When you want to market your local business online having a website is a must. To help search engines find your business website, here are a few simple things you can do.
When done right a great company website is not only somewhere you can direct potential customers to find out more about your services, but is a great way for new customers to find your services or products.
Below we’ve put together some simple things you can do to help improve your standing in search engine results.
1. Create Useful Content
The simplest thing that any business can do is have clear and simple content on their website. You want to make sure that people visiting your site can easily tell what your business is about. You want to provide answers to the questions that any person would want answered:
- Who are you?
- What does your company do and what services/products do you offer?
- How can your company help them?
- Why should they trust you?
- How can they find you and get in contact?
- Any industry specific questions.
These are just some ideas and there may be other questions that could be answered, but look at creating content for your site with the customer in mind. You want to make sure that is easy to read, free of errors and provides useful information. Be sure to use words and phrases related to your industry. This could be done through some keyword research (specific search words) related to your industry. However, this is for more advanced content writing but if you’d like to give it a go, a great place to start is with a simple Google search. Look at what words you competitors are using and compare which ones are used most often.
Be sure to include images unique to your business, take some picture of your workshop or store. Make sure they relate to what you are writing about. Images are usually the first thing that will grab the attention of website visitors. Make sure you have quality pictures that showcase what your business is all about and name them appropriately.
Make sure that the design of your website makes information easy to find, either through the break-up of text on the homepage or through multiple pages.
If you would like to revamp your site or create customer targeted content, contact us now.
2. Website Trust Indicators
Leading on from your informative content comes Trust Indicators. Search Engines will place a priority to websites that they trust. The simplest way for your local business to generate this trust is to prove that you are a real business. Create a Google Business profile and a company page on Facebook. Be sure to complete all fields and include your physical address, telephone number and latest email address. Add to this detailed ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ pages. This will help search engines trust your websites authority and may improve your ranking in search results.
3. Register with Search Engine Webmaster tools
This step is a little more on the technical side but isn’t impossible for you as a local business owner to do. After you’ve created your content, complete with images and trust indicators you want to let search engines know about your site. Over time, a search engine may come across your site, but why wait? Go to Google or Bing webmaster tools, signup and add you company website – there are other search engines out there, but these are the big two.
This will let the search engine ‘bots’ that crawl the internet for information find, index and segment your website in the search results for you industry.
This article only gives you a glimpse into how you can help search engines find your local business and boost your search engine results.