You finally have a completed website, it’s online, packed with great content and it looks fantastic. Now everyone should be able to find it right? Well there’s been many great websites out there that have come and gone simply because no one knew they existed.
The majority of people online rely on Google to discover new sites and if yours isn’t discoverable there, it may never be found regardless of how good your content or website design is. So where should you start to gain some traction with your website search results?
Ensure your website is mobile friendly and SEO-optimized
Website visitors are 89% more likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile.1 This statistic alone should put the value of a mobile friendly website into perspective. Google does factor in if a website is mobile friendly when serving up results through search. Here’s an easy way to check how well your website performs using Google’s own mobile-friendly test tool.
Another important step is to optimize your website for search engines. Think of SEO as the foundation to your house. If the foundation is in terrible shape it won’t matter how glorious that interior design is looking. The same is true for SEO. You need to have a great foundation on your website, which includes the following:
- Unique content
- Internal link architecture
- URL structure
- Bot accessibility
- Sitemaps
- Server response codes
If these terms are a little intimidating don’t worry. A basic audit of your website can share all the insight needed to fix that foundation!
Create some unique content for your website
Duplicate or unnecessary website content can harm your ranking potential. Yes, the bots are reading now. Here is an example of what not to do with content:
City specific pages: A business will try and increase their rankings for all the surrounding suburbs by creating a similar page for each one. Google can detect that this is either duplicative or manipulative content and this can impact your ranking negatively.
Establish your business with Google My Business
This is something we’ve mentioned before but can’t emphasize enough. It’s a quick and easy way to help increase your exposure locally by creating a Google My Business profile. The added benefits here are that it will allow customers to leave reviews, find your contact info quickly, and display your business within Google Maps.
Secure your website
Not only is it good practice to have what’s called an SSL certificate installed on your website it’s also taken into consideration within search results. As of July 2018, Google’s Chrome browser has started marking websites without an SSL as ‘not secure’. Many web hosting companies offer free SSL certificates to install now and it’s a quick win to a more secure and search friendly website.
Have questions on any of these steps? Let’s chat!
1. Statistic based on a release from Think With Google