You really don’t need me to tell you that in this day and age – Google is King. Not only does it bring people to your business by driving traffic to your website, it provides them with the information they need to make quick decisions about whether they’re going to engage with your product or service.
Your business website is truly your biggest communication channel, and leveraging it through Google is an amazing way to draw potential customers in. If you’ve had an amazing website designed, people need to see it! Utilising a SEO services (search engine optimisation) company and techniques is a fantastic way to give your business the best chance of being found through various search engines, as the better you ‘rank’ for certain terms, the more people are going to see your website!
If you’re new to the SEO game, there are a few quick ways to get started and boost your business’ Google search ranking. Let’s take a look.
1. Get your website’s speed in check
Google favours websites with great user experiences, and this includes websites that encompass fast and reactive wait times. There’s seriously nothing worse than clicking on something you’re interested in, only to see that blank white screen and loading bar start… and then stop. And then start again! Ineffective website speeds send abandonment rates skyrocketing, so it’s vitally important that your website is operating effectively.
You can use a tool like Pingdom to test your website’s user speed as starting point.
2. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Back in 2015, mobile searches overtook searches on desktop computers, and since then this percentage has grown exponentially.
It’s super important to make sure that all the information (and awesome visual design) on your website is accessible to consumers regardless of whether they’re accessing it on a mobile or desktop. No one wants to have to constantly zoom on to tiny text on a website that hasn’t been optimised, or have pictures not load so they have no idea what they’re actually looking at.
On January 10th 2017, the Google Webmaster blog actually stated that “Starting today, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high.” Bingo!
At the end of 2018, Google announced that half of it’s indexed pages were using a websites mobile version to index it pages. If you are building a website, you need to have a mobile first mentality now as Google’s smartphone Googlebot, will crawl your website and see our mobile friendly it truly is.
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see whether your website is optimised for mobile or not. If it isn’t, why not have a chat with a digital marketing agency like Firefly to see what we could do in terms of cleaning up your website so it’s ready go on any platform?
3. Give your website wording a freshen-up
If the copywriting on your website hasn’t been updated in a while, this can be a massively valuable tool for boosting your search ranking. Targeting specific long-tail keywords (phrases with three or more words) that relate to your product or service communicates with Google what your website is about, meaning you’ll attract more of the right people.
The whole focus should be to write content for the end-user and not Google.
Some of the more popular short keywords, like ‘life insurance’ or ‘Auckland cafe’ for example, can be extremely competitive, and especially if you’re just starting out, you’ll have little chance of ranking for them. Instead, use Google Keyword Planner to establish what long-tail keywords will work and be valuable for you. When using the planner, look for the number of monthly search returns and competition for each phrase. Basically, the higher the monthly searches and the lower the competition, the better!
You can then take these long-tail keywords and rewrite your website copy to incorporate them. Don’t go overboard though – keyword stuffing is never a good look (and often ends up not making much sense!)
With a little bit of research and a few quick fixes, you can be on your way to boosting your Google search rankings. However it’s important to remember that SEO success is absolutely a marathon and not a sprint, so don’t be expecting to climb to that number one spot without a bit of hard work!
Freshening up content is also a nice way for Google to see your pages are changing, and evolving which is why websites like Wikipedia are constantly bringing in new traffic and ranking high on search engines. Constant user submissions and new content is added to these pages daily.