How to get found on Google

Some people say SEO is a dark art, making out that it’s tricks that can improve your Google ranking, but this really isn’t the case - it’s hard work, good content and a few pointers in the right direction.

The content and the hard work is up to you, but I can give you a few pointers in the right direction. The below tips are just a few things that will increase your chances of getting found on Google. These are not the only things you can do - but should help with your overall google ranking.

Building back links

The easiest and quickest way is to get back links to your site - sign up to business online directories as this will easily give you strong back links to your site with little or no effort – link to directories here. Most of these sites will let you add an entry for free. Just add a small bit of business information, put in the bio and the all-important back link to your site. Add your site to say 30 of these and guess what, you’ve got 30 good back links to your site.

Social media

It’s pretty obvious but sometimes it can be overlooked. It’s so important to set up social media accounts for your website, again with a bit of information and linking to the site. This could be where you share the blogs you’re writing, articles, post images and generally keep the world up-to-date with your content. There are lots of social media platforms out there, although I would suggest you definitely set up a LinkedIn business page, Facebook business page, Twitter and of course Instagram accounts.

Google my business

Now Google loves Google, so not having a Google my business page is missing a big trick! This is pretty easy and straightforward to set up as long as you have an address and email account & phone number for Google to verify. Once done, Google will create a “my business page” on its search engine - then any content you add such as images, company logos, office shots and team pictures, with a map of how to find you is there, ready when someone searches your business.

Speed

We all get fed up with it and so does Google but it’s so important that your website loads quickly. Any time spent waiting for sites to load is going to get you lower and lower down on googles listings. Google ranking times seem to always be decreasing but your site needs to load within the first 2 to 3 seconds otherwise it will be penalised. I would suggest not going for large Hi-Res images on the homepage, or Videos and animations that aren’t already embedded in Youtube or Vimeo.

Site Map

Again, another easy one to do that can overlooked is to create a site map for your site so Google can easily index all the pages - you can even upload the sitemap straight to google through a Google search console. This can then be simply be added to the footer on your site - linking through to the site map. The simplest way to create a free site map is to use the site https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which will create a site map from your website.

Adding Page titles and Meta tags

Title tags define the title of your web page - it should be short, clear and descriptive and needs to be displayed on the page - but don’t duplicate content from the page content.

The meta description is what search engines use to gauge which topic you’re writing about and the exact audience that they should send to this page. So, make it descriptive and short – no more than 160 characters. Both these help Google find relevant content for its uses - so it’s important to improve ranking.

Blogs 

Google loves content, information, top tips etc. The more information you can feed it, the better ranking your site will get! This is why blogs are so important. A blog is a great way of adding regular content to your site. It need to be a certain length, include keywords that your customers are searching for, plus engaging headings and images will help.

Two important points here are - firstly, always write as if you’re writing for a person not a computer, remember these posts need to be read by people not only computers. And secondly and probably more importantly try and answer a question your customers might be asking. 

For example, think how we use Google i.e. you often ask a question such as how do I, or what’s the best way to, how do I make, best ways to get…. etc, etc. So, try and make sure your blog posts are answering questions your customers might be asking

Then once you’ve written these blogs make sure you market it as much as possible by always including the share button after each article, so people can share this to their social media. Create social media posts to promote the blog post, e-mail newsletters promoting the post, create a video of the blog to upload to YouTube, create infographics of the blog etc. See if you can get your blog guest posted on someone else’s site. My advice is, once you have produced this content, re-market it re-post and re-use it as much as possible.

My final tip and maybe the biggest one of them all is to get Google search console - this is a free tool  which Google provides, that will tell you all the areas that your site needs to improve on for SEO. It shows pages that aren’t loading correctly, and any errors pages you might have. Go through and fix them all and this will increase the amount of traffic your site receives. As well as Google search console it’s really important to add google analytics to your site. This way you can view the number of visitors you’re getting, where they come from and how they interact with your site so as to improve the overall experience in the future.