When starting a new business, especially a self-employment, trade, small business or micro-enterprise, creating a company website is at the top of the to-do list. Often this comes before the actual marketing strategy, especially when an eager entrepreneur is starting a business alone or with a small team and just getting started – ready to take action and get money in the bank as quickly as possible. What most entrepreneurs find out the hard way, though, is that it's one thing to create a great website – but quite another task to get someone to find it, stay on it and engage with it. And that's where SEO, or search engine optimisation, comes in.
90.63% OF WEBSITES GET NO DIRECT TRAFFIC FROM GOOGLE SEARCH TERMS.
Think of your brand new website as a car: you can drive the most beautiful vehicle out of the showroom, complete with an oversized bow and a bottle of champagne. But if you don't fill up, change the oil, check the tyre pressure, top up the water level and take the car in for regular maintenance, it won't last long or retain its value. I can supply your website with this fuel by optimising keywords and other important SEO functions, which will cause the website to rise ever higher in Google searches. This is not done by magic – it is made possible by the targeted use of keywords, interesting content and backlinks to get your website to the top of the search results. In order to achieve optimal SEO ranking results for new or existing websites, certain things need to be known in order to prepare for the launch. And that's what this blog is all about.
Since Google changed its focus to ‘mobile-first’, it is important that websites are optimised for mobile-first (i.e. the website must load quickly and display correctly on different types of smartphones). Since websites are usually not created with a mobile device, mobile errors are often not recognisable and/or mobile optimisation is overlooked. Pages that are not optimised for mobile devices have fallen 21% in search engine rankings. Is your website mobile friendly? Find out by using Google's free mobile-friendly test to see how your website is doing.
Search engines reward up-to-date and valuable content for users. To ensure that a website remains relevant in search results, it must have useful, appealing content for your target audience that is regularly updated and/or added to. There are two main reasons for this: Firstly, to prevent Google's search algorithms from considering the site to be inactive and to avoid it during regular reading (= crawling). Secondly, it is important to provide relevant content that is useful for customers to return to the site again and again. Companies that blog have on average 55% more visitors to their website. Blogging is also a very popular way to create engaging content around a company's topic and is an important human skill. A monthly change of one or two sentences in the text of the website is enough to alert Google's search patterns to the need for a new read. Content optimisation is an ongoing task, which is why I constantly create new content or revise existing content with the appropriate keywords.
Google dominates the use of search engines and is responsible for over 70% of all global search traffic. In the US, Google holds a whopping 94% of the mobile search engine market share. Conclusion: If you want to win at search engine optimisation, you have to play along with Google, and that means you have to make sure that your website always performs well on Google's most important ranking factors. Among the more than 200 ranking factors used by Google's search engine, user experience and technical SEO are currently the deciding factors.
93% of global traffic comes from Google Search, Google Images and Google Maps. To return to the analogy of the car: If one of these key ranking factors is a flat tyre, I'll have a hard time accelerating your car. But that can be managed too. In addition to the important keywords, I make sure that backlinks, metadata, SERP snippets, semantic search, entity search and other important Google search factors are always optimised. I also analyse all clients' websites in terms of technical SEO factors, such as page loading speed, site security and accessibility, actual business information on the site and overall user experience. These are all important factors that determine the level of usability of a website.
high-converting landing pages
Sign up for a free, no-obligation initial consultation and find out how we can help you achieve a profitable and scalable web presence.
