You might offer a great product or service but when your business is just starting up, getting potential clients to notice you is sometimes a steep hill to climb. You might have an impressive website, but for some reason your search rankings are not reflecting this. That means you are missing out on the biggest source of quality free traffic available.
Here’s what you need to do if your SEO strategy isn’t working or you have less than impressive search rankings….
Review Your Current Strategy
It’s a hard thing to admit, but some companies either don’t really have a SEO strategy to begin with, or if they do, they have not visited it in a while. After a complete analysis, many times gaping holes are discovered and subsequently resolved.
Go Beyond HTTP
Google gives higher ranking to those sites using HTTPS or HTTP/2. If you are still stuck using HTTP, consider making the move to an encrypted site that uses HTTPS, or HTTP/2 which increases site speed.
Get Mobile Friendly
There is no benefit to staying stuck in the past with no mobile version of your site. The sooner you have a mobile-friendly version, the better. Why? Among many reasons, Google gives higher rankings to mobile-friendly sites.
Review Your Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the name that describes how well search engine spiders can crawl through your site to index your content. They do their job through HTML/XML site maps they (hopefully) find on your site and they can do it faster if your site speed is optimized. In addition, the more your site is truly mobile-friendly vs. giving a nod to mobile users, the easier it is for spiders to check your site.
Use Structured Data
Structured data, otherwise known as schema markup, tells search engine spiders about the meaning of the items it finds on your site. For example, if you list an article a schema markup will tell a search engine spider it is viewing an article. Anything you can do to make a search engine’s job easier is a plus for your SEO rankings.
Check for Duplicate Content
Over time, companies often have a tendency to create duplicate links to send customers to a particular page on their site. During an email campaign, a customer probably won’t notice this, but a search engine spider will and it reflects poorly on the overall site. Try a tool like Siteliner to help you find duplicates throughout your site.
Ask Google to Check Your Site
Why wait for indexing when you can get ahead of the game and ask Google to index new or revamped pages? Use Google’s Submit URL webmaster tool to allow them to review new pages and use tools found in Google’s Search Console to have them review previously submitted pages.
SEO is not easy but the rewards can be significant if your site ranks for a lot of relevant search terms. It is also the key ingredient in any effective inbound marketing strategy, so it’s worth investing time and money into getting it right. If you’d like to know more about SEO and harnessing Google webmaster tools to optimise your site, let us know.
