Rapid Business Growth’s Blog

How to get your website higher up the Google or Yahoo rankings is a relatively new science.  Naturally there are lots of fraudsters offering fantastic results for a very minor fee.  You can normally recognise these as they offer to submit your website to thousands of different search engines.  Since most of us in Ireland (90%) only use Google it should be obvious that these thousand of other search engines are pointless, (if indeed they exist).  Ranking high on Google means having your site appear on the first page when a prospect searches for a keyword that is relative to your business. This is called a “natural” search, as oppose to a “paid” search. 

Paid search is when you pay Google for one of those little text ad that appear at the side of search results. Paid search is the fastest way to get traffic to your website.  You can open a paid search account and have visitors to your site in just a few hours.  Once you get it working you can experiment with keywords and get a good understanding of how the system works.  But once you stop paying it stops working and there is no long term benefit.

Natural search on the other hand, is slower and does not stop when you stop paying.  All you have to do is get Google to believe that your website is interesting.  That sounds easy doesn’t it?  So how do you get a good Natural Search ranking?

The best way to convince Google that your website is interesting is to make it interesting to real users.  The more relevant and useful your site content is to users searching on your keywords, the more traffic you will generate to your site and the lower your bounce rate is.  You need to have interesting content that is regularly updated.  The more traffic you generate, the more popular your content can become, the higher your ranking on Google.  

Also Google evaluates your site is by counting the number of links to your site.  This is also common sense: once you have interesting content you expect that lots of other sites will link to you.   

If you want to drive traffic to your website, you should quickly get a Paid Search campaign working, only then look at Natural Search.  These are two planks of any attempt to get a good natural search ranking: Interesting content and lots of inbound links.  Both of these require effort and consistency over time. 

Have you spent money on a website but aren’t seeing the benefits?  Do you need more visitors to your online shopfront?

The key to getting on traffic to your website is having your website on the front page of search engines.  Studies show that surfers are notorious impatient and while they are highly motivated, they have a very short attention span.  If their interest is not grabbed immediately by you, they will wander off to whatever topic shouts the loudest at them.  

So how do you get high up the rankings?  Well the first step is see where you sit right now.  There are various services to check your page ranking and while you are there try a few of your competitors websites also.  So where do you sit? Best in class?  Midway? or Tailend Charlie?  Store these results and check back often until you get a decent feeling for how you are perceived.  If you are number 1 and stay there - congratulations.  You are winning the a big share of business that comes via the web. 

For everybody else you now have a target to beat.  One very important element in Search Engine Rankings is the number and quality of the inbound links to your website.  The more and better links you have the higher your page ranking.  So the second step is to look at your own inbound links and your top competitor.   Check it out and take note of who is linking to your top competitor and not to you.  Repeat this for all your competitors who have a higher Page ranking than you.  

Now you have a readymade list of websites to contact to seek reciprocal links! Just send them an e-mail and ask for a link.  What is the worst thing that can happen, they say no?  Why do they link to your competitor and not to you?  Perhaps you should seek links from their competitors? In other cases you will see that links are from directories who will all have a subscribe mechanism, which you can also use. 

In this way you can start pushing yourself up the page rankings and getting to the top of the search engines.  There are a few other tricks such as articles like this one, blogging, social book marking that will be the subject of future articles.

For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.
Best wishes
Mike Spratt

www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328