemap (so that it’s easier for Google’s crawlers to find all your pages, here’s how to make one)

Big learnings

…it seems like the absolute best things to focus on are:

1. Finding out who your best performing competitors are
2. Finding key search terms leading to their high performing pages
3. Creating content with those keywords on your site. Then, linking back to your site within that content. Base the content around questions your users are asking so that it’s valuable to them (you can find what they’re asking with Google Trends)
4. Share that content on every social channel under the heavens

If your content is the best, you win (well, that’s the idea).

Next, in Part 6, we put this strategy into action 🚀

If you read past the tapir, chances are you read the whole thing. If you dig it, give us a few claps. It’ll help others find this too.