Here are a few tips for any business trying to get onto Google:
Firstly – Your Website
You can setup your own website completely free and without any technical experience at all. The easiest solution is to use Google website builder tool. https://sites.google.com/
Alternatively find a local web designer who’s will to discuss your plans and propose a simple well designed site. (We can put you in touch with designers in your area). Review their portfolio and ensure that their experience matches your aspirations.
When designing the site – you want the main body to be text based, describing your business, the types of products or services you perform, and how you conduct business. Include testimonials and examples of previous work. Ensure your phone number and email address is at the top of every page. Try not to go for big graphics, and keep the design simple. Visitors are more interested in reading than navigating ineractive graphics and flash navigation. They are also interested in informative content – so keep this in mind when writing. You want to educate your readers, get them interested – then they will call.
How do I get on the search engines?
Firstly do your research. You can examine exactly how many people are searching for your type of business or product using this tool:
Using the Advanced Options section change your country to the UK – and then type in the word of phrase that a buyer might be looking for. Remember the buyer is usually looking for a solution to a problem and not necessarily your company.
An example might be “leaking roof”. If I search on this word I can see the number of searches per month (look at “local monthly searches”) of different words that are similar.
If I sort in volume order (click the “local monthly searches” title) then I can see words like “roofing”, “flat roof” and so on. These are too broad and are not “buying words”. However as I scan down the list I can see “roofing contractors – 14,800 searches per month”, ”roof services” and “roofing companies”.
These are ideal and represent the type of searches I want to attract to my website.
So how many visitors?
If I add up the number of searches these three words represent – I can see 14,800 + 9,900 + 1,900 = 26,600 searches per month for these words. Now if I was in Position 1 for these searches I would receive approximately 40% of these visitors. ie. 10,640.
If I can convert 0.5% of these into a sale – then that would be 53 sales per month. I’m sure that would be interesting for your business.
Optimise your homepage title and description
Using this research I can now optimise my homepage title to be :
“Roofing contractors, Roofing Services, roofing companies – MyCity”
The search engines will understand that your homepage will provide useful information about these keywords, and also list it at the top for searches in your city or region. Its important to keep the title to around 65 characters as this is the length you see in the search engine listing.
Next – optimise the description. Here you will describe what type of service you provide, especially with any special offers you can offer – as its this description that will entice people to click on your website.
eg: ”Acme Roofing contractors provide expert solutions to leaks, replacement roofs and repairs. Suprisingly affordable – free quotation – call us today”
This type of description will tell the visitor who you are and what you offer together with an enticement to visit your site and give you a call.
To summarise:
- Select a web designer to build you a site based on content not fancy graphics.
- Make sure you write good quality content for the site including examples, previous work and testimonials. Don’t forget your phone number.
- Research your 3 primary keywords and ensure there are people searching for them.
- Write your title and description, and ask you web designer to put them on your site.
For further advice on optimising your small business website – send us an email at info@pageonetraffic.co.uk
