How can you use SEO to improve your website's search ranking?
This week’s question for the Live Q&A on Facebook came in several parts, as follows:
What is good copy, for your website, social media, etc
Do you have any suggestions on how to get more activity on your website, and get a higher Google ranking?
And what’s the best way to use SEO?
The architect who asked this question is writing new website copy, so I focussed on websites in my answer. You can watch the 24-minute video where I explain this, below.
I want to state upfront that I am not an SEO expert although I have used various SEO techniques in copywriting for various clients over the past 15 years and on my own website. So I have a working knowledge of SEO and how to enhance your results, and I’ve included some recommendations about where you can get more detailed advice if you want to dive in deeper, either to DIY your own SEO or find a consultant.
The importance of accessible language
Before I get into SEO and copywriting, I want to reiterate that your outward facing marketing and communications should always be written with your intended audience in mind.
So whether you are writing for social media, your website, your local newspaper or an architecture awards entry, start by thinking about who you are writing for, and then make sure that the words and phrases you use will be understood by that audience.
That means no jargon, no archi-speak and no insider language, and the best way to test your current vocabulary is to refer to the ArchDaily list of “150 weird words that architects use”. You should banish those words and phrases from your copywriting – pin the list up beside your desk for easy reference if you think that will help!
What’s your architecture practice marketing strategy?
Today’s question about SEO and copywriting dovetails neatly with your architecture marketing strategy, because in order to get results with SEO, you need to understand who your future customer is (your ICA, or ideal customer) and what you are offering them as a service or product, and why your offering is unique and appealing (that’s your USP or unique selling proposition).
You need to know who you are targeting and what they will purchase from you in order to determine the words and phrases that future clients are likely to enter into the search bar. Once you know those keywords, you want your website to appear in the first page of search results, because very few people click to the second page or beyond.
Check your website’s current SEO performance
Start by finding out which words and phrases are currently bringing traffic to your website, using the Google Search Console tool or the Google Analytics tool.
Set up your Google Analytics if you haven’t already, then go to Acquisition then All Traffic to see where your traffic is coming from – it may be search, social media, email, direct to your website, etc.
You can also drill into Acquisition, Search Console, Queries, to see the search terms that are generating clicks – that is, visitors to your website – and Impressions, which is showing your site to people in search results. (The Google Search Console provides more data).
For my website, over the past month, some of the most popular search terms have been:
“Sounds Like Design”
#climateemergency
Architects Assist, and
Architects Declare
Looking at these results can be an eye-opener, because the terms that are currently working may not align with the words or phrases that you have targeted – or that you think people are using to search for your website.
How to use SEO to market your architecture practice
SEO can seem like the dark arts but essentially it’s about peppering your website copy (and metadata!) with the words and phrases that you think potential visitors to your website would enter into the search bar in Google.
Depending on your practice and intended clients, your search phrase might be:
“renovation house design Melbourne” or “new build Sydney eastern suburbs”.
If you’re not sure how to improve your rankings in search, I recommend you take a free course by copywriting and SEO expert Kate Toon. It’s called SEO Nibbles, and it’s a three-part program that she delivers via video, with resources and tools that will help you get clear on your current performance and what you’d like to target in future.
Kate emphasises the fact that SEO has three main pillars:
Technical – making sure your website back-end is tuned for SEO, ensuring that it is secure, ie it has the https prefix, because Google prioritises secure websites in its search rankings; and that it loads quickly, and a host of other factors that will impact your search results.
Content – which is your copywriting and use of keywords that visitors are likely to search for your; and
Links – which are the links from your site to others, and external sites to yours, that convey authority and trust. You can also increase your inbound links in author bios, directories, guest posting on other people’s websites, appearing in podcasts and media articles, etc, and you can check how many links your site currently has in the Google Search console (and fix any broken links).
However, if you’re not yet ready to commit to Kate Toon’s free course, you may prefer to look at the Help pages from your website platform – Squarespace and Wordpress both provide useful how to’s on the topic of SEO (see links below).
How do I improve my SEO?
Kate Toon outlines six key steps to improve your SEO and results rankings, and recommends you tackle them in this order:
Technical – to get your back end in top shape – she says there is no point tackling the other elements until this is finetuned;
Research your keywords – the words people are currently using, and the target keywords you want to rank well for;
Create epic content, using those keywords in your text and metadata;
Increase your backlinks, from other trusted and authoritative websites;
Content marketing – which is regular posting to your website or blog; and lastly
Measurement – looking at your stats, including the amount of time visitors are spending on your pages, how many pages they look at, the bounce rate etc, where they are coming from – search or social media or emails etc. You can monitor these metrics using Google Analytics, or using the Marketing Metrics Tracker spreadsheet I created for architects (get your copy here).
“How can we get more activity on our website and improve our Google ranking?”
Another way to push your practice up in the search results – which is not directly related to SEO – is to list it on Google’s My Business – assuming you have a physical office address you’re happy to publicise or that you serve a particular geographic area – because that will generate a Knowledge Graph result when people search for architects in a particular location, or close them them.
Also, did you know that Google bots crawl your website more frequently when you consistently post new content, which is why a lot of people blog regularly? You can also request the Google bots to crawl your site (see link below), but there are no guarantees that they will, and you have no control over the timing.
In order for Google to rank your website highly for your chosen search terms, you need to use those terms in your copy AND the metadata throughout your website, including:
URLs
headlines (the H1 style in your design template)
sub headings (the H2 style)
intros or excerpts
image file names and Alt text
tags, and
in Squarespace you can use the keywords in the SEO title and SEO description in your page setup (there is a similar process for Wordpress blog posts).
It’s worth mentioning here that if you are an architect whose website is image rich rather than text heavy, you can still be very deliberate about your SEO in all of those metadata locations, to increase your keyword rankings.
How long will it take to see SEO results?
Kate advises that it can take 3-6 months to see positive results, and she recommends taking actions in small chunks so that you can see what’s effective, rather than making a series of major changes at once and not being able to work out what worked (or didn’t work).
She provides a list of recommended suppliers on her website (link below), that’s people who’ve done her 8-week intensive course and can manage your SEO for you. According to Kate, you’d likely be spending upwards of $1000/month for at least six months to see useful results, which might make you more keen to do the free course, and start to finetune your own SEO!
Kate also offers a short course that costs $97, which leads you through her process, making it an inexpensive way to obtain expert guidance to tackle your own website.
It’s worth remembering that SEO is a huge topic – and because search algorithms and user behaviour are constantly changing – it’s not a set-and-forget part of your marketing plan. It requires monitoring and tweaking, and new regular content updates to stay on top of the rankings.
Hopefully these resources will set you on the right path to improve your search ranking results.
If you found this post and/or video useful, and want to share it with a friend, please send them a link to this article. And if you’d like to learn more about modern marketing for architects, you can enrol in the self-guided online program - Architecture Marketing 360: a CPD course for architects - and get started straight away, here.
Additional resources and tools
Kate Toon SEO Nibbles
https://therecipeforseosuccess.com/seo-courses/seo-nibbles
Kate Toon recommended SEO consultants
https://therecipeforseosuccess.com/suppliers
Moz – the Beginners Guide to SEO
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
On-page SEO checklist for new websites
https://talk.hyvor.com/blog/on-page-seo-checklist
Ask Google to crawl your URLs / website
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?hl=en
https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543547-Your-site-map
https://istartblogging.com/how-to-get-your-blog-indexed-in-google-search
Squarespace SEO Help
https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002090267-SEO-checklist
Wordpress SEO Help
https://wordpress.org/support/article/search-engine-optimization