SEO Nutters and 14 pieces of content you need to have on your site

I am entirely astounded how many people, even those working in the Search Engine Optimisation industry, don’t get the obvious. I have folks whining that they are no longer in position #1, but they don’t have contact details on their site, have only 1 page of long-form copy, no other content, no blog, no about us page, and they have ads all over the place. I mean come on, how they got to #1 in the first place is the mystery not why they are no longer there.

Then I see other requests when clients are saying “give us proof” in the form of a link to a Google site or a video as to why what you want to do to our website is going to send our rankings up and not further down. If everyone had proof we would all be at # 1, oh right sorry we would all be tied for first place, and Google would crash 🙂

Perhaps the problem is that experts like myself keep writing on the topic of SEO and there are so many articles folks are not finding the good stuff, or are reading too much and not retaining it all. I do think that doing SEO needs a certain about of logic and a good deal of gut feel. Google will not tell us the recipe for their magic sauce, but we can infer certain things from what they do tell us, from experiments that we or others do and just good old computer logic and common sense. I have not seen many SEO 101 courses to know how good the material is, but I do have to wonder what they are teaching.

So what are the 14 pieces of content you need to have on your site to rank better?

1. Contact Us page – with a phone number, address, email address, contact us form and perhaps a map
2. About page – Give some details about the history of the company, who the key people are, with photo’s and links to their social media profiles
3. Terms and Conditions – especially if you sell anything
4. Privacy Policy
5. User reviews – if you sell a product or service, use a service to do it for you but embed it entirely on the site (not iframes)
5. As little ads and popups as possible, none is best
6. Links to your social media sites – Yes get them and use them.
7. Call to action … encourage people to click through on your site, 1-page won’t do it, and you need a good reason for users to want to click to the next page
8. Knowledge Base or FAQ
9. Make sure the spelling and grammar are 100% correct. Forget using any AI Content spinners, if you have then you better re-write that content by hand using someone with impeccable grammar and spelling abilities.
10. No blank pages, try and get a decent amount of text on all your pages. Google loves text, and they would after all not exist without text.
11. Keep it clean, no swear words and stay away from risky comments
12. Keep as much as possible on your site, don’t use Iframes and don’t have parts of your website on different domains.
13 Check all your links and menus and make sure they go to the right places.
14 Content …content … Content. Write stuff you know about.

So there you have it, my 14 point checkup for the content on your site. It’s not even rocket science SEO tags and such, its easy to do but so many people don’t do it for some reason. If you fix all 14, you will undoubtedly go up in Google’s rankings for your keywords. Let me know how it goes for you in the comments below.