Have you ever heard; “If your web page does not show up on page one of a search that you don’t exist to the searcher?” Do you believe it?
Well you should because it’s true.
[source: Keith Sauro, DigitalSherpa] Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer. When was the last time you went down and clicked on page 2, 3 or more of results (unless of course your page is not coming up in a search and you are trying to see where your site is indexed)? What most people do if their search terms don’t yield desired results on page one, is refine their terms. In fact in a recent study conducted by Optify, the top 3 organic results receive 58.4% of all clicks from users.
So a question that business owners ask me all the time is How do I get business to come up on page one of search results? My first question back to the business operator is For what search terms? Operator says Well you know page one?. And I ping back. I understand, but for what search terms? Every possible keyword or phrase someone can think of when they search for your business? I don’t mean to be so caddy, but it is impossible to come up on page one organically for everything. If that is your goal, you will drive yourself bonkers. So I want to talk about some steps you can take to beginning getting the organic results you want. What we are talking about is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
But first, let’s refine the question How can I get my webpage to come up organically on page one search results for as many terms possible?
Let’s focus on these 4 important points:
Determine what keywords you feel are important to your business, then research.
You can hire an SEO company to research popular returns about your type of business, but that can be costly, and in the end they will focus on a package of SEO and SEM – pay per clicks (PPC) that will be even more costly. Or, you can research on your own what terms are popular. You can go to Google Adwords and research what’s popular. Not to buy keywords in PPC per se, but to understand popular terms and get suggestions based around your business. I am not saying not to use PPC as a part of your strategy, just don’t put all of your eggs in that basket. You may want to mix in some PPC for words that rank very high on the competition scale if you feel like not breaking through organically will keep you up at night. You can also dig deeper by using Google Insights to research the growth of these terms over time to find the best possible and most logical choices to focus on. Once you have the baseline keywords that you want to try and push in ranking, you can move onto the next steps.
For example: checking the term Remodeler Kansas City in Google Adwords will show how many global searches are done monthly for that term, the rate of competition for the term, and also Google will serve up other keyword phrase ideas around the term. See below:
Start a blog and produce content frequently and push that content to your Social Media business profiles.
Blogging allows you to write content frequently and easily. The rule of thumb for blogging is to write content that you feel would be interesting to the type of consumer that you want to do business with. Answer questions, concerns, industry trends and think about how someone might want to search when you are writing. Think of keyword possibilities that match your focus in the both the title of the story and the body of the text. When you add content to your blog, you have the opportunity to tag. This is where you are going to also use the researched key words you felt were relevant to your business. But also, the content text you write, will create more key words. And many times create searchable phrases that may not have been so obvious to you. Check out my recent blog post: 4 ways to understand how content marketing gets your website found in organic search.
Review analytics monthly.
You can’t optimize what you can’t measure, can you? In other words if you don’t know what keywords are working and driving organic results, you can’t be sure what content is working and what is not. So be sure you either set up Google analytics with your blog, or at the very least use the analytic tracking available with whatever platform you set up your blog on. Then review and repeat what works, and stop doing what is not. “The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result”, Anthony Robbins.
Be patient¦
Getting organic results takes time. It’s not like flipping the light switch. Just because you tag, and write content it’s not automatic. You must establish credibility with Google. This happens over time by writing lots of unique, frequent, relevant content to gain the proper indexing you desire, as well as engagement from your Social Media fans and followers.
So keep doing the right things over and over again and those page one search results will come. And guess what, your business will grow!