A Website Word of Caution

I got to go back to my roots yesterday and do a Website Optimization audit for a client. Although many things have changed in the world of SEO, some things remain the same.

One of those things is having critical keyword phrases as part of your homepage content.

Google sees the searcher as their customer and, therefore, wants to give that searcher relevant results based on the words they type in the box. A key indicator that will help Google match the searcher with relevant websites is if the words they searched for are prevalent on the website. So if I searched for ‘Dentist in Sacramento’ on Google and those words were commonly used on a homepage, that increases the odds the site is a match for me.

So back to this client. We figured out that the majority of the content that Google was picking up was a rotating list of testimonials. Now don’t get me wrong, I love seeing testimonials on Websites, but they can wreak havoc on your SEO if it makes up the majority of your homepage content.

Instead of words like ‘Dentist’ ‘Sacramento’ or ‘Dental Implants’ being the most common words, this site had words like ‘Steve’ and ‘Great’ and ‘Recommend’ as their most common words. Great for testimonials, bad for SEO!

Type in your homepage address to the link above and look at the 10 most common words on your site. Make sure they are descriptive words describing you, your business or product or service. If they’re not, I would recommend creating better website copy using words the common Google searcher might use to find you or your company.