With 93% of online experiences beginning with a search engine, Google holding over 90% of the search engine market share and a quarter of all online traffic coming from local searches it’s vital to rank well when people are looking for your products or services.
Paid adverts appear at the top of Google, however, it’s the organic search results that don’t have that word ‘Sponsored’ above, that usually achieve the higher click through rate.
One of the first things you should do when optimising for search is to set up a Google business profile. Even if you don’t manage your website yourself, you can quickly and easily set up your business profile. This will allow you to appear in the map searches you see when conducting Google searches.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is about optimizing your site to get the best search results. You can use an agency, but if you do want to take a DIY approach here are some tips:
1. Keywords: Think like a customer, research the keywords through sample searches and see what comes up. If it’s your competitors, this is a good place to start. There are also a number of tools you can use to formulate your keyword list including Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest.
2. Keyword phrases: (Known as long-tail keywords). Customers use a combination of words such as: ‘Garage’ ‘Door’ ‘Maintenance’. So be sure to include these in “speakable” phrases. Remember many searches are conducted on mobile devices nowadays with searchers “talking” to their phone. Over 95% of Google searches are four or more words.
3. Plugins: Find a good SEO plugin, make sure you read up on it and use all it’s available tools. There are too many to recommend, so search the top 5 for your website platform you’re using and ask for recommendations.
4. Metadata: (The title and description displayed in your search results). Complete and optimise the title to a maximum of 60 characters and for the description note that Google will truncate (Shorten) this after 155-160 characters so use these characters wisely. Add Schema: (Code recognised by search) you can find all schema language references at https://schema.org/.
5. Social optimisation: (Defines how your shared content and links should be displayed on Facebook). You can add this yourself usually in the plugin you install which also means your images become the links in your Facebook posts. It can be wise to speak to someone about this, you could contact www.linku2hibiscuscoast.co.nz or www.stokedigital.co.nz
6. Google ads: This is a paid service and, at a cost, will increase the chances your site being higher up the Google rankings. You pay for either the number of clicks or number of leads but remember, organic search invariably gets a higher click through rate.
7. Images: Use key words in your image names and always add your alt description.
8. Long copy: Another way to appear in searches is to add a blog to your site and write articles that include your keywords. This can earn your site over 50% more traffic.
9. Inbound and internal links: Partner to get other websites to link back to your site and link internally between your own site pages. If you have no external backlinks, you run the risk of being classified in the over 65% of sites that will get no Google organic traffic.
10. Update: Keep your website updated and make your text fresh and relevant.
11. submit this to index all site pages.
Now test your page with tools such as Google Rich Results test, Structured Data testing tool and Mobile friendly test, website speed and performance optimisation (a good tool is GTMetrix) and check for keyword density (a good tool is https://www.seoreviewtools.com/keyword-density-checker/).
Then work, work, work on maintaining the results you are able to achieve, it’s an ever evolving world!