Depending on what age your kids are or your nieces and nephews (or your friends’ kids you try to avoid seeing outside of major holidays), watching toddlers and youngins scrambling over one another for plastic eggs can be entertaining. You know what’s not entertaining? A potential customer scouring Google search to find you online. As you’ve already determined, making your business show up on Google search for any of your services or products isn’t a walk in the park.
If anything, it’s a rat race.
Spoiled egg alert: Learning how to show up on Google search isn’t necessarily the hard part. It’s the practice, accuracy, and quality of what you do that matters to your online visibility.
TL;DR: The practice, accuracy, and quality of what you do matters to your online visibility.
How Your Audience Finds You Online
The best way to approach your customers finding you online is not to approach it as you would approach it. Put on the shoes of your customers. Put on their sweaty socks. And really who understands your customers better than you do?
When determining your keyword strategy this year, determine your customer’s intent, their motivations, instead of simply promoting and pushing out your products or services. In some cases your client will be looking for your products, so make sure they have accurate descriptions. In other cases, you provide solutions and information helpful to your audience that leads to loyalty or trust of your brand.
Before they know you, you must know them.
Good eggs you need for a basket that overfloweth:
- A mobile-friendly, customer-friendly, conversion-friendly, spiderman-neighborhood friendly website.
- A local SEO overhaul.
- A reputation for quality.
- A continual strategy, using social signals.
A website that converts
Your website sucks.
Maybe you don’t think it’s that bad, but that’s where you’re wrong. Your website shouldn’t be about what you like, but what your client is looking for. The importance of knowing your audience also plays into knowing the importance of your audience’s interaction with your web presence real estate.
Make your website show up on search engines with quality content, technical SEO, clear CTAs, and easy navigation. There’s more to it than that. But it’s a start.
A location
You exist. That’s great. But do you exist in the right places?
Local SEO is woefully overlooked when launching a business. What is local SEO? The answer is simple. Is your Google business listing showing up on search? Is your business on Yelp?
If you have a business front, this part of ranking at all is crucial. It’s tedious work, optimizing your social and business profiles across the web sphere, but take a lazy Saturday or Friday afternoon and spend it doing the following to help your peeps find you online:
- Number
- Address
- Website
- Hours
- Profile image
- Cover photo
- Short, keyword-driven snippet about your business
A reputation
A stinky egg is a bad egg. (Unless you think all eggs are stinky). All the awesome web presence in the world won’t improve your customer service if it sucks to begin with. A good reputation stems from a good company and five-star reviews will come organically.
You have great customer service? Great! Learn how to solicit reviews (politely) to help your business show up on search. Fortunately, we have marketing resources for that.
If you have to constantly ask for reviews, maybe you’re doing it wrong.
A reputation also requires studious content marketing, which may include blog writing, onsite content, or other web presence strategies that show you as a reliable and credible resource in your industry.
A signal
Just the other day a grey, plumy pillar of smoke emerged over across the street from our offices and wafted into the sky like an ominous hand of the apocalypse. Later, we realized, no, this wasn’t a smoke signal but a fire. Everyone’s safe; don’t worry. The point is, though, that people need to know you’re alive. That you’re out there.
We don’t recommend smoke signals, rather, social signals. Motivated by well-written, strategized onsite content.
Don’t post on social for the sake of posting on social. Anchor your signals in onsite content.
Your business on Google matters on social, too. Think of your social posts like nerve endings, you don’t need them to survive, but they do help relay your vitality. Content strategy in conjunction with social strategy takes practice, accuracy, and quality, but you can’t have the last two without the first.
Practice.
When you practice, you practice and implement strategy to know your audience. You see what they like, love, or laugh at. You find out what they engage with the most, that gets more clicks to your site. Practice doesn’t always make perfect, but it does make better. Review some social media tips and start posting today.
TL;DR: Practice practicing best practices and efficiency and rankings will rise.
Still lost in the weeds? Get the fuel for your web presence.
