So you’ve spent on average, research shows, £10,000 or a full 5 days work on building your current business website. Now is the time to make sure people can find it!
Businesses are missing out on over 71% of online sales leads, just because they aren’t optimising their website for SEO. It can be a few simple tweaks that could get you higher than your competitors for your chose products and/or services.
The aim of the game is to give the search engines (mainly Google for the UK) exactly what they want… and they want good quality websites and regular content.
So here’s 3 big problems that will probably b hindering your rankings…
1 – HTTPS – SSL
HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocols Secure – the biggest element of this we want is the “S” – you might see some web pages don’t have the S, and that will be directly effecting their rankings. The S means you’ve got a secure connection and data is being transmitted back and forwards over secure data. For this you need to purchase an “SSL certificate” – this is a Secure Socket Layer which your website hosting provider should be able to offer you for around £30 per year.
Since April 2018 Google has stopped unsecure (non-HTTPS) website from being found of mobile versions of search, so if you’ve noticed a drop in website traffic since April, check you’ve got an SSL certificate for your website – even if you don’t do any ecommerce of take anyones details! You’re doing it for your SEO as well as your customers.
2 – Broken Links
1 in every 2 website has some number of broken links. Search engines don’t like broken links, so we want to find and remove or update these errors.
Ever seen a “404 page” this is where you’ve clicked on a link that’s no longer valid, so we want to go and find where those are. You could do this manually, but we highly recommend a free tool called SEO Spider https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
With 71% of people abandoning a purchase if they notice the website isn’t secure, it’s worth investing that £30!
3 – GMB Listing (Google My Business) None, or Not Updated
Do you have a GMB listing? When was the last time you updated it?
When using Google to search for your product/services, you’ll often notice if you’re searching for a location, that you’ll see one or multiple GMB listings on a map. If there’s lots of competition, you’ll have to work hard to out rank the others, so you’re not only top spot on the organic search (below paid adverts) but also the top of he GMB listings section. If you can get your company name is as many of these sections as possible, the more opportunities you’re giving your potential customer to connect with you!
We’ve increased one of our clients sales leads by 33%, just by optimising their GMB listing!
And some SEO jargon busting for you…
You know we like to keep things straight-forward so here’s a simple breakdown of some words you might hear your web, IT or SEO team using, and what they actually mean…
- SERPs – Search Engine Rankings Position – so for example your website might be “page 2, rank 1” – which would mean it’s on the second page, on the first “organic” (non-paid-for) item
- Keywords – (or key phrases) – what you want to be found for when someone types it into a search engine, this could be branded e.g. “DigiEnable” or unbranded e.g. “SEO Services”
- Rankings – A general term for a range of different search engine positions
- Front End – What someone see if they were coming to your website for the first time as a member of the public
- Back End – The part of your website where you login with a username and password, and you can see all your settings, plugins and “behind the scenes” info
- Meta data – this is the hidden data we right in specifically for computers or software to tell it what content we have on each page and image. You can have for example, a Title and a Meta Title, which could both have different content.
We hope this has been useful, please do let us know if we can advise you with anything else, of if you’d like to find out more out our services contact us now!