There I have just gone and said it…..shoot me now! I know that everybody bands about the words Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) meaning fundamentally if you’re not in the top five of a Google search then you should either spend the next few years of your life trying to achieve that, or alternatively your website will never ever be found and you may as well shut up shop now.
However, it really isn’t as drastic as that. There are many successful businesses who don’t even have a website, let alone worry about whether Google puts them first in the list of businesses in their area of industry. There are also some very industry specific businesses who know that people will find them regardless of whether Google knows about them or not.
But what about the rest of us who do want a presence on at least page one of an appropriate Google search? We strive to achieve good SEO – we make sure our metatags are there and are relevant, we make sure the meta descriptions reflect our business and it’s between 150-160 characters and still makes sense to a potential viewer/customer, we tag our pictures and write appropriate page titles and yet still Google tends to ignore us. Without getting too paranoid about it, it could just be that your competitors are doing it better.
Google your Competitors’ websites
Therein lies the crux of it. If you want to get better in social media and SEO – look at your competitors’ sites and see what they are doing. Do they write a blog to keep their site updated? Are they active on social media, without posting about how good their products are every twenty seconds or so. Like all marketing, it’s all about balance and providing information potential and existing customers want/need, rather than bombarding them with bumpf…..and it has to be targeted – no point in shouting in the wind.
Also I am always very sceptical of specific SEO companies that promise to make your site the top pick in a Google search. This is not only hard to achieve, but it also may be short lived as it has to be continually challenged to ensure it stays at the top and moreover Google changes the rules all the time!
Good design and content is key
The best thing you can do is take a long hard look at your website itself. It doesn’t matter where you are in the rankings on Google, if when people come to your website they are not converted to buyers. Do you make it easy for people to buy, are they clear about what you offer as a business or are you so SEO enabled that your content doesn’t really make sense?
As always nothing puts people off more than broken links, pages that take forever to download, sites that don’t work properly on people’s phones and worst of all, spelling mistakes. Your website is your virtual shop window. If it’s not properly ‘dressed’ then you will lose customers.
Your overall Marketing Strategy includes Google
The last thing I would say is that social media and SEO are only really one part of your marketing strategy, albeit an important part. It is vital to incorporate an on-line strategy into your overall marketing strategy, but with on-line, as much as off-line, there needs to be goal setting and a measurement of achievement. If your company goal is to be at the top of the Google ranking, then the question is why? What will that do for you in the scheme of what you are trying to achieve. You need to make sure that whatever you do on-line matches up with what you are trying to achieve off-line in terms of your target market, your strategy for growing your business, increasing sales and very importantly company image.