A question that I believe a lot of local and small business owners ask themselves is “How does search work?”. When it comes to being found on a search engine, there are a lot of factors and equations that work together to pull up different search results. This video is a year old, but I still think that it’s informative enough to be relevant. In this video a Google employee, Matt Cutts, explains how Google gathers information from all over the internet.
That really sums up a lot of how it all works. Knowing exactly how search works is just the first step for any company wanting to be found online. The next step is to decide what you are wanting to show up for. This involves putting yourself into the shoes of your customer and how they would search to find your business. Typically they are not going to search by your company name if they don’t know you, so try to think of specific keywords that match what services you offer. P.S. I’ve also posted on Learning to Choose Your Own Keywords.
Once you have determined your keywords, it’s time to make sure that your website has that keyword on it. Mike Romrell has a great post that talks about Keyword Density that I highly recommend you read. In his post he talks about the density on your page, but one of the biggest and probably easiest problems I notice with websites is that they do not have keyword rich content in their Meta Title and Description. This is vital for anyone wanting to rank on search engines.
A future customer is not going to be interested in your website at all if it is titled “Home Page Template” when they are actually looking for a “Plumber in San Francisco.” Changing your Meta Title to “Your Local Professional Plumber in San Francisco” is not only going to increase your ranking for the that keyword, but also improve your click through rate (CTR). CTR is the amount of times people actually click to your website after seeing it.
If you of course are needing help to make these changes onto your website, contact us and we will be happy to help you come up with a well written Meta Title and Description for your site.
These small and simple changes will make a big impact in your online campaign. Best to get started on this now rather than later!
