Sure fire ways to increase your Google ranking 🚀

Foreign. Google My Business GMB gives you the best opportunity for optimizing your listing on Google and give you the best opportunity to appear in these results here, top of the page above the usual organic results. So hopefully you've already got yourself a Google My business listing. And assuming you have, then this is what you'll see. And the reason it's important is because this, if we have a look at the three month results, then you could be looking at these sorts of numbers. Tens of thousands of search hits with hundreds if not thousands of clicks directly to your website. So this is exactly what it is that you're trying to achieve. It's also great because you can also know what you are being found for. So if we just look at the laurels over the last three months, you can see here, this is exactly the term that we use, main SEO term, this is the secondary one. So you can see we are doing really well on Google Business for exactly the terms we want to be. If we scroll down here, you can see they're all relevant terms, which is fantastic. So this is what exactly what we're looking for. So where do we start? Well, the most important bit is what's called the nap, the name, address and phone number. The nap, the name, address and phone number. And that's this bit here. Now what you want to aim for is have this information here exactly the same as this information on the bottom of every single one of your website pages. So t tip number one, your nap, your name, address and phone number. The phone number will be in one of the other tabs as well, will be on the bottom of every single one of your web pages. We scroll right to the bottom and here a telephone number and name and address exactly as it is onto our Google listing. The way you can do that is by going to the info tab and you can see here you can edit your name and address and phone number. So here's your name, you'll put in there your address. So if you pop your address in here and ensure that it links up to your exact location. So you can see this is where we are, that's where I'm sitting right now, just in here. Now, because we're in a rural location, our postcode doesn't actually take our guests to where we actually are. So I forced in a postcode here which is nearer, but I can then change, which would then put our PIN in the wrong place. But I can then drag and drop our pin. So it's exactly where it needs to be. So if you have problems with your postcodes, I know a lot of people do, then pop it in here, this is the postcode you want people to use for sat nav and then move the PIN to your location. But this is where you want to make sure that your business address is the same as your website. So next thing you want to do is pop in your opening hours. And again the important thing here, your phone number. Now looking at this bit here, this is what Google call your short name. Now your short name makes it much easier for you to send your guests a link so they can, they can provide a review on Google because a lot of people have found that quite difficult to do, some people haven't got Google accounts, etc. And so forth. So if you set yourself a memorable Google name, so we're Oldham Towers bnb, which is essentially our prime market, you can use this to send your guests a very easy and quick. Can you send us a review? Please take your short name and essentially you want to use this link here which is gb and then in here put your Google short name. So ours is Alton Towers B and B review. So there it is, G page, your short name review. If you send them that, it will take them directly to this excellent little page where they can pop in there an automatically populated five star review and then post. Simple as that. They don't have to worry about anything. They know exactly what they're doing. They don't doesn't take them any effort, they don't even have to fill it in, they can just click on post. So that way you can send your guests a reminder and they can give you a nice little review on Google. Now if we pull this down, you can see here underneath short name is also our website. This is the URL that people will click on when they see our particular listing. So if we look at our listing here and we go down under all the blurb, you'll see here when it says website open this website, that is what will take them to our website. But that link is driven by your Google My business page. This is where you set. The reason this doesn't just say laurels is because people that click through from Google from the map pack won't be shown as organic traffic norms. They'll get jumbled up with other stuff. It makes it much more difficult to know exactly what traffic's coming from Google My business. So you just need to add this little bit of code here, put your normal website address in here, so ours is again thelorals.co.uk and then follow it by this little bit here. So I'm just going to highlight it here and you can pause the video at this point. So basically then forward slash and then just put it in here. Basically what that's saying is where does this click come from? And it's going to be which is Google my Business and it's going to be counted as an organic click in your Google Analytics, which makes it much easier to track your successes on this. So you'll know exactly who's coming to your website from Google my Business. So don't forget to do that. It's always important. Now scrolling down now this is one of these typical Google things where they always like to change things. So it's well worth going into here and checking it every few months. Don't just set it once and assume that they're not going to change it because they're always adding bits and taking stuff away. So depending on your category we're in hotel, you may or may not have something similar to this might be a free range. If you're self catering, you might have free text area which you can put in a description about your property. So if you're going to do that, make sure it's in good natural language. Don't try and be spammy or anything like that. Just describe the who, what and the where and why should people should come and come and stay at your place. If you're in a hotel stroke B and B like we are, then it's more of a pre formatted thing. But it's well worth going down and checking these because occasionally, like I said they these will change. So go down and pop in all the stuff that you think is important. Select and deselect the things that you do or do not provide to your guests. Like I said, the big takeaway from this is go in here every few months because they are always changing this. Now one of the most important things on here apart from the bits we've gone through is photos. Now good quality photos are going to sell your property better than any number of words. So make sure when you have shed loads of photos showing the best bits of your property and don't just put photographs of the bedrooms and the bathrooms. Mix it up with places nearby, views of your garden or your outside or your surroundings, etc. And so forth. So make sure that you have loads of photographs that detail what your place is and how fabulous it looks. Don't just put in here bits to do with your bedrooms and bathrooms. People are not going to book your property because it Looks like it's got a comfy bed. They're assuming that it's going to have a comfy bed because you're a bed and breakfast or self catering or a hotel. Anyway, the important thing about the photographs, not just putting them up and having good quality, is to also have them geotagged. Now what do I mean by that? Now if you go to a nice little page called ImageMeta IO there it is there you can change or you can add to the data that's hidden in your photographs metadata that's hidden in your photographs that Google can read. And adding that extra data also gives you an extra little bit of help on your Google my business photographs. And I'll show an example of that. So what we've got here is just open a random photo of say this one. The important thing about this is as we're saying, this is a picture of my grandkids in playing in the woods. Now these woods are based where we are. So they are when you take photographs around, in and around your property, you want to tell Google that is exactly where they were taken. So if you upload the picture you can do more than one at once. And if you click on continue, this gives you the option of tagging it with the location information. So here where it says enter an address, this is provided by Google Maps, the very same thing that you're trying to aim for on your Google my business. And you can see here it's found us. So the laurels BNB built direct for our best prices starbank. That's exactly the information that we have on Google My business and that's what we want to add to this picture. So that's entered into there. We can also add some keywords which add some keywords which allows people or Google to find and or classify this particular photo. So you could put in here woodland holiday kids, fun or anything that anything that actually describes this particular photograph. Now the other thing about this photo was it was probably called image123jpg. Again that does not help in optimize or search. So you want to rename that file and call it what it is. So put it something like kids playing in the woods or something similar. I'm not going to bother about the author and then all I need to do is to click on continue. That image will then be uploaded, they will process the tags and then you just need to download it. One area which people tend to get confused in or which can cause some kind of confusion is the category that your business ought to Be in. Now, the best way of finding out what category to be in is to have a look at Google and see what Google thinks. If I go to a Google search and I put in here something like Breakfast in Brighton, so sort of random search. The guys here on the map pack, remember this is what you're aiming for. So there's the map pack. This is the first thing people are going to see, followed by the rest of the organic results. So this is where you want to be. Now these. So these people are doing it right now. If you click on one of these listings, you can find out whether they have the same category as you or are slightly different. And bear in mind, these are successful ones. So these are the ones you want to be taking lessons from. So if we just click on one of these now, it's going to open in a window. Now again, you need to be using Google Chrome here. The reason I use Chrome is because it's got lots of tools in it that enable you to do a really good analysis. So you open their listing and if I right click here and I go to view page sort, it'll open another page and you'll get a whole bunch of stuff. The bit we're looking for is quite specific. So we're looking to do a find. Now if you press on your keyboard control and then the letter F you will find a little search doodle will come up here. And what we're looking for is the term global data. If I type in globaldata, I can actually spell it right, Global data, you'll find that it's highlighted here. Now if you look along this line here, you can see that their category is local business travel activities hotels. So if you're, if you're typing in, in the results into the search here, if you're typing in what is applicable to you. So whether it's hotel in Harrogate or self catering in West Wales or whatever, people that pop up map pack here are the people you need to be replicating when you're setting up your Google my business. So what else can we do to enhance our listing? Well, if you go over to Google Maps, again is our Google Maps listing and here is the laurels B and B. If I go to the bottom right hand corner and drag onto our little street view man, you can see that the street view blue line is highlighted. But you can also see these little blue dots which are called the photo spheres and they are embedd the Google Map. And if I drop onto one of these, you will see the Laurels. BNB hoves into view as per Google Street View, and allows you to look around and move around. So here we are inside, ception, back outside. This is our view down the valley. So this is all on Google Maps and. Or Google Street View, same thing. And you can see down here that this is, this is where we are. And all these little blue dots enable our guest to look around, see what's here and go, oh, that's lovely, I quite fancy going there. Next tip. I'm sure you've all heard of backlinks. If you haven't heard of backlinks, then they are essentially people that link to your website. Also call them citations. Backlinks, citations, whatever. Google likes them because it tells Google that your site is worthy of other people linking to it. Now, as long as they are relevant to your business and they're not some kind of spam factory, don't think that you can go on the Internet and go sign me up. A thousand links for 10 pound 50 and everything will work wonderfully because that is exactly what you do not want to do. Google will know that they are, you have bought links or they are spammy links. So do not be tempted to do that. But what you can do is to genuinely get links from other businesses. So you can people call, reach out to other business and say, hey, how would you like. So the best thing to do is put in your phone number in inverted commas and inverted commas tell Google that it's an exact search. Right, here's another tip for improving your Google My business listing is to create your own Google Map. You just go to google.com maps and you can start adding your own little icons here and information bits. So if I click on this, you'll see this is the information I've added. This is about the Emma Bridgewater studio, which is pottery, as we're in near the potteries. And I can add all these bits and bobs, photos, etc. And text. Gives our guests a great way of seeing what's around. And I can send them this link, this link here, which obviously I would shorten, but I can send them this link in an email when I'm confirming their booking saying, hey, have a look at this, there's some great things to do. You can also put my website, which again allows people to go to my website and use it as a good source of reference. Now the beauty of this is you can add layers so you can have individual bits and bobs, so food and drink. So if I click on them, you can see them highlighting. So these are all local eateries that people can go to that we would recommend outdoor activities. So they can select and deselect these as they like so they can click on them, see the information. Oh yeah, quite fancy going there. And you can also do directions, so you can see, you can see here there's directions for the ones I've already got. So that's the best way to get to this particular railway line for example, or whatever. So this is a great way of improving your listing and getting people to spend more time on your website and providing them with more valuable information. So here's a bonus feature. Now I've done a random search on Google for how big is a king size bed now? And here are the results and you will notice right at the top is this one here which is really nice and large, which is nice and large, has a picture with it and will be more prominent than the rest of the organic results below. Now this is called a rich result. So your site or blog posts, etc. Can appear as a rich result at the top of Google if you have the specific code on your website. So how do we go about doing it? Well, it sounds really techy, it looks really techy, but actually it's dead simple. So I'll go through what it is you're going to try and do. So rich results, that's what it is. Here we go. That's what we're looking at. Now you can test your website to see if it has any rich results on it already from this Google page. So again, if you pop in here, search.google.com testrichresults just pause the video, pop that in and in here you can put your own website, which I'm going to do, and it will analyze the website and see if it has the capacity to show any rich results. The code is basically talking to Google and telling Google more things about your website than it might necessarily find from its standard crawling behavior. So here we go. Here is the result of the laurels and you can see that this page is indeed eligible for rich results, which is great. Now what's that doing for us? Well, if I go to the Google search console, hopefully you've all seen this. This gives us the results of how often our page has been seen, how often the Google search bots have covered it and lots of other information. But what I want to show you there, here is the search appearance bit here and rich results. So our website in between June and August has had 17,700 impressions on the rich results and it's been clicked on 211 times. So enabling our page to display rich results has generated now extra coverage for our website. Right, so how do we go about doing it? This is the easy bit, relatively. So if you go to this amazing web page called Miracle, if you click on where it says schema generated. Now schema is just, is just what it's called and the JSON LD is just the way the code is structured. Now there are different ways of doing schema and the JSON LD is the way that Google wants you to do it. And if they want you to do it that way, that's the way you should do it. So what's this going to do for us? Basically if you click on this screen here, this drop down, it says what sort of thing do you want to create? Now if we scroll down here, this 99 times out of 100 will be what you want to look for. Local business. So we're going to generate a local business schema markup. So if we click on that, you can see there's a whole bunch of stuff that we need to fill in. And this is the code. Now normally you'd have to be really techy and write this code yourself, but the beauty of this page is it's going to write it for you. So we've got local business and then we need to click on the drop down and go okay, what sort of local business? And again, nine times out of 100 we're all going to be the same. A lodging business and then more specifically hotel, motel, etc. And so forth. So I'm going to put in there bed and breakfast and you can see it's filling it in here. So it's put bed and breakfast as the type. Now we're going to put the name in. So the name I'm going to put in here is the same name that is on our Google my business. Copy that and I'm going to pop it. There we go. And you can see it's already populated that. There we go. And then it wants to know what picture we want to use that's going to be shown on the rich results. Now that's the picture. So if I go back to the hour because of king size bed, this is the picture we're talking about here. So we want a picture of your place that you think represents your place. The best way to get that image is off your website. So if we choose, if we go back to our website, I'm just going to go to the Page our homepage, say, and I'm going to use this image here. So all I need to do is I'm going to use that image. Now, how do I get that from there to our schema markup? Well, if you right click on it and then you can just go copy image address there. So I click on that, go back to our markup generator and then paste that in there and you can see that it's filled it in here and it's filled it in there. So that is the picture. Now the URL is again is your place's address. So it's the laurels, obviously. So I'm going to put in here the laurels. Again, it's filled in a telephone number. Now, price range is interesting. So I would put in here whatever your lowest price is, I'll put here 60. So whatever yours is, however you normally price your rooms or stays or places, that's what you want to pop in here. And again here is where you want to put your address. Our street name is Starbase Okamore, Stoke on Trent St 10 3DF. Again, what is shown on our Google my business page, Country United Kingdom. And then here we go. So this is again the latitude and longitude bit. This is the important, important because it needs to coincide with our Google my business. Again here it's fetched them from my address. The other way of doing that is to go to Google Maps itself to find this latitude and longitude. So if I go back to our listing and I zoom into where we are, if I right click again and go what's here? There are our coordinates. So, and they will vary, obviously if I click here, they'll be slightly different. So let's get them as accurate as you can to what's on your Google my business. But those are the coordinates there that are going to be in here now. So we can also add our opening hours. Once you've done that, you have your script. This is your schema markup for your rich snippets. So all you need to do now copy this onto your website. Now, how do I go about doing that? I hear you ask. So if you've got a web designer, you just send that to him and say, can you add this tag to the body text or the head text of my website? And you can do this for the whole of the site. We can do individual ones for each page. If you're using WordPress, then you can do this relatively easy yourself and I shall show you how. All you need to do is go into the admin area of your WordPress website. And depending you might have a theme that allows you to add code to your body or head, in which case you can add it directly there. If you haven't, then you can use a plugin to do that. So just click on add new plugin and then do a search for plugin and just put in a header and you'll get a list of plugins. And I would just use this one here, the first one you come to, or this one here. Insert headers and footers. Let's use this one. Insert headers and footers now with anything. When you're installing plugins on WordPress, the important thing to do is to go for one that has a lot of active installations and is regularly updated. So this was updated two weeks ago and it's got four out of five stars, so it's pretty good. Equally, you could use this one as well. So all I'm going to do is click on install and the plugin will be installed onto WordPress and then click on Activate and then we can see our new plugin is here and we'll also be able to find it under settings. Here we go. Insert headers and footers. So all you need to do is to see where it says here the scripts will be printed in the code or head section. That's perfect. That's where we want it. So we just go back to our markup generator. We copy all of this code, don't miss any of it out. So it must go from the little caret script to the one after script. Copy that by pressing Ctrl C for copy and then go back to our WordPress site, pop it in there and there is our code and then click on save. The important thing about this is once you've installed your script is to test it. The best way to test your code is by popping it into this Google page here. As you can see. So again, structured data testing tool. So if you just go to code snippet and paste in your code, which is what we just generated and go run test, you can see there's the code on the left hand side. On the right hand side is what Google will see from your code and you will see any errors or warnings pop up here. So if you've got anything here then it will tell you whether there's a problem or not. If you click on preview then it'll actually show you what our rich result will look like. There we go, that's it there. So there you go. So that's rich snippets as created relatively simply, without the need to know how to code in JSON ld. You're welcome.