It starts with 2 things: caring about your business and educating people.
A Healthy Business Needs a Healthy Website
If you care about the health of your business, you should care about your website. In our highly connected world, a website can be your best tool for driving sales. Cutting corners with your website development could be detrimental to your business goals, because it could mean poorly written code, a website that is not search-engine-friendly or mobile-friendly, and it could hurt your customer conversion rates.
Your website should have a sense of quality in design and user experience, and it should be programmed with simple techniques that make it easy for people to navigate. Generally, if your website is coded in a clean and user-friendly way, search engines will find it easy to navigate, too.
When you attempt to build a quick starter website using a pre-built template and some thrown-together copy, you are not representing your business well, and you are more likely to have a badly programmed website with very little information and nothing particularly attractive to Google.
I want to emphasize that good web design is important for your user experience as well, and a good user experience will lend to social media sharing, following, more visits, conversions, and other good “Web Karma.”
Educating Your Audience and Attracting Customers
Your website should be an information center for everything related to your product. When you present helpful information about your product and your industry, you are guiding people through the process of understanding what you offer, and you are telling the search engine what your website is relevant for.
Create an FAQ
Compile a frequently asked questions list (FAQ) that includes the most common questions your customers and prospects ask you. Include a few more questions that you wish people would ask you, maybe about how your company is different from competitors. This will naturally add good keyword-rich content to your website.
Feed Your Blog
Establishing a blog section on your website is a good first step, but you also need to think of it as a resource section for your prospects, customers, and their friends and neighbors. By adding regular content to your blog, you have the opportunity to share some of your expertise with people across the Internet. The reputation of your website will improve as your content grows, and Google will notice.
You don’t have to name your blog section “Blog.” Many companies have creative titles that relate to their brand and industry. Some websites use a title like “Resources” or “Helpful Articles” as a link to the blog area.
We recommend planning ahead for your blog writing and determining a regular schedule to write a new piece. A good frequency is once a week, and companies that blog more (2 or 3 times a week) typically have more success. Pre-determine a few topics with your target keyword phrases in the titles. By determining a list of 6 titles to write about, you are more likely to follow through with your plan to add blogs for the next 6 weeks and you will likely write more efficiently.
If you promote your blogs in your email newsletter and social media pages, you increase their exposure and the likelihood that visitors will read, comment, and share your content. This type of engagement is noticed by Google and improves your online reputation.
Having a high Google ranking is not something that can just be purchased instantly like an advertisement. It requires a process that includes building a great web presence, and these two principles are the foundation.
About WEBii
Jacqueline and the team at WEBii provide professional website optimization and SEO management for a wide variety of companies, including those in financial, construction, health, education and technical industries, and for non-profits. Learn more about WEBii SEO Services.