SEO Basics

SEO Basics – Website Mods

Congratulations on making it through a very involved step last week!  If you missed it, you can find it here.  This week we are going to tackle making the necessary mods to help your website receive top ranks in Google. In this step you need to take a hard look at your website, and ask yourself, does your site really deserve to rank amongst the greats?

4 Great Points

You should provide these somewhere in your website.

  • Who you are

Explain your business and what you can do for your target audience.

  • Establishing Trust

This one is simple, when was the last time you didn’t look for reviews or testimonials of a business or service you were interested in using? Without trust, visitors will never become customers.  Proudly display your testimonials and links to your reviews online.

  • Why Should I

Relate yourself to your customers.  Share stories, tips, anything that makes it evident that you are qualified.  The goal here is to show your target audience that you are a real person who cares and can help them solve a problem.

  • What’s Next

So your customer found you, they now believe you care, and that you are the most qualified person to assist them.  Now you need to capture their information.  Whether you are selling a car, duck calls, or even a logo design, capturing that customers data so that you can continue to message them is invaluable.

About Page

On of the most important aspects of your website is your “about” page.  The “about” page of local business is one of the most highly viewed pages on most websites.  Visitors to your site want to know that your company is real, that you believe in what you are doing, and that you stand by your work.  Do not phone it in on your “about” page!  Think of your “about” page as the story of your business.  How did your business start?  What major accomplishments has your business had?  Where is your business today?  Tell the story with heart, your customers will be impacted by your emotion.

Things To Check

Here is a list of other things to check on your site.

  • Phone number and address on each page (what’s even better is a floating address bar that follows the customer on all pages)
  • Specific pages for each service you offer, don’t group services on one page
  • Clear call to action on every page
  • Is your navigation easy to understand (check on mobile to)
  • Optimized and engaging images that your customers will relate to
  • Testimonials should be easy to find and plentiful
  • No thin, weak pages
  • Genuine helpful text
  • Real content written by an actual employee who cares about the business and its customers
  • Make sure you mention all of your services on the homepage
  • Describe your service area
  • Links to review sites

More Pages

As we mentioned in the last step, search engines will crawl all of your pages, the more content that you have available the more likely a search engine will see you as an expert in your field.  It is important that you only add these pages if you can fill them up with relevant content, a blank page won’t do you any good.

  • Company history
  • Financing options
  • Portfolio of completed projected
  • Company photos or events
  • Charitable connections
  • Individual staff biography’s
  • Locations, if you service multiple locations, each one should have it’s own page
  • Videos
  • Frequently Asked Questions

By putting all these pieces together you will have the groundwork of a great website.  And if you want your website to help grow your business, generate leads, and convert those leads into paying customers, you need to get this step right!

In later steps we will discuss additional tracking options that will help you actively monitor your website and see where your customers are clicking through the use of heat maps and how you can influence customer conversion through A/B testing.  But for now just do your best to fulfill everything in this step.  And we will see you back here for Step 8!