There is an old joke that the best place to hide a body is on the second page of Google. This is mainly true when you think about how many times do you go further than page one to find a service? And if you are not there, no one is going to see you.
If you are a small business covering a certain geographical area this will be an easier task than a company that covers the entire country with a product that is not niche but if you put these basic steps in place you will climb a few places up the ladder.
Register your company with Google.
By registering you will be on Google's radar and more likely to appear in the search engine for a local area. You will also appear on Google maps with a nice place marker that customer can click on and see various bits of information such as your address, phone number and your website.
Google have an informative article on how you go about this here.
Use your H1, H2 and H3 Tags correctly.
One of the big things Google ranks you on is page quality. This means that you have taken the time to find out how the Google Bots like to see things before they promote you and if the bots think you have taken the time and effort to get the pages right, it will give you a welcome boost.
HTML Tags are used for headings on your page. It tells Google which bits of the page are the most important for using as titles in their search results and which headings are of lesser importance.
A typical heading would look like:
<h1>This is a heading </h1>
A typical sub heading would look like:
<h2>This is a sub heading<h2>
These must be nested in order and the H1 tag should always be at the top. Most templates for content management systems will use headings up to <H6>
Use alt tags for your images
When Google Bots search your site and come across images, it needs to know what they are so if you give the alt tags to describe the images, Google will know what they are and show them in Google images. This can often lead to clicks to your website.
Don't use cheap or free hosting.
The reason it is cheap is you will be sharing a server with lots of other websites so at busy times of the day, or if another website on that server is having issues and hogging resources, it will have a detrimental affect on the performance on your site.
This will affect your Google rankings as the bots do not like websites that are slow to load. You can check your page load speeds here. Ideally your website should load in under 0.4 seconds.
The very minimum you should be paying is £5 a month. Tech Radar's review of hosting companies is a useful resource for hosting. Many have a free or cheap trial. You can also contact us for advice.
Use META Tags
A meta description is an element in the HTML code of a web page that provides a brief description of the content of that page. Visitors cannot see this but Google bots will use it to to create the search snippet you see under your company name on a search result.
How we can help
The above suggestions will certainly improve your SEO rankings but there is much more to do if you want your rankings to move from good to excellent.
If you are in the Greenwich area and want to improve your search engine optimisation we are happy to produce a free report on where things can be improved and meet you to discuss, alternatively if you are not in the area we are happy to provide a free consultation over Zoom. We also cover the Blackheath, Deptford, Canary Wharf and Woolwich areas.
Please contact us for more details