Here are 5 things (with 1 bonus) you can do to help rank a small business website higher in search engine results.
#1 – Submit your site to search engines.
This tells the search engines to come to your site and crawl it so they can index your site and add you to the rankings. If this is not done, it can take weeks or months for Google to add a new website to it’s index. The best way to get a jump start is to submit your site to them. (If we build your website, we do this for you!)
#2 – Setup a Google My Business page and link it to your website
This will help with those in your geographical area searching for something you offer or sell. And it’s how you get to appear to the right of the search results and on Google Maps. If you rely upon local traffic, people walking through your door, or you server a local area a Google My Business page is essential!
If you need help setting up a Google My Business page, please let us know. Not only can we help set it up, but we can help you with optimizing it, automatically collecting reviews, and help you leverage the rest of the functionality it included!
#3 – Setup a company Facebook page and link it to your website
High quality and authority back-link on the most popular social network in the world. Every business needs on. If you sell online via eCommerce, you can also share your product feed to your Facebook page, which essentaially creates another online store for you!
Contact us if you want help setting up you Facebook Business pages.
#4 – SEO research and publishing useful content for your target audience.
This is often best left to the professionals or someone who has a lot of time to do the work and research. The most important part is the research.
When we work with clients like you, we get to know you, your business, and most importantly your target market. They we do research to find what exactly your target market is typing into search engines to put together a plan of how to rewrite your websites content to appeal to your target market and to rank for those keywords. Then our professional writers rewrite the content on your website so it’s optimized to show up for those keywords and phrases
*TIP – The research is also very valuable for any other marketing efforts you may do both online and offline.
#5 – Get backlinks to your site from high authority sites.
This can be a more challenging and daunting task, especially for a small business.
You used to be able to pay companies to spam links to your site all over the web. By doing this you would be essentially gaming the search engines so it appeared that your site was more popular or important than you would be otherwise. Now the search engines punish that practice.
The best way to get quality back-links are to setup a blog, and to write (or hire someone) to publish valuable and relevant posts about the problems your services or products solve. This also works in combination with the research done in #4 above so they can write posts tailored to the words and keyphrases your target market is searching for. This tends to be very time consuming.
Increasing search engine visibility is one of the reasons so many sites have blogs. We can help with all of this.
*#6 (BONUS) – Guaranteed way to show up on Page 1 of Google…Buy advertising online!
This is the only way to insure that your site shows to your target demographic.
Paid advertising works! It’s why Google make so much money. It works. It’s is VERY powerful. The #1 way to show up on page 1 of Google to buy ads. A good percentage of a search result page is dedicated to paid advertising.