Every business on the Internet, no matter how large or small, relies on Google. That’s because search engines like Google are one of the most widely used tools that consumers online use to find answers and solutions as well as products and services that they are looking for. Having a healthy relationship with Google will improve your chances of being found by potential customers.
How to Make Google Love You
Just like you, Google provides a service to its customer base and it is vital to its success that it delivers just what its users want.
Googles goal is to provide the best and most relevant content to the people searching for information on their site. That is why they are the number one search engine because users can generally find the exact information they are looking for within the first few search results.
That is good news for you and your business because it means that if you provide a particular product or service and their users are searching for it or something similar, Google want their users to find you.
There are things that you can do to make things easier for Google so that they can send visitors your way. If you put them into action, you will build a much stronger relationship with Google and they will reward you by giving your site a higher ranking so that potential customers can find you.
Here are a few simple steps that you can take:
-
Make Your Site Easy to Navigate
When someone lands on your website, it should be apparent to them very quickly who you are, what kind of product or service you provide and how you can help them.
Once they realise that you are what they are looking for, you need to make it easy for them to find the most relevant and important details about your business right away. You can do this by providing descriptions of your business, your services and the products you sell. It is vital that you make your site easy to navigate so that they can find what they are looking for very quickly.
The easier it is for people to find that information, the easier you will make it for Google to locate the information and pull the content into their search results.
-
Publish New Content Regularly and Consistently
New and relevant content is the driving force behind the way that many people can find you online. The days of static ‘brochure sites’ that never change or are updated are long gone. Your job is to consistently and regularly publish new content that is both relevant and informative to your target audience.
As your content starts to generate more traffic and engages with your readers, Google will see that you are an authority site within your field and will support your site by featuring it higher in the search engines.
This will not only help you to attract more visitors, but will provide a door in which many new potential customers will see you and start visiting your site.
-
Be Social
We can’t stress the importance of social media enough. Your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest accounts will give your site extra authority and increase the number of visitors that you receive.
Google recognizes that the size of your social media audiences and the number of people who share your content are reliable factors in determining how relevant and important your site is. It gives your extra credibility.
By maintaining an active social presence, sharing content on a regular basis and engaging with your audience online, you will not only grow your community, but you will also strengthen your relationship with Google as well. This relationship will be reflected in your search engine results and will give you a distinct advantage over your competitors.
-
Be Aware and Take Control of All Your Online Listings
As well as your own website and social media platforms your company will no doubt feature in other places too such as Yelp and other review sites as well as apps such as Foursquare.
You don’t want to confuse Google or your customers by allowing these sites to display the wrong information about your site. It will be confusing for potential customers and it makes things difficult for Google to identify your business and recognize which is the correct information.
It is imperative that you make sure that the information is consistent across all the sites.
-
Take Advantage of all the Tools That Google Has to Offer
Google wants your business to do well. It wants you to be found by potential customers looking for what you have to offer. To help you to make things easier it has provided a whole array of tools to help you.
Google particularly loves businesses who use these tools to their full potential and rewards them for doing so.
One of the most important things that your business should do is claim your Google Local Page.
Google have also invested a lot of money into their social media platform Google Plus (Google+). It might not be the first name that comes to mind when you think about social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest receive a lot of press and have more of a buzz surrounding them. So why should your small business use Google Plus?
Because of the huge investment they have made, Google encourages all businesses to use it and is happy when they do. This is reflected in the search results.
That is not the only reason though as Google Plus actually has a huge user base. With more than 600 million active monthly users, Google Plus sees its number of users increase daily.
Facebook continues to be the social media giant with the most users, but the increase in web traffic via Google+ indicates that businesses should be using it. Ignoring it could be potentially damaging for them in the future.
As with all social media platforms, your customers will be on it sooner rather than later and many probably already are so you can’t afford to ignore.
-
Use Good Grammar and Spelling
Make sure you proofread any articles or information that you publish. Although they haven’t officially confirmed it, Google could place well written articles above those with poor English.
Even if bad grammar and spelling never becomes an official signal in Google rankings, there is no downside to a well written article or information page. It is worth keeping in mind that Google has found a clear correlation between well-written sites and sites that are highly ranked. Of course there could be a number of reason for this but the message is loud and clear: Sites that are built and maintained with consistent and careful effort are going to do far more than sites that are thrown together. If you’re willing to invest resources and time and effort into your website, your website will be far more likely to give you a worthwhile return on your investment. Google will love you and so will your visitors.
-
Make Sure your Website is Finished
Are you happy with your website? Is it complete? We often see businesses who publish incomplete websites with “Coming Soon” notices on multiple pages. This is very disappointing for visitors and more often than not, it turns them away due to inadequate content, resulting in lost sales.
-
Avoid Flashy Sites
Search engines are great at reading text but they cannot watch movies, view pictures or view Flash animation or other non-text data. They are also not every good are interpreting programming code such as some JavaScript that generates dropdown menus. So, although you might think that your site looks amazing but it is not very search engine friendly and you will be losing potential customers.
It is important to build you pages in a way that contains lots of descriptive text and straight HTML links. Your web designer should be able to help you to make sure that the site is optimized properly.
-
Include a Site Map
A sitemap is a web page that includes links to all the pages on your site that you want indexed in the search engines. Your sitemap can be generated by a tool in your content management system and is fairly straightforward to set up (we can help you with this is you require assistance. Be sure to submit your sitemap to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. You should also link the site map in the footer of your homepage. Again, this is equally useful for both your visitors and Google.
-
Monitor and Do Better Than Your Competition
It is a competitive world and you need to be better than your competition in order to succeed, especially online. It is vital that you encourage Google to send visitors to your site rather than your competitor’s site. To beat your competitors at SEO and make Google love your site more, your main task is to monitor your competitor’s websites. Look for changes and developments to those websites as well as the general searching queries of the customers of the industry to ensure that they never out-perform your site.
We Can Help…..
Our SEO services help our clients to quickly promote their websites to a large audience online and ensure that the right target market are directed to the relevant areas of the website.
We can control your website marketing campaigns through the use of Google’s very popular advertising tool, AdWords along with other PPC campaign tools and general website optimization.
As an experienced SEO company we can help your business website receive increased traffic from your target market and help to convert this increased traffic into actual sales.
Our experience allows us to be in full control of multiple campaigns that will help you gain a competitive edge over your rivals.
Online marketing campaigns require a thorough assessment of the target market along with competitive analysis to ensure that they grab the attention of relevant people. We are experienced in running very specific regional marketing projects right through to large scale global campaigns.
For more information on how we can help your business, please contact us today.
