You are all excited!

You just had a gorgeous new website built and you can’t wait until people start finding that website and contacting you for business.

Three months later and nobody has contacted you or mentioned your website at all during sales calls and you’re wondering if something’s wrong with the site.

You Google your industry in the local area, and notice your website doesn’t pop up on the first page, second page, third page of Google, even though your Webmaster told you four, five… they did search engine optimization (SEO) work six, seven… on the site.

There it is. . .  way down on page eight on Google. . . hmmm. . . no wonder nobody has found you.

Did your Webmaster do what they said they would?

Most likely yes. However, that’s just not enough nowadays, and here’s why:

1. There are over 1 billion websites currently active on the World Wide Web as of March 2016 according to Internet Live Stats.
2. 140,000 websites are launched every single day
3. Google performs 2 million searches every minute
4. 2.9 billion Google searches are made every day

  Now do you see why, even though your webmaster did some initial SEO work on your site, Google still hasn’t given it the kind of ranking it needs to be on page one? Your site is currently like a little store on the end of a long dirt road in the middle of nowhere! No wonder Google thinks you’re irrelevant. And relevance is the most important thing Google looks for in terms of ranking your website. What’s important to them is that people who are searching the web are using their search engine, and that only happens if the search results are relevant to what they were searching for. See how that works? Please keep in mind that we are talking about organic search results, not those that are bought through Google Ads (which work great, by the way, but first things first). So what makes your website relevant to those people who are searching? Here are just a couple of things that Google feels makes you relevant (We will expand on this in future blogs as well):

1. Constantly updated, new information. Have you ever walked into a little, dark, dusty store that looks neglected by the owner, and like few people ever go there? That’s what your website looks like to Google when you haven’t updated anything on the site in months and months. And this is what a lot of people do with their website. They have one created and then they just abandon it, thinking that since it’s out there on the Web, that’s all that was necessary. Well, it’s not. We live in an ever changing world, and people expect your website to be updated regularly with new information. That’s why so many website have gone to a blog format. Blogs don’t have to be long, but they do have to be informative and educational, or at the very least engaging and amusing for your audience, depending on what you do in your business, and what your goals are with the blog. Blogs let you update your website at the very least, once a month. This keeps you top of mind with your customers, and with Google as well. In terms of sales and marketing, this is a passive marketing approach, which can be made more active by sending out email newsletters that include a link to your blog every month, and also by posting part of your blog with a link to it on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. Do more people clicking a link and landing on your web page make it more relevant? Absolutely!
2. Inbound links. Look, your business is not an island, in every case, businesses have other industries and businesses that are a natural fit for referring customers to. Also, you probably have friends who own businesses or have associates whose services you’ve used on a regular basis. Have a page on your site with links to these trusted companies and request that they have a link to your website on theirs as well. The more websites out there that have links that go back to your website, the better your ranking with Google. . . because of course that means your website is relevant.

We have a number of other suggestions for helping your organic search results, and will be writing about them over the next few weeks. But if you’re ready to get this kind of digital marketing plan in the works for your website right now. . . .please give us a call at 732-859-7592 or 732-859-7637 and we can get you started immediately.