Working from Home? Top 5 tips to improve your website visibility in Search Engines
Having a digital presence is crucial for any business in this day and age, but if you want it to generate leads and enquiries (and why wouldn’t you?) – it’s not enough to simply have a website and do a bit of social media.
Optimising your online presence is key to being found by your ideal, potential clients. You can have the slickest website in town, but if no one’s finding it – so what? When people do land on your website, is it delivering to them everything they want, how they want it?
So, without the techno-jargon, how can you get higher up in search engines, when your product or service is searched? What search terms are your clients actually using?
Aside from paying to be up there (Google Pay Per Click Adwords is a seperate service), there are a number of things that can be done to improve your rankings in Google. The collective terms for all these various tasks can be called Search Engine Optimisation.
Some aspects can be a bit techy and tricky – you might need your web person to help you with – but there’s also a bunch of things you can do yourself to get you more leads online.
The 5 most common problems we see;
- Lack of clear goals for the website
- Not tracking traffic, visitors or user flow
- Not having relevant, targeted and signposted content
- Not submitting your site correctly to search engines and directories
- Not optimised for mobile devices or speed
We’re happy to talk to you about all of those, but for now, we’re going to concentrate on 5 things you can do, today, to start generating you more leads to your business;
1) Embrace Google’s Suite of products | MyBusiness, Map Listing, Google Reviews.
Google My Business is a free way of listing your business on Google. When you search your company name, do you get all the details about your business to the right of the Search Results? If not, you need some of this.
You can add full business details including your website, the services you provide, opening hours, photos, contact details, social posts and lots more. It enables you to have a map listing for when people are searching for your location and a review section for that all important customer feedback.
It’s a great method of optimising your online presence as when someone then searches for your products or services, you have a chance of coming up in those map listings. And if your competitor has no reviews showing, and you have 25 five star reviews, who you gonna call?
2) Relevant, Structured Content
Arguably the single most important piece thing about your website, is can Google see what your website is offering? It may be obvious to you, but does the Website Title, the Page Title and the Headings down the page, talk about your key product or service, or elements of?
If you have a number of products and services, have a page for each, so you can focus. If you show pictures, you or I might be able to see they’re of something relevant, but do they have titles and tags/descriptions, telling google what they are? Lastly, have you enough words and content on your page? Google needs to know what you’re offering and provide decent content.
3) Be Fast, Be Secure and be Mobile Ready
Be Fast. If your homepage is slow to load, Google’s not going to like you. Your customers will get bored of waiting and leave straight away, further sending bad-vibes to Google . If you’ve not made your images web-friendly for example, they’ll kill your load speed. You can test your loadspeed on a site like www.gtmetrix.com, you can maintain your images quality but greatly reduce their size using a service like bulkresizephotos.com
Be Secure. Do you have the little Padlock up in the search bar next to your website address? No? Shame on you. Add one now. Whilst they used to be the preserve only of ecommerce shops, Google wants to see them on all websites. It will punish you in search if not. Your web host will be able to add one of these for you, and it shouldn’t cost too much.
Be Mobile. Quite a few years back now, more websites are viewed from a mobile device than from a desktop. Google rewards mobile friendly sites by ranking them better. You might say “my website works on a mobile”, and they all do – but if you have to “pinch and zoom”, you’re not mobile friendly. Test your site here: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
4) Google Analytics, Search Console & Facebook Pixel
OK, this might be getting a bit more technical, but hear us out.
Google Analytics is another free tool from the goliaths of the web, but it means once you set up account, put a bit of code they give you into your website, we can start understanding where traffic is coming from and when, and how they use your website. Are they getting to a page and leaving your site? Visit analytics.google.com/analytics/web/
Search Console
Still with us? Next level up – submit your site to Google Search Console.
This will most likely be a job for your web person, but if you’re feeling techy then go for it.
This platform essentially scans your website to understand its layout, content & tags (sitemap) so when users are searching, your website’s correct layout is displayed in the results. Visit https://search.google.com/search-console/about
We recommend doing this with any new website OR if you’ve done so major website changes.
Lastly, add a Facebook Pixel to your website.
With over half the world on Facebook, it’s a marketing tool not to be overlooked. The pixel tracks and stores any visitors to your website who are currently logged into their Facebook. From this, you can retarget them through ads and even create similar audiences who are interested in your services / products.
Visit www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-pixel
5) The ‘Authority’ of your website
Let’s just say your website has the identical content on it as your competitor. Say both have been around the same length of time, and both tick all the first 4 things in this list of tips in the same way. Who’s your favourite now Google?
Simple. It’s about “who you hang with” and your credibility – or ‘Authority’.
If you have Directory Listings, listings on other (authentic and related) websites, there are plenty of free online directories locally and nationwide.
Ideally, articles written about what you do, with a link back to your site really help to show your expertise and kudos, all improving your trust and credibility.
(It used to be about the “quantity” of people that linked to you, but that led to lots of rubbish websites offering links, so Google upped its game.)
6) A bonus! Are you ‘optimising’ for what people are actually searching for?
You may write all over your website “we’re uPVC specialists” for example, but if your customers don’t search for that and are looking for “Double glazing companies near me”, let’s get barking up the right tree. Also, if that is the most popular term searched for and has high competition, but “double glazed window fitters” has similar amounts of traffic searching for it, but much lower competition – let’s get your found for that term instead?
By using Google “keyword planner” you can see how many searches are done for what. Again, that might be a bit technical but if 1 to 5 haven’t scared you off, this might be a good next step to look at.