The internet has allowed so many businesses to blossom into huge multinational companies with billions in revenue such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook and more. Equally, many smaller businesses have found great success online. There are 1,197,982,359 websites in the world as of January 2021, with the milestone of 1 billion websites being reached in 2014! The number of websites is always increasing with thousands of sites being created daily, therefore the competition is fierce for ranking in the search engines. This blog is a little introduction as to how you can get ahead of the competition. It’s all about a little TLC!
The ability to set up a business online without having to purchase a physical premise is a key factor in this increase in the number of websites being developed. However, many people believe as soon as they have a website designed that the hard work stops and that internet traffic will pour onto their site, leading to loads of enquiries and sales.
This is not quite the case, as we’ll see. The work has only just begun when your web designer hands over your new website.
Ideally, your web developer built your website with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) at the forefront of their mind. There are many best practices to abide by when building a website to ensure the site is set up to be able to rank highly in the search engine results. Don’t be afraid to ask your web developer about these…To name but a few:
1. Correct heading rankings
2. Use of keywords
3. Fast loading pages
4. Use of meta-descriptions
5. Alt Text on images
6. Sufficient content on each page
As mentioned, once the website is live the work is only just beginning, with thousands of websites going live every day it is going to take some work to convince search engines like Google that your site is worth ranking highly. Simply put, if you don’t care about your website, they won’t either! Alongside ensuring your website is built correctly with SEO in mind, there are many things you can do to make improve your rankings. Here is Sizzle Marketing’s top 3 recommendations for improved SEO that you could do without a developer if you wanted to.
Number 1, Blog, Blog and Blog…Writing a regular blog that is relevant to what you do, to add to your site shows regular interaction with your site which is favourable to search engines, and the new content will attract new visitors. Next month we will be doing a blog on blogging!
(We’ve been caught out here! But this blog isn’t only for SEO purposes, we promise- Sizzle Marketing want to help you and your business.)
Number 2 – Keep monitoring your site’s performance and make incremental improvements. Two great tools for this are Google analytics, and Google Search Console. Using these tools, you can get in depth stats about your site’s performance across many metrics. For example, you can see the bounce rate of pages of your website. This is the percentage of people who landed on a page and left almost immediately. This could be due to many reasons but perhaps it could be the way the page is set out. You can make some changes and then see if this stat improves. There are many metrics and many changes to be made over a long period of time to create a highly functioning and top performing website. Similarly, ask your network of friends, family, and contacts for feedback on your website’s usability. Do they find it easy to find the information they need? Are they able to carry out the intended action easily?
Number 3 – Link building…search engine rankings are all about trust. Can Google, Yahoo, Bing trust your website to deliver the answer to the searcher’s request? One of the main ways to build this trust is through link building to create ‘link juice’ (a terrible term!) Through building online profiles across various websites and directories such as Yell or Google My Business, you are firstly giving your site more chance to be found on that site, but also having links on other relevant sites/directories creates this credibility and trust for your site, making it easier for search engines to recommend your website to searchers.
If you have any questions regarding building an SEO friendly site, please do not hesitate to contact us.
