You have a beautiful website with amazing content and pictures.
It looks very current, even trendy, yet you still aren’t attracting visitors.
What gives? Here are 5 things that may be hampering your progress.
When you look at your website and see that it starts with the Http://, Google sees it as your site not being secure for your users. Standing for “Security Sockets Layer”, the SSL is technology that encrypts your connection to a website so that hackers cannot intercept any of your data.
Although available earlier, and used predominately for e-commerce sites, Google determined that the SSL was so important that it added it to the ranking algorithm. Thus, acquiring an SSL certificate for your site is important for more reasons than security. How do you get one? Simple, ask your webhosting service. Once it is acquired and installed, your old Http:// will magically become Https://. Your viewers will be safe, and Google will be happy. Learn more about the benefits of the SSL Certificate here.
Google isn’t the only search engine in the world, but it is the most powerful. With that said, Google isn’t going to be super excited to recommend your business unless it knows you. Thus, the first thing you will want to do is create a business profile. Create one by clicking here. After you create your page, learn about all the amazing tools that Google offers for FREE! This will benefit your crawlability, as Google will understand what your business does.
Are you using social media for personal or business use? If the answer is “yes,” then you need to make sure that you mention your website often. You can do so by sharing information about your product or service, in a way that is more than just selling. This directs people to your website, lifting you in rank. Want to know more? Read our blog on Social Media.
You’ve heard of search engine optimization, or SEO, but many not know much about it. SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from search engines. It is not a one-time trick, but an ongoing process. A website should be reviewed at least once a year for optimization.
Sound daunting? There are tools to help. Again, I punt to Google and its great toolbox. If you have not attached Google Analytics to your website, you are driving blind. It will show you how your website is performing. There is so much good information that can be derived from Google Analytics, but it can also leave you scratching your head as to finding a remedy to increase your traffic.
Thankfully, there are tools such as Yoast SEO on the market to help. This product promotes itself as the number one SEO optimizer on the planet, and it delivers. Yoast offers a ton of free tutorials to help you understand the how and why of SEO optimization. The product plugs directly into your site through WordPress. You will work on each page to examine and improve your content, keywords, links, and indexing. You can also improve your Google page, Facebook, and Twitter previews with Yoast.
If you still are not seeing the traffic increase to meet your expectations, you may want to invest in a Google Ads campaign. Again, this product is managed directly through Google. Once called Google Ad Words, this is paid search and not organic. But it is powerful! By paying to rank higher, you will be noticed by your potential customers.
I’m sure you’ve done a Google search for a product and found the results with an (Ad) in front of the company. That’s a paid search. How many times have you clicked on those results? I’m sure many. With Google Ads, you set your budget, search words, demographic, and location. It is an extremely powerful tool to rank your business higher than your competitors.
One caveat, using an Ad Words campaign does NOT mean that you should forego your SEO efforts. It does not work to lift your true ranking, only organic search does. So, once you turn off your campaign, you will still need to rely on your website’s SEO.
I’ve provided just a few ways to move your website higher in the search, but there are tons of other tools available to help. There is even a tool that will show you where people are clicking on your site with the use of heat map technology. There is A/B testing, optimizing with mobile first indexing, links, and setting the proper information architecture.
Don’t have time or not down for the task? Let us at Business Designs Unlimited help.
