Can making my website attractive to Google pull in more clients?
Posted by: electime 3rd August 2020
When it comes to your online presence, nothing beats having your own website.
It’s a space that is entirely dedicated to presenting your business to the world, showing off your skills and persuading the customer that you are the right person for the job.
If you’ve got a website up and running, you’re probably already aware of the delight that this space brings to you.
But is it working for you? Is your website bringing in potential customers? No matter how good your website looks, it’s only of value to you if it’s fulfilling its purpose.
If you answered ‘no’ or ‘it could be doing more’, it might be time to look at how basic SEO could improve your website.
What is SEO?
You might have seen the term thrown around by marketing gurus and ignored it. If you’ve never properly thought about SEO, you might not be aware of its potential. Here, we break it down simply:
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimisation.
Search engine optimisation is all about improving your website to increase the quantity and quality of traffic coming to it through organic search engine results.
Quantity is self-explanatory, but ‘quality’ entails ensuring that the customers who visit your site are coming there because you’re relevant to their search. Organic traffic is any traffic you haven’t had to pay for.
A website that has undergone the process of SEO is better understood by search engines for being relevant for a customer’s search term. Therefore it is ranked higher. The ultimate aim of SEO is to get onto the first page of Google, as 75 per cent of people don’t scroll further than this when searching for something.
SEO for my website: conducting keyword research
Say you’re an electrician with a website, who’s based in Birmingham.
To integrate SEO into this site, we need to think about keywords – what is the potential customer searching for? It’s vital to understand the customer, in order to optimise your site in such a way that it ranks high up in their organic search results.
To do this, we can start with the five W’s:
- What?
- What electrician services are people searching for?
- Who?
- Who is searching for these services?
- When?
- When are people searching for these services? Are there seasonal trends?
- Where?
- Where are these potential customers located?
- Why?
- Why are people searching for these services?
Considering and answering these questions is an important part of conducting keyword research.
Obviously, we want to rank for ‘Birmingham Electrician’. Using a keyword research tool, we can put ‘Birmingham Electrician’ in and see what else customers are looking for. ‘Reliable electrician’, ‘emergency electrician’ and ‘certified electrician’ all also happen to be terms potential customers are using.
You might also spot, whilst conducting keyword research, that traffic volume varies greatly between terms. Optimising your site with terms that are high volume is definitely a good idea, since this is where your customers are in their droves.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use low volume search terms though! There will be less competition for these terms, improving your chance of ranking higher.
SEO for my website: how to
Here are some practical ways you can use SEO in your site:
- Basic optimisation
- Blogging
- Get people linking back to your site
- Get a Google My Business account
Basic optimisation
Basic optimisation involves you thinking carefully about what’s on your site.
For instance, when it comes to images, it’s best to compress them and reduce your loading time. You can use your keywords in your image alt descriptions.
When it comes to the copy on your site, you should make sure it’s of high quality. This doesn’t just mean that your copy is useful, but also that it’s readable. Use headings and subheadings. Break big chunks into smaller paragraphs. Use bullet points for emphasis. Finally, make sure you’ve used keywords, but don’t overdo it.
Blogging
Blogging allows for a constant stream of content to run through your site, featuring your keywords. In SEO terms, this tells search engines that your site is staying relevant.
It also causes more people to visit your site and spend time on it – this means search engines assign more credibility to your site; it’s clearly a site of quality because it’s somewhere people like visiting, so you get bumped up in search engine rankings.
Get people linking back to your site
Backlinks are a powerful tool in your SEO toolbox. They tell search engines that one site is essentially ‘vouching’ for the other. If you can get high-authority domains to link to your site, your own authority improves.
Basically, if you write a blog article and a site like installeronline or electrical news decides to link to it, the ‘trustworthiness’ of your site will be boosted.
Get a Google My Business account
An important first step in any local SEO strategy is to claim and verify your local business’ Google My Business (GMB) listing. From there, you can follow a guide to make sure you’ve completed all the most important information.
Basic SEO can improve your website…
Try implementing some of these ideas on your website as soon as possible. Laying down a strong SEO foundation is highly valuable for your website. It can take a while for SEO tactics to start working, but establishing a strong presence on Google is vital for the sustainability of your site.
If you need help, Shake and Speare are a digital marketing agency that specialise in websites for tradesmen. Give them a shout!
