A Friendly Reminder About Your Website and Google

You may have heard this joke before: where should you hide something that you don’t want people to find? The punchline that goes with it: you hide them on the second page of Google.

It’s pretty tongue-in-cheek, but there’s quite a bit of truth in it: 75% of those searching never scroll past the first page of results! And, since over 85% of people in the United States are using Google to make those searches, it’s the search engine you need to focus on pleasing the most.

So, what can you do to bump up your ranking so you’re on the first page, or - the ultimate goal - one of the first results?

You need to work to get your website optimized to how Google likes websites to be.

Getting on Google’s Good Side

To simplify things for you, there are three main categories that you need to dedicate time to addressing when fixing up your website: the overall user experience, your content, and your links.

1. The Overall User Experience

Your website needs to be designed with user experience in mind. Make sure you can answer “yes” to the following questions:

• Can all features of your website be accessed on every device a person may be browsing on?
• Is it easy to navigate your website?
• Do your website pages load relatively fast?
• Does your website meet Google’s accessibility standards?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, then it’s time to redesign your website.

2. Content

Focusing on your website content is a great way to improve your search engine ranking. But, it’s not always enough to just have a lot of content. If the content isn’t tailored to what your services entail and what your target audience might be searching for, you’re going to attract people who aren’t interested in your services.

When defining your written content strategy, consider the following:

• Are you including the right keywords? - The content you write about should contain the keywords and topics that you want to rank higher for.
• Is your content optimized? - You want to make sure that keywords are used effectively throughout your content where appropriate (the title tag, H1 tag, H2 tags, image Alt text, and/or the primary content area).
• Is your content over-optimized? - This can happen if you’re following Black Hat SEO techniques. Spamming your content with the same keywords over and over with no mind for user experience and readability will negatively affect your search engine ranking.
• Can your content be found by Google? - To find and index your website content, Google needs to crawl your website. If your website is designed in a way that Google cannot crawl it, it’s going to hurt your rankings.

One of the best ways to prop up your content strategy is to have a company blog, and post articles related to your service offerings on a regular basis.

Notice that the list above pertains to your written content, but that isn’t the only type of content that Google is looking for. Any videos, images, and downloadable content you have that pertain to what your business does can help improve your ranking. The more and wider variety of content that you have, the better!

3. Links

Related to both the user experience and your content, links are still considered important to Google (though, not as much as they used to be). Take care of the links on your website and take advantage of internal linking to improve user experience.

Also, don’t forget to link back to your website whenever possible through your other marketing efforts! Backlinks - which are other websites that link to yours - increase your page’s credibility, and will likely increase your search engine ranking. You can start doing this yourself by sharing links to your blog articles through social media.

Your Road Toward The Front Page

If you want some further insight into how your site is doing according to Google itself, try using their new tool web.dev. This tool, currently in open beta, analyzes your website (or, any website that you want to peek at) based on four different categories: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Give it a try!

And, we don’t want to brag, but our own MSP’s website as well as the websites of all of our SEO clients all boast a 90+ SEO score using Google’s tool. So, if you need to improve in that area specifically, check out our SEO service offering tiers - just recently revised to better serve you. Contact us if you would like assistance!