You’ve got your new website and it looks really good; it’s easy to navigate and it’s targeted at your audience … but why aren’t you seeing any enquiries or sales?
Unfortunately getting the points right above – the design, ease of navigation, targeted – isn’t enough. If no one reads or visits your website, it’s as good as no web presence at all.
Did you know that 35% (hitwise.com) of all of web visitors come via the search engines? The UK’s favourite search engine is Google; in fact 9 out of 10 UK searches use Google.
Ranking in the search engines
Ranking in the search enginesTo bring the visitors to your website you need to get your website as close to the top of the search engine page i.e. Google, Yahoo or Bing. If you think about how you use search engines, probably like most of us you pick the choice closest to the top of the page.
Search words and phrases
To get noticed the first thing you have to do is find out which words or phrases people looking for you specifically search – maybe your products or services in a certain area i.e. Web Design in Basingstoke.
Think about how you search for things on the Internet when you are looking for a supplier or service provider and then brainstorm some words and phrases for your business i.e. for a garden services website you might look for these phrases:
- gardening services, your town
- local gardener
- lawn mowing
It’s about finding the most common, the most frequently used searches. Of course there are websites that can help you with this, have a look at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal; here you can check the frequency of your search suggestions.
Why you need your site optimised for the search engines
Having discovered some keywords or phrases that are popular search choices, you need to include them in your copy. Having them in the titles of articles or blogs on your site helps them get picked up by the search engines.
It’s also important to have changing or new copy appearing on your site frequently and making sure that it is SEO ready. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is how you get noticed basically.
How do search engines find your site?
Search engines look for keywords especially in titles to start ranking you. Another really important way that search engines work is by looking for links back to your site from other sites. For them if your site is linked from another site, it verifies and gives an indication of quality and trust for your site.
Start by getting reciprocal links to your local business directory or newspaper or friends’ websites. Link to your suppliers and see if they will link back to you. Other ways are to add your site to social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+. Further down the line you could guest blog for another site – or get your digital marketing team to do this.
SEO is for life
SEO is for lifeRemember SEO isn’t a one-off operation. You need to constantly look at your site and make sure any new copy is optimised otherwise your ranking will slip.
It’s always those who shout loudest who get noticed so remember you have to shout about your website to the right audience to get it noticed.
If all this sounds like a foreign language why not get a digital whizz to do it for you. Have a look at our SEO packages and talk to one of our experts.
