During a recent Wix webinar there were a few people saying that there websites weren't doing as well as they hoped, so I offered to give them a hand. One, who took up my offer, is a professional setting up her own design consultancy and on the face of it the website looks ok.
Wix makes it easy to build good looking websites but it takes more than that to rank high in Google search results. Again Wix offers you the SEO tools to do this, but as with most tools, if you don't know how to use them, you won't do a very good job.
The actual building of a small business website can be quick and easy to lay out, but it is important to use the right words to sell your product or service to the customer and to Google and it must be easy for the user to navigate. You need to do keyword research to understand the search terms that people might use to find your business. There are ways to drive a lot of searches to your website but if they aren't looking for what you offer, your wasting your time!
As part of your SEO you need to spend time using keyword research tools to help you write relevant text and use headings correctly. Even when you've done this there is still more work to do! You need to add Alt text to all the images, to help Google understand what the image is about. Then there's meta descriptions for every page, again to help Google but this is often the text that appears in the search results, so it needs to attract the potential customer to click on to your website.
Lastly you need some 'back links', which are links to your website from other websites or blogs. Google likes to see plenty but they also want them to be from reputable source, so you can start by adding links from Yell, Google My Business, Cylex and many other free directories, links from trade associations or professional bodies are great but will probably incur a fee.
Once you've done all that you need to monitor your website with tools like Google Analytics or Search Console, this helps you to see how people found your website and will give you ideas for tweaks that you might need to make, to either improve your websites ranking or to improve your websites relevance to those searching.
Building a website that looks good is only the first step, without spending time on SEO your website won't work! Back to the professional that I'm helping with 'Possibly the Worst Performing Website', 37 impressions in 3 months is awful! And these impressions were on page 6!!
This is in stark contrast to the website featured in my last blog, Andy's website is less than a year old, as he's a plasterer so we're only targeting the immediate area, but still he's had over 840 impressions in 3 months. His website ranks 2nd or above for at least 10 relevant search terms and the click through rate for the last week was a staggering 12.5%!
If you want your website to perform well spending time on SEO is essential, if you are disappointed with your websites performance get in touch and I can do a fee audit. Call me on 07814 875280.