Australian Government SEO Recommendations - Practical Takeaway

This is an updated article from 25-12-2021.

I recently stumbled upon an article from business.gov.au about recommendations on how to improve your search engine rankings for businesses in Australia. We know a couple of things about it. With SEO being very speculative with the number of articles and studies on the web, the Government body would have had to condense it down to credible and proven methods. We agree with their recommendations but find it a little too short, especially when you are in a very competitive space and would like to have more than just cardinal SEO foundation. I would like to elaborate on the recommended methods further from the point of view of BAM Web Solutions.

In 2021, we have adjusted thousands of technical variables, added over 10,000 keywords and increased client net portfolio by at least 80,000,000 Impressions via Google organic search. In order to deliver positive results, we restlessly develop and test methods outside the box in order to gain search relevancy like no other.

In a competitive market, let’s get to it.

Understand Your Online Customers

This is a critical oversight by many companies. The article recommends awareness, consideration and purchase potential of your target market. This is a fantastic advice! From my experience, more than half of startup businesses are unable to explain what they are selling and who they have in mind very well. Make sure to have a plan. We’ve used NSW Business advice and support services to help create a business plan and a strategy which narrowed down our expectations and ability to connect with the profitable market.

When it comes to established, larger businesses, they tend to lose a market share to smaller and yet much better optimised businesses online. This is a complex and challenging matter for large businesses due to lack of the ability to adapt to user behavior trends in short to medium term. Small business on the other hand will roll out with recent trends in mind.

Clients which expanded successfully over the last couple of years have refined their perfect client profile and laser focused their marketing material which in turn makes our job a lot more efficient when it comes to raising relevancy in search.

Unfortunately for small business, it is difficult to achieve the data about their perfect customer and therefore will need to either invest in user test groups or simply Google Ads to collect as much data as possible about their target market in order to position themselves appropriately in the market.

Use Keywords on Your Site

This is a classic debate in the SEO world and mainly depends on the state of the Google RankBrain algorithm. I’ll make it easy for you - stuffing repetitive keywords is not healthy in 2022.

Today, Google respects contextual and meaningful content. There are cases of large websites ranking organically very well because they tend to elaborate their product or service extremely well in a short manner. This means that you will need to use synonyms, references and images better than your competitors. Although keyword density within the website text and metadata counts, it has become more important to deliver it well.

With average attention span falling, you need to make sure that your content is delivered quickly and effectively without creating a home page with 10,000 words.

I have to note that the Australian Government website article did not mention Keyword Research and I think it is because of recent advancements in Google’s search algorithms take care of that to a degree. We insist on performing a solid keyword research and incorporating search phrases relevant to your business with the most search volume into your overall marketing strategy as it reflects user behavior. Note, there is a lot of noise and exaggerated search numbers, I think it is more cost effective to focus on more niche keywords rather than what everyone else is fighting for when yoou are starting out.

Refresh Your Page Content Often

Mhyeah.

We encourage business updates, insights and general discussion in business fields. According to our experiments, social signals are preferred when it comes to “weekly updates.” More long-term insights usually perform better via the website blog page.

The market is constantly changing and the user behavior is a major part of it. Adapting your product or services to a more relevant group of people has to be implemented for sure, but does not need to be done every week. However, engaging with algorithms to improve freshness index can be important to your business in terms of public recognition.

Avoid cutting too many corners with tech giants these days, you will roll back to sandbox.  

Gain Links From Other Websites

This factor is critical to organic growth on the web. This approach has been around since it was introduced in 1996 by search engine RankDex (extension of financial publishing company founded in 1935). Google (97% search share 2021) and others consider quality of total links pointing to your domain and their relevance.

I can’t stress enough how important it is and how sensitive it is. Just 10 years ago, you could generate thousands of links to your website and the search algorithm would rank your site for the anchor term, regardless of the link nature. Today your domain will get punished if you add irrelevant links pointing to your website. It’s crazy how much effort Google is putting into mapping networks.

Either way, you must network your business online as much as you do offline. This area of SEO is extremely complex and indefinite but can be very beneficial. Best case scenario is that you will require a large number of websites mentioning your website as long as they are relevant. Any garbage will penalise your focus keywords and general friendship with advanced search engines. This is also known as Off-site SEO.

Include The Meta Description Tag

Sure. This has to be implemented. If you do not have a title and a description tag on the web today, your brand name will be chopped apart in the piranha tank, burn in the lava pool or crumble in -100 Celsius, whatever, you get the point.

What they are trying to say is that your website meta data needs to be structured in order to meet the web search engine readability. On-site Optimisation includes tags, headers, meta data and a few others. The fields basically tell search engines exactly what kind of business you are in and what you have to sell, buy or inform about the searching users.

I think what they are trying to tell us is at least to add a meta tag to your home page please.

Based on our experiments, home page description is a no brainer. Make sure to have ‘Title,’ ‘H1,’ ‘H2 Structure’ and the internal linking to the relevant information as well. Some have limited space, make sure to capitalise on the display real estate! Guides here from Moz.

Google is a tech giant and currently hold the Olympic fire for SEO. They lead the way with the research and development along with their marketing efforts to stay dominant as the search provider across the globe. Remember, their business model revolves around keeping the search user happy. Happy website visitor equates to better relevancy.

Stay up to date on the latest SEO techniques

You can't go wrong by keeping your keywords right. John Mueller from G spam boiz recently announced  that if you've implemented an AI bot on your site, you must use it as an embedded tool not native, nana. 

Be well ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for your attention and time! 

This article is not sponsored by any of the organisations referenced in this article.