You have a great product, unique service proposition and website – all you need now is to show up on a Google search. How do you do this without spending a huge amount of time, getting a degree in techno-speak or breaking the bank? We’ve put together a few of our favourite simple tips to help get online visibility.
1. Register with Google My Business
My Google Business provides a useful way of providing visitors with a snapshot of information about your business without actually visiting your website. By providing this information, you’re getting ahead of competitors by making it easy for potential customers to get in touch with you, find your address, map location, opening hours and customer reviews. It also has a nifty reporting interface that can show you how people are finding you and what they’re doing with that information.
2. Develop your SEO keywords
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is something of an art (and science!) – you can learn more about SEO and why you need it in this article, but when it comes down to it, understanding your SEO keywords and working them into your website is crucial. Keywords are the search terms that Google’s crawler bots use to decide the most relevant and trustworthy search results, so putting some thought into which searches you most want to appear in is money in the bank (and traffic to your website, so to speak).
You can approach this in any way you like: we often suggest starting by identifying your key product/service/USP and the geographical location you provide services. You can also look at competitors or similar businesses you admire to get ideas. Once you have a list of keywords, run them through an online keyword tool to get an idea of the volume of traffic for the keywords on your list (and it might throw up some new ones too!).
3. Audit your website
An audit of SEO on your website can be a useful exercise in finding out where your SEO sits at the moment. By looking at the content (text and visuals) and architecture (the structure of the information on the site) you can get a feel for how often you use the list of keywords you’ve just developed. You can also assess if anything interrupts the site’s flow ensuring that it is clear to visitors what they need to do next, like getting in touch for a quote or visiting an online store.
As well as this you can use a free online SEO audit tool to help find any gaps in the backend of your SEO – and you should chat with your web host or developer to help implement any changes.
4. Make your website SEO Forward
Time to update your website with your keywords – think about front end text changes, adding picture tags, and back end things like headings and meta tags are really useful in getting keywords in without breaking the flow of your front end website text. Here are some more ways to up your keyword game:
- Using relevant keywords in the title of the relevant pages
- Using relevant keywords in page URLs
- Using relevant keywords, and variations (e.g., "gourmet parakeet snacks"), throughout the page copy
- Using relevant keywords in the meta tags, especially the meta description
- Using relevant keywords in any image file paths and in the images' alt text
- Using relevant keywords as the anchor text in links back to the page from elsewhere on the site.
5. Social Media
Always with the social media! Using other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat to refer people to your website is a solid marketing strategy and one that you’ve probably fallen for before. Social media platforms allow you to have a conversation with followers (and potential customers), share insights, build trust and remain visible, even if a purchase is still in the decision pipeline, as it were. Don’t underestimate social media or write it off as not for you – you’d be surprised at who is on social media (everyone) and how much online commerce (and cute cat videos) is driven through these platforms.
We’d love to know how these strategies have worked out for you – get in touch if you have any questions or would like to know other ways of increasing your SEO ranking and online visibility. Until then, stay safe and well.
