Here are a few tips for business owners and employees to improve their company’s search engine rankings:
First, have an idea of your current ranking; we suggest that you know where you are ranked now and have some statistics on your current website traffic. Google offers a free service called Google Analytics that can be set up to track existing website traffic. To find out where your business currently stands on some key search terms, simply type them into the various search engines, such as Google or Bing, to see how far down the list or on which page your website appears. Note that typical searches are three to five words in length and may be longer in some cases.
If you are unable to find your company’s website when performing some simple searches, then the next step would be to add your company name to the search. If you still cannot find your company’s website in the search results, you will likely need to work on your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). This SEO process creates a starting foundation to start improving your company’s search engine rankings. Even if you do find your results, please continue reading.
Congratulations, your company has what appears to be the base for improving your search rankings. Today’s search engines are simply trying to match each search with the most relevant results. In order to do this, the algorithms and computations have gotten more complicated and are less and less prone to “tricks”; consequently, this article is simply raising your awareness and hoping to change some of your daily activities in order to help train the search engines to find what you want your customers to see when searching.
On a daily basis, it is important to become your own company’s customer. This entails placing yourself in the role of a customer each time you have a question, going to your favorite search engine, searching for what you think is the most relevant topic, and seeing if you can obtain the correct information through the search engine all of the ways onto your company’s website. At first, this is probably going to be a frustrating process. If that is the case and it does not seem to be working, then check your website and see if you have the text you are searching for on the same page you are trying to navigate to. If not, you should revise your website content and try the search again later. This is a process of continuous improvement. Search engines like to know that sites are not stale; monthly updates to your company’s website allow search engines to know they are not out-of-date, and it is often easier to make incremental changes to the website instead of large changes.
If you are not sure where the information you are trying to add should go on your company’s website, we offer two suggestions. First, consider adding a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page. Second, consider adding a resource, news, event, or blog section for miscellaneous communications.
Not getting the traffic you want can be a problem for many companies. Try searching for the sales terms as a customer and see if you are getting the results you want. If not, then keep doing this every day, once a day, to see what the results are. If the results are not improving, you will need to revise your company’s website content to improve the rankings. The new content has to be human-readable relevant information. Be careful not to put text just to improve your rankings because search engine algorithms can detect this and can actually ignore the text or even demote your site.
Finally, if you have done all of this and are not having any luck, then there is a list of other possibilities including site speed that can affect your relevance and rankings within the search engines. Unfortunately, these are a bit more complex for the average user to resolve.