You have a few hundred followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Most of them are family and friends. All your social media sites are linked to your website. Your website is nicely done. It has great content. Your site is clean, user-friendly, and mobile device friendly. But there is not much traffic. Business is slow, and you would rather not splurge on an expensive ad to generate business and traffic on your website. What’s your website’s problem? What’s wrong? Can you rejuvenate your business and online activities?
Imagine yourself finding your dream beach house. The house has clean architectural lines with large glass windows, mid-century furniture, and stainless steel appliances. You admire the designer’s attention to detail. You instantly fall in love with the house. Then a cool, gentle breeze blows by and your dream beach house collapses.
This dream beach house of yours is your business’ attractive website. Your dream beach house collapsed because it has a weak foundation. Your company website does not generate enough traffic to be bumped up on Google searches because its foundation is weak too. Typically, a weak website has limited clicks, daily visits, and catches only a few leads.
What do we mean when we say a website’s foundation is weak? Remember the saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover?” A book’s cover might be well-designed, but its content might also be the worst you have read in your whole life. The same is the case for your website. It might be attractive to your eyes, but the content or its foundation might not be strong enough to attract Google to your website.
So how will you have a strong and successful website that will attract Google to boost your site to the top of the search engine result page? A successful website will not only look nice but, will also have well-structured keywords that are connected and consistent with its links, contents, and tags.
First, establish your keywords. If you own a coffee shop and think you brew the “best coffee in town,” then your starting point for generating keywords would be your nature of business, your name, and the “best coffee in town” phrase. This could be a good starting point for generating keywords for your website.
Another way of generating keywords is to think of what your future customers would type in Google’s search bar. You would probably also come up with “best coffee in town.” Once you have generated these keywords or keyword phrases, you can see how many people are using these keywords on Google AdWords. You can mix and match keywords or keyword phrases to generate more traffic to your site, because different people will have different ways of typing their keywords.
You can spread your keywords throughout your website, but you wouldn’t want to oversaturate every page of your website. You’ve got to make your content feel and look natural. Place your keywords strategically, where it’s important and necessary. Keywords are not bombs you drop in bulk and everywhere. Think of keywords as sharp, piercing bullets that hit targets right on point. The most strategic placement for your keywords is your meta page title.
Meta page titles, or SEO meta tags, are what pops up when you search for something on Google. Let’s use Best Buy as our example because this is what helped me understand meta pages. When you search Best Buy on Google, the first things you’ll see is their title and a short description. The title combined with the description is the meta page title. Basically, a meta page title is a brief description of your web page. Titles and descriptions have limited amount of characters, not letters. Your website will have separate meta page titles for all the web pages. You’ve generated your keywords. Pack your meta page titles with some of your most important keywords, because Google is attracted to websites with healthy meta page titles.
Once you’ve generated your keywords and meta page titles, it’s time to think about your inbound links and external contents. Inbound links are outside links that connect to your website. These are blogs or websites’ contents mentioning and linking your company’s website. In doing so, it creates curiosity from readers of other websites and drives traffic to your site. In your own content you can also create links for other businesses or websites. Creating these connections with other websites builds relationships and trust. The Google robots that read the contents in websites and web pages would slowly trust your website.
But, keep in mind, while your connectivity with other sites builds trust, you still need your website to be active as possible. Through your external contents, blogs and press releases, need to be up-to-date. Google robots read a website’s inactivity. This will not help your cause of pushing your presence higher in SERPs. Continuity and consistency are not only important in real life. It is also important in the world of digital marketing.
You’ve got all the tools you need for a strong and healthy website to help boost your business’ search engine visibility. Re-imagine the dream beach house you saw and picture it with a strong and deep foundation that no wind or storm can take apart. Turning your dream website in to a beautiful reality will need time, structure, and consistency. Seeking professional help with a specialized team is more cost efficient than doing it yourself or having a non-trained secretary do all digital campaign and social media engagement for you. Actualize your sleek, attractive website with a well-designed foundation that is guaranteed to boost your online brand visibility.
