SEO Is Essential To Get Your Business Noticed
Today, an online presence is essential. How can you ensure your business comes up on a potential customer’s search results?
Remember the days when a customer would look in the Yellow Pages or the local newspaper if they needed a builder or plumber? Today, these resources still exist, but nine times out of ten, the first place that people look is on their smartphones.
These days, whether you’re after a takeaway pizza or a car insurance quote, you hit Google to find the best option, and the same applies for those looking for a tradesman.
Of course, the thing about search engines is that if someone types “plumber” into Google, they will probably be presented with about 150 million results – give it a try and you will find that’s no exaggeration. That’s where local SEO for traders comes into play. A good SEO strategy will help connect the right customers with the right suppliers, resulting in a win/win all around.
While plumbers, bricklayers, ground workers, electricians, carpenters, kitchen fitters, bathroom installers and window fitters can use sites such as TrustaTrader, MyBuilder and RatedPeople, in the long-term you need to be able to generate business from your own website to avoid paying commission on every lead.
Aspects Of SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a component of digital marketing that specifically focuses on improving your site’s rankings on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These engines use a variety of metrics to decide which of the millions of possible websites offer the best result to a given search, but these essentially boil down to two aspects: relevance and authority.
Put simply, the first seeks to establish that your site is relevant to the search – so in our example, it looks for websites that talk about plumbing, and aspects thereof. The second seeks to establish whether you are a better authority on plumbing than other sites.
Improving SEO
So how can an SEO consultant help you to establish relevance and authority? There are a number of ways, including the following:
- High-quality content – the most important aspect of any website is the quality of the words, images, and videos that are on it. If your content is original, relevant, and engaging, the battle is half-won.
- Fresh content – these days, you can’t just put up a website and leave it there. Google’s web crawlers will look at your site more often and pay more attention to it if there is a regular supply of fresh content to look at – and so will your customers!
- External links – if other sites are linking to the content of your webpages, then this tells Google that you are an authority in your field.
4) User experience – if your site is easy to navigate, loads quickly, and has visitors staying longer and coming back for more, this suggests to Google that it is a site worth ranking higher than one with fewer visits and higher bounce rates.
Look After Your Online Shopfront
Creating a website is one of those tasks that seems relatively easy at first. However, buying the domain name and getting the basic details of your business on there is only the start. Online, your “shop” is on a virtual street with hundreds of others offering similar services.
SEO is the mechanism by which you can get customers to pay attention to your shop ahead of the rest, and is something you cannot leave to chance.
