A website is often the centrepiece of a brand’s digital strategy. After all, it’s there and available all hours of the day for anyone who might be interested in your products or services.
But if you’ve put lots of time, money, and effort into your website, only to find that you don’t rank anywhere near the top page of Google, it can get pretty frustrating.
What does it take to rise to the top? Is it a matter of luck, or is there something practical and concrete that you can do?
What words or phrases do you want to rank for?
Step one is to consider what you want to rank for. What would someone search if they want to find your business online?
It’s important to have a specific target to measure when you are trying to improve your keyword rankings. Then we can take concrete steps towards improvement using search engine optimization, rather than chasing squirrels.
With these targets in mind, next we’ll need to consider — how well does my website currently answer or provide information for these searches?
Google’s reputation is based on showing websites that are the best match for what a user searches for.
If your website doesn’t really speak to any of the concepts that you want to rank for, then your first tactic will be to freshen up your website content.
Who are you competiting with for the top spot on Google?
One of the things inevitably plays a critical role in your strategy is who you are fighting with for position number one.
After all, you’re not the only one who wants to be king of the hill.
A good strategy for finding out what tactics might help you climb a couple positions is to simply search for the word or phrase that you want to rank for Google and see who comes up first.
Click through the first few websites that show up. What do they show that you don’t?
SEO isn’t magic. You can think of Google like a giant calculator that very quickly considers lots of different factors and then ranks all the potential options based on who performs best.
So if a website with one blurry picture and a couple paragraphs of text written four years ago is up against a website that is regularly updated with useful information, it’s pretty clear which one Google is going to prioritize.
How do you know when your SEO work is starting to succeed?
The goal with SEO is to improve your position in Google, which in turn should lead to more website traffic, which in turn should lead to more business.
Simple, right?
Well, it can take some time for these things to happen.
It is possible to make a big jump quickly in the rankings — but more often than not SEO is a slow moving tactic with long term results.
Think of it like steering a big ship — the actions you take won’t have immediate effect, but they will be felt for a long time to come.
Besides patience, you will need a foolproof way of tracking your efforts to see the results. Tools like SEMrush are invaluable for giving you a simple way to see where you rank for keywords week over week. You can also track your competition, to see if they are making any moves to counter you once the wheels start turning and you start rising through the ranks.
Curious about how to take your website to the top of the rankings in Orangeville?
If you’ve been wondering this exact question for a while, then now is the best time to start.
Step one is to talk through the process with a digital marketing specialist who can take stock of your current website and help identify any gaps with content or technical SEO that might be holding you back.
Then you can work together to plan a long term strategy that gets results.
Good luck!
About the Author
Frank Myrland is a strategic creative consultant specialising in marketing campaign development and implementation.
He has over a decade of experience managing campaigns for both B2B and B2C clients, working on projects in many verticals including retail, community and government organisations, not-for-profits, professional services, financial and insurance, manufacturing, and residential construction.
