What do you think of when you hear the word “Google”?
Somebody would say it’s a multinational company, another one would say that it’s a tool that we use to ask questions and search for answers on the Internet. A marketer would say that Google is a great tool for inbound marketing. But what is Google for your business? Does it have any importance and impact on it? Should we think about Google when we create a website? Let’s go bit by bit.
Top Results Appear First
When an Internet user searches for something on Google, the first page of search results will display the most popular text fragments that the search engine believes most closely corresponds to the request. In most cases, the user will only check the top results on the first page skipping the rest of the search results. Therefore, if your website is low in Google ranking, it will not be displayed at the top of the search. This is why it is important to put the page in the top search results since pages from the top ten are most often displayed on the first page.
Business’ Credibility
It’s also important to mention that displaying in Top Search Results Page significantly increases the credibility of the website in the eyes of the Internet users, which respectively enhances the authenticity of your business in the eyes of its clients. That is a psychological factor that can benefit a business’ image and differentiate it among rivals.
Leads and Traffic
When a website is displayed in Top Search Results, it also essentially increases the visibility of the site driving more leads and traffic to it. Can you believe that websites that are at the top of searching results capture 36.4% of the traffic that is missed by websites with a lower rating? This means that a business misses a lot of opportunities if its website appears even on the second page of the search results.
Increase the Conversion Rate
Companies that are ranked higher in Google can significantly increase their conversion rate and for that, you have to keep in mind the reviews and overall rating of the company on Google. The higher your rating and the more positive reviews you get, the better your conversion rate will be.
What impacts your ranking on Google?
There are about 200 factors that Google uses when sorting sites in the search engine and ranking it. All of them in one way or another affect Google rankings, but among the factors that have the greatest impact on ranking are site architecture, domain security, incoming links, topic selection, individual keywords, structured content, meta tags, and website speed. Focus on these factors strengthening your website’s security, architecture, design, content, and tailoring keywords, and it will pay off rank your site at the top of the search results list. However, bear in mind that after getting to the top you need to continuously work on website and SEO to stay there and differentiate among competitors.
We hope that now you understand the importance of Google ranking, and do not underestimate the impact that Google can have on your business. So if you want to be successful on Google, we highly recommend you to hire an expert SEO Agency that will create an effective strategy for you and help you to get rid of the Google ranking problem.
Does your organization have an in-house marketing team? If yes, that’s great, but it’s never enough. We recommend you consider hiring an SEO agency that can benefit your business development in the long term.
What are the main reasons you outsource SEO and hire an agency specializing in that?
Reason #1 – Accountability
When you partner with an SEO agency, you will have to sign a contract of services that will be legally binding for both parties. Therefore, when you start working with an SEO agency, you will have a proposal, deliverables, and other relevant documentation stating your SEO agency’s objectives and responsibilities. This accountability level will help drive the desired outcomes and achieve better results than doing SEO in-house.
Reason #2 – SEO Agency’s expertise
An SEO agency is a team of experts in search engine optimization that can handle anything from setting the right SEO strategy for your business to its implementation. You will be able to get an informative solution from an industry expert rather than searching for the answers yourself and potentially incurring unnecessary costs.
Reason #3 – Tailored Strategy
An SEO agency will help you to build a strategy tailored to your business objectives. If you manage your SEO efforts yourself, you will have to go throughout the process, possibly making mistakes and putting yourself at risk of throwing money at a project that might not be worth it. An SEO agency can provide you with faster and less expensive solutions that are 100% tailored to your business objectives helping to scale up your business and significantly increase your revenue in the long term.
Reason #4 – Fresh Ideas
An SEO agency is an independent party with a fresh pair of eyes to look at your business and your digital marketing performance. It can give you relevant feedback and generate new ideas to optimize your website and increase efficiency.
Reason #5 – Increase brand visibility
An SEO agency helps increase your business website’s rankings in the global marketplace and obtain a sustainable branding impact. Companies that don’t use SEO effectively have lower rankings and remain unnoticed on the Internet, while an optimized SEO strategy will help your business to appear in search ahead of well-known brands.
Reason #6 – Customer Acquisition
Another reason to hire an SEO agency rather than doing it in-house is customer acquisition. A successful SEO strategy can significantly increase the number of website visitors driving the traffic, lead generation, customer acquisition, and converting them to sales. While you and your team keep doing what you do best: delighting such customers.
Reason #7 – Website Audits and Reports
An SEO organization will frequently conduct website audits and generate keyword and ranking reports for your website. This will help your business define the scope of SEO and to better clarify your website positioning by analyzing data and tracking changes and improvements.
Reason #8 – SEO Maintenance
It is essential to understand that SEO is not just a one-time assignment; it is a long-term constant process. It is a strategy with a set of actions that should be taken to achieve your business goals. When you hire an SEO agency, you don’t need to worry about regular website checkups, fixing the bugs, continuously working on increasing your website popularity and driving more organic traffic to a website. An agency will take care of it, helping your business to grow. This should free your time to develop other aspects of your business.
Reason #9 – Algorithm Changes
An SEO Agency is always aware of the latest trends, ranking algorithm changes, and SEO techniques. Rather than searching for the latest SEO trend and trying to understand how to implement it yourself, if you outsource SEO to an expert agency, it will save you a lot of time and trouble by allowing you to fully focus on your own business.
Hire an SEO Agency and it will help significantly boost your business’s search visibility, drive traffic to the website, strengthen your brand name, increase your online rankings, acquire more customers, and generate more revenue while having time to focus on your business and responsibilities. It’s an investment that will pay off.
Why is Search Engine Optimization important for businesses? Well, Did you know that? 167 Billion Searches happen on Google a month. If you are not showing on the first google result for your products and services, you are missing in a vast untapped potential. Search Engines, such as Google, are the new yellow pages. It is where people go to find answers, including people looking for your products and services. 88% of people research before they buy a product or services. And what’s the first place where they research? Google! So, Do you really need SEO for your business website? Yes, you do! Because of this, we decided to create our SEO guide!
What is SEO? S.E.O. stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the work that goes into your website and some other online places to prove search engines, such as Google, that you are the best, more relevant, and most trusted answer. So let’s get started with some basic terms:
Key Terms
Keywords: Your SEO keywords are words and or phrases for which you want to rank in search engine result pages. For example, if you own a spa in El Paso, TX, then one of your keywords might be “spas in El Paso, TX”, or “hot stone massage in El Paso”. A keyword is a phrase someone looking for your product or service might type into Google when looking for a business like yours.
Keyword Competitiveness: It is a term to define how easy or hard it is to rank higher for a specific keyword. Think about it as the “difficulty” level to rank higher for a keyword. Products or services that are in high demand might, such as restaurants, will most likely face higher keyword competitiveness that other business that is not as crowed, such as a Mobile Car Wash.
Looking at the number of results for a specific keyword is an excellent way to get an idea for keyword competitiveness. As a general rule, the fewer results, the lower the competitiveness. We will dive more into this later.
Backlinks: A backlink is a link in someone else’s website pointing to your site. It is also essential that these other pages mention your keywords in their content, where they link to you.
SERP. SERP or “Search Engine Results Page” are the pages Google and or other search engines display the results for a user search.
The job of the Search Engine Optimizer is to convince Google that our website has the most relevant and trusted result for a specific keyword.
First, you need to concentrate on creating great valuable content on your website for your customers and your prospects, but you also need to make sure that search engines can understand your site. Search engines are robots, so you need to make sure your website is well structured using the right HTML syntax, has the right metadata, etc.
Modern website builders might do some of this work, but it is easy to get it wrong. If you know how to do this great! If not, you might need help from an SEO company, such as Phidev, or your marketing agency.
Another thing you need to pay attention to is how fast your website loads, not only from a customer perspective but also from a Google perspective. There is a great tool out there created by Google named PageSpeed Insights. Simple, visit that page and enter your web address. It will then give your website a grade depending on your website performance. PageSpeed Insights looks into many things that might not make sense to the average person. Still, a knowledgable web developer or SEO company will help you figure out the results and the advice on how to improve your website. It is hard to get a score of 90+, but if you are above 50, your site is doing a decent job.
What about Trust?
How does Google know if your website content is trustable? Here is a perfect analogy for that. If you get a call from a 5-year-old saying your neighbor is the next best basketball player in the world? Would you believe it? Now, if you had a call from Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Larry Bird and told you the same thing? Would you believe them? Most likely, you would because they have something we call “authority.” They are known to be someone who has authority in their field. Search engines work the same way; it is not enough for you to say what you are great at what you do; other trustworthy sources need to say it too. That is where backlinks come it.
What can you do right now?
Search Engine Optimization should not be ignored! The biggest thing you can do is to put relevant content on your website. Answer the most common questions to your products/services on your website in a separate page. Create pages giving some tips on how to get the most of your products or services, or how to do it themselves. It might seem counter-intuitive to provide information for free, but your experience is another aspect for people to decide to work with you.
If you own a business and have an online presence, chances are you have heard the term SEO a few times. If you don’t know by now, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It serves as a marketing effort focused primarily on expanding visibility organically in search engine results. This is particularly important since search engines are the primary method of online navigation. Around 97% of consumers look online before buying a product or service; which can potentially help or hinder your business. When considering if SEO is the right move for your business consider this.
When it comes to online presence, Relevance is KEY.
What you have to understand as a business owner is that using SEO is as much a marketing tactic as a branding play. Through SEO you can specify how and where your customers can find you online. By researching keywords you can develop content that will attract people to your website and essentially create a larger online audience. The content you put out there on your website has a big impact on how search engines such as Google and Yahoo rank your website on search results. Having a prominent and relevant online presence not only gives you higher positioning and organic traffic but it automatically increases your credibility as a business.
The true merits of consistency for your website
However, you have to curate your website constantly, and carefully. It is a never ending process. Your website audience is dependent of your website content and your website content is dependent of the use of keywords which comes from correctly using SEO in your favor. Customers should feel like they are visiting a page that is current and up to date with the outside trends. Otherwise, they’ll simply go to a better and cooler website, a.k.a. the competition. This is the part where the lack of Search Engine Optimization can hinder your business. If you do not customize your website to what you have to offer or utilize all the tools available to you, your customer will not find you online.
Should I hire professional SEO Services?
No one can truly guarantee a #1 ranking on Google or a highly trafficked website, so be wary of people or companies who do or who email you out of the blue. However, there are a few things you can do to make sure your website attracts the right people. It all starts with deciding to use SEO to optimize your website.
The best way to accomplish this is by hiring professionals to help you apply your findings to your website. A professional SEO team can help you with: advanced keyword searches, content development, expertise in specific markets and geographies, and review of site content and structure. Sure, you can probably manage all of these. However, SEO agencies can also provide technical assistance which include, hosting, redirects, and error pages. All of which require more professional assistance, so much so that even Google hires professionals to help them with it.
Have more questions on how to optimize your webpage?
Contact us today!
Our clients have been asking recently why is it that we are using HTTPS instead of HTTP on our websites and what the main difference is.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a way in which your browser communicates with web servers. The main difference from regular HTTP is that it is secure. HTTPS encrypt all information sent to and from your computer and the web server. That’s why it is a requirement on e-commerce websites to protect your credit card data.
On 2014, Google announced it will use https as a ranking signal. This means it will give a small boost in search results to websites that implement HTTPS. Late last year, it announced again, that it will index HTTPS websites by default. Making HTTPS a bit more important. For this particular reason, Google has been promoting HTTPS everywhere.
Do you really need HTTPS?
It depends if you are going to accept any type of sensitive information such as credit card information, social security numbers, and/or sensitive business information, then yeah. You should use HTTPS. If not, then here is what to consider:
Advantages:
- A small Search Engine Ranking boost: This means that when someone is looking for specific information, with the implementation of HTTPS, your website would be the first choice for the user. HTTPS give your website that extra boost. This is can be considered part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy.
- Security: All information is encrypted, and it is also verified (integrity). This means that no-one can do a “man in the middle” attack, or pretend to be your website. This provides your business with guaranteed security and ease of mind.
- Trust: This is more of a psychologic factor. People might feel better doing business with a website that is encrypting all information. Assuring your clients of the security of their information allows you to build a business partnership based on trust.
Disadvantages:
- Cost: Even though the cost of SSL certificates (what you need to implement HTTPS) has dramatically decreased over the last few years, it will still increase your yearly web costs. You also need a static IP per parent domain, which incurs an extra cost.
- Speed: Even pretty much seamless, encryption information takes some time and processing power.
In general, we do recommend securing your site. It is a tool that will let you expand your business website and allow you to reach a wider audience.
Let us know if you have any questions or if you need help making your website secure.