How visible is your business?
You’ve got an awesome looking website, a great brand and a good social media following, yet web generated sales just don’t seem to be happening. In addition, the number of clicks through to your site from key search terms seem to be few and far between, and getting less each month.
There are literally hundreds of different things you can do to increase the visibility of your website within search engines, and you can guarantee your competitors are doing all of them, and more. In fact, it’s highly likely they have even employed a professional agency to perform a free SEO analysis to give them an even better insight into their web performance.
If this sounds like the situation with your business at the moment, chances are your brand is not visible to your customers when they search online, which will make it difficult to thrive in today’s digital age. With over one hundred million active websites currently online, standing out is essential to survival.
Here are a few of the most effective ways to make sure your business is seen by all the right people in the future:
Optimized for cell phones
The online environment has changed and an increasing number of people are accessing the internet via their smartphones. In fact, sales of smartphones and tablets far outstrips the combined sales of PCs and laptops, and cell web activity has grown exponentially over the past couple of years. You should be ensuring your business moves at the same pace and exploit the opportunities cell optimization presents.
Use local directories and Google Place Pages
If you want to make it easier for people to find you online, then getting listed in online directories is a good way to achieve this. However, care should be taken to ensure you only add your business to quality, relevant directories that will add value to your business.
If you have a small local business, take advantage of the abundance of local directories you have access to.
Improve your title tags
For the uninitiated, title tags are the words that appear in your browser window, not on the web page itself. Try to use words that your customers would use to search, rather than just the name of your business (for example; building supplies or green wholesalers).
Make it easy for the search engines
Search engines will crawl your site to grab content, so it knows which pages to return in a search. If the search engine ‘spider’ can’t navigate your site, those pages won’t be visible to your audience when they perform a search.
Flash Navigation, Java Script and the use of frames should all be avoided to ensure maximum visibility of your site as these are all difficult for the spider to crawl.
Get more (good) links
Quality incoming links assures the search engines that your website is trusted, valued and popular and should therefore be rewarded for good behaviour by appearing at the top of listings. Some of the best ways to earn these links is by regularly posting link-worthy content and getting listed in established, trustworthy directories.