How do you get a business onto the first page of Google?
Introduction
Most business owners now recognise that if their business is not on the first page of Google, that they can sometimes be at a serious disadvantage.
That’s to say, whether you retail designer clothing, or you sell dog food online, if your business is not on first page of Google, well you could be missing out on a lot of sales.
Yet with that said, there are still a lot of businesses that do not know how to get their business onto the first page of Google.
To help you, we are going to explain what SEO (search engine optimisation) is, and why it’s important to invest in a white hat agency.
Crawling and Indexing
First things first, you have to make sure that Googlebot can crawl your website. Googlebot is used by Google to read your businesses website, and notice changes that have been made.
So, for instance, let’s say you run a dental practice, and you start to offer a brand new service, such as teeth whitening.
Well, you may add a new page to your website to advertise this service, add it will be Googlebot that will spot this new page, and then index the new teeth whitening page.
Then the algorithm will decide where to rank your business. For example, if the page has a lot of backlinks, and these links are good quality, then this page may well rank of the first page of Google.
Your seo agency should make it as easy as possible for Googlebot to index your website, this means designing a site map. This will inform Google of every page that is on your company website.
Also, sometimes Google will not be able to crawl some websites, this may well be because your company website is not live. Perhaps it has been taken offline while improvements are made to its design for example.
Or perhaps the website designer has left the “no-index” tag on by mistake, and Google cannot crawl the website.
Whatever the reason, if you want your website to be placed on the first page of Google, one of the first pieces of work that will be needed, is to make sure your website can be crawled.
So, this means before the long process of seo begins, your seo consultant must ensure that the website can be crawled.
Also, when major changes are made to the businesses website, often it’s the marketing agency that will request a recrawl. This is often completed by using Google’s Web Master Tools.
Google’s algorithm
Once a website has been indexed, its then up to Google’s algorithm to work out how important the website is.
For example, if you looking to purchase a new kitchen, and you searched for “kitchens + city” then the most relevant business that is selling kitchens in that area will be returned.
Yet, how the businesses are ordered, in terms of where they rank on the first page of Google, well that is dependent on how strong the websites ranking signals are.
Now there are more than 200 signals, so the business that has the strongest backlinks, the strongest content marketing and the strongest ranking signals, well that business will be ranked at the top.
There will always be competitors that will want their business at the top of Google as well. So, this means that there will be a lot of businesses competing.
This is why SEO is a constant process, and the businesses that stop investing often get replaced by businesses that are implementing seo.
Google hates spam
From reading this blog post your probably now thinking that SEO sounds like a lot of work, are we right?
Well, the simple fact of the matter is that digital marketing can be hard work. This is often why you have some businesses that try and cut corners, and invest in cheap seo.
However cheap seo is often a false economy, that’s because if the work is of a rubbish quality, then often the business will incur a penalty.
If you’ve heard of the Google Penguin and Panda updates in particular, then you will know that a website can sometimes see its rankings drop sharply, that’s straight after a penalty is imposed.
In a nutshell, Google only wants to reward businesses that invest in quality seo. Google wants to provide the best quality answers to its customers.
This is why its only worth using a white hat digital marketing agency.
Does your business need help with its online marketing?
Whether your business requires local seo, or national seo, we can help. We have experienced marketing experts that work for our agency.
We also work with a wide selection of businesses that range from dentists, through to e-commerce retailers.
If you would like to find out more regarding how online marketing can help your business, why not give us a ring?
