So you’ve got a website?
Have you done your SEO? What is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimisation and without it your chances of being found are remote. Let me tell you how it works…
How people get to your site
When someone is searching for a product or service that you may provide, they enter what is called “keywords” into the search engine. They don’t enter your name, because they probably don’t know it at this stage. So all of you who are pleased that your site comes up in Google when you search for your own name, sorry but it’s not that great a result.
These keywords are hard fought over, with companies optimising their site just for the words that people are likely to type in. Now days actually it is groups of words, people don’t just search for “consultants” or “shoes”, but more likely “sales consultants” and “Nike Trainers”, so it takes a bit of thinking about.
Don’t waste money
There are entire companies set up to do SEO, all wanting to help you to do this (for a fee). But unless you take the time to understand a bit about it, you may not get what you had hoped for and it will cost far more than you should be paying. SEO consultants will require that you pay them money upfront and often every month to keep optimising the site (because, correctly, it needs constant changing to stay ahead of the competition).
Some are not all that good and try to get you to agree that your keywords are so specific that it is easy to get you on the first page, because only you would have those keywords, such as “Able Consultants Limited, Swansea”.
We looked at free tools that were on the web
We spent a lot of time doing our own research and putting together various tools that said they were free to use, in order to check our ranking and how we appeared to search engines. It was very time consuming and although most of the tools were free, they were very messy, limited and seldom offered good suggestions of what to do. Have a look at some if you like, just type “free seo tools” in google - but if you’re serious about the business I’d move on to our next suggestion of what to do.
What we used and I’d suggest you do as well
We ended up using something called IBP which is software you have to pay for, but everything was integrated together in one place, it was easy to use and it explained everything. The suggestions were spot on and it saves each time how you rank on various search engines. You could then compare how you rank after the changes, it produces a report showing how you have moved up or down for each keyword .
You can find out more about it here and actually if you have a web site, you ought to just get it. Not only does it do the simple things like check your ranking, but this is the clever bit… it will go off and check the top 10 sites that appear for your keywords and analysis them to work out why they are at the top. Based on what they did, it will then give you suggestions on what you should do, in order to be in that top 10.
How you can use that
You could, like us, use the information to get more people to your business site yourself. It’s not hard if you can access your own site admin. Or if you can’t, now that you know what needs to be done, you could get your web designer to go in and do it. Or finally, because you no longer will have the wool pulled over your eyes, you can knowledgeably engage a SEO company to do it and you will know if they are doing a good job, because you now understand it and can keep records of how you rank over time.
If you've got a web site for your business, it makes sense to allow people to find it.
