Improving your business’ digital presence is key to gaining more leads and sales. Perhaps you’re in the process of developing your business’ website or you have just launched it. Either way, these five quick tips will help your customers find your business more easily online.
1. Optimise for local search
Defining your target areas from the get-go is essential when creating an effective digital marketing strategy.
It might seem simple, but one of the key pieces of information search engines look for when indexing your site is your business location. This helps search engines segregate and rank your website pages in search results that are relevant to your target location. Be sure to have your business contact details in the footer and contact page of your website.
Google’s increasing emphasis on ‘map pack’ search results has meant that utilising ‘Google My Business’ is now a key strategy for businesses focusing on local search. Making sure your Google My Business page is packed with reviews and photos will encourage visitors to engage with your profile. Additionally, setting correct locations and services within Google My Business is important for appearing in local service ‘map pack’ search results.
2. Build domain authority and consistent citations
One of the many criteria search engines will use to rank your website is how much authority your domain has.
As a start-up, your website will likely have a fresh domain. Search engines view websites with a higher number of quality and relevant backlinks as more trustworthy, and ultimately rank higher in search results.
An effective link building strategy can be creating original blog posts with statistics or infographics. This type of content encourages other businesses to link to your content on their website.
Citations
Citations can be found anywhere on the web where your business is mentioned. This can be a phone number, email or address. These fall into a similar bracket to backlinks but aren’t technically classed as backlinks. Examples of citations can be found on social media or directories.
Having contact details which are consistent across the web can be crucial to an effective SEO strategy, these citations send signals to search engines that your business is legitimate.
3. Find niche keywords to implement on your website
The amount of competitors businesses typically have is growing and growing. New businesses have to find a way of standing out from the crowd, and finding niche keywords to implement on your website can be part of that solution.
Here are a few questions to answer when trying to identify niche keywords:
- What are my business’ USPs?
- How does my business’ USPs relate to the services we offer?
- How might my business’ USP influence my audience’s website searches?
- What services or products does my business offer that my competitors do not?
Google Trends is a free SEO tool that allows you to see what search terms are trending in Google’s search algorithm. This can be really useful when developing your niche keyword strategy. Trends can provide a base platform so you know that people are searching for your topic.
4. Tracking and analytics are key
Ask yourself, how do you know if your audience is getting the information they need from your business’ website? Google has some key tracking and analytics tools that can show you exactly that.
Google Analytics allows you to measure a variety of different statistics around your website’s performance, here are a few examples:
- Visits to a page
- Session duration
- Bounce rate (how often a user will immediately exit a page)
But you may ask, how do I apply this data? Here is an example:
If a particular page has a much lower session duration than another, ask yourself why this is from a user experience perspective. Perhaps the content isn’t interesting enough or the page isn’t interactive enough. Take a look at the page and evaluate. When making steps to improve the page, have a clear user journey in mind.
5. Building trust with your audience
One of the most important factors as a start-up is establishing trust with your audience. Potential customers may be swayed by a competitor’s reliability and good reviews instead of taking a risk on a new business like yours.
Building trust is not only essential to gaining new customers but is also an important search engine ranking factor. Positive reviews across digital platforms like TrustPilot, Facebook and Google My Business are more likely to improve your rankings, which will, in turn, improve your click-through rates.
Additionally, research certifications that are relevant to your business’ industry and add badges to your website once certified. This can be a great way of increasing trust and making your business stand out from the competition.
If you’re looking to improve your website’s SEO, the team at Brace are here to help. Get in touch with us today to see what we can do to improve your business’s online visibility.
