Exeter Web Design and Digital Marketing Agency - we've built over 900 websites for businesses, charities and public bodies. We specialise in Web development, eCommerce, Digital marketing, Branding, Positioning, Design and Print. Based in Exeter, in Devon, we have clients across the UK. Contact us for help making your marketing more effective.
All of us have received those ‘helpful’ emails into our in-box saying ‘Hi, we can help you get your business onto page 1 of Google today, just pay us £500 and it’s done’. We all know they are a scam but a lot of our clients still stop and think about it and ring us up and ask if we can do it instead maybe?
For a start you can only rank on page 1 of Google for certain ‘key phrases’, such as ‘Electrician Exeter’ for example, not an entire website. We are often told that ‘we are already on page 1 of Google’ and we ask for which key phrases and they say ‘oh I don’t know’, which probably means they aren’t. But as business owners you want to know, you want to promote your business and you want to gain sales leads.
Firstly you need to understand what page 1 of Google is all about. When your customers need your services, they type a question into Google such as ‘electrician Exeter’ and Google returns a page of possible website links for them to click on. Most people don’t search beyond this page (page 1) to find what they need. The people who do feature on page 1, do so for several reasons…200 reasons in fact, as Google has over 200 ranking factors. Its clever little algorithm visits your site and scans it, and decides on which page your website needs to rank. Those 200 signals include social media, user-engagement signals and trust. However today I am only going to talk about the one you should start with first:
Content
Fresh content is the lifeblood of any website. Google doesn’t see a website as a static brochure, it hates that. Your website should be ‘a form of communication’ between you and your customer. Establish your top 10 keywords (electrician Exeter | electrical services Exeter, | friendly electrician Exeter | domestic electrician etc.) and ensure they appear in the first 100 words on your page’s content throughout the site – not all of them at once, but spread out site wide. It’s a significant relevancy signal. But do try not to ‘keyword stuff’ as that always reads badly for the user, the content does need to read well with good copy for the customer. It’s a balance between talking to the customer and talking to the search engine. Then each month set aside some time to add fresh content, such as a blog, event or case study. The fresh content needs to include a keyword so your signals to Google’s algorithm get stronger over time, and it does take time, but this is the first step into ‘optimising’ your website for Google…then page one won’t seem so far away.
Want some help establishing your keywords and optimizing your website’s content? Call Luke on 01392 248 365 or luke@daneswood.co.uk