Google recently announced an update to their search ranking algorithms that in most part only affects what Google terms “spammy websites” but with that being said, there is in my opinion, some unintended affects to small business websites…Continue reading
In this final article of Website Ranking Factors For Small Business, I will cover factors that can get your website penalized by the search engines, hurting your chances of appearing for the keywords you want. The below information is by no means all inclusive, but covers some of the more common black hat SEO activities that will eventually hurt your rankings.Continue reading
In my prior article in this series, I discussed website On-Page Ranking Factors for small business websites. This article will cover factors that are considered Off-Page Ranking Factors and how they apply to a small business trying to achieve first page rankings for desired keywords.Continue reading
In this article series I will cover top-level factors that search engines use in determining where a website will rank for given keyword(s), and how a small business can use these factors to propel their website ahead of the competition, driving quality traffic through organic placement.
This first article will cover what is known as On Page factors, meaning what can be done on the website itself. We will cover the following:
As I’ve written about before, website content is king when it comes to attaining rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). I can not stress enough how important it is to have a good amount of Quality Content on each page of your website. The old days of having a website with the same old, stale set-up of: Home, About Us, Services, Gallery and Contact Us are dead and gone. The web and how people use it has changed dramatically, and to keep up with this change, the search engines have changed their game too. Having quality content, with a purpose, will help any small business get to the first page of the search engine results.
For a more detailed explanation of why quality content matters and how the search engines have changed, please read my article on Google Caffeine and how it applies to small business websites.
What keywords do you want to show up for? How competitive is it to get to the first page for those keywords? Do you know what keywords will get your phone to ring or get people walking into your store? These are some of the questions that need to be answered when determining what keywords you will want to work on.
For many of my customers the first keywords they say are typically the hardest ones to achieve rankings for. For example, and automobile mechanic in Portland, Oregon may want to achieve rankings for “Auto Repair Portland”, or something similar. I typically try for rankings for less competitive, but higher converting keywords. This has proven to be very successful for many small businesses. So for an auto repair shop, I might suggest building a page directly targeting people who need to have their timing belt replaced, with quality content that explains why this auto repair shop are experts in replacing timing belts. The auto repair shop gets to the first page of the search engine for a keyword such as “timing belt replacement”, the people that land on that page can see that this shop knows their stuff about timing belts, and thus coverts more of these prospects into customers. This process can be duplicated over and over again for different services such as: transmission flushes, emissions repair, brake repair and so on. A good quality, robust website will eventually get rankings for even the most difficult keywords with this tactic. The question I ask many of my customers is “would you rather be on the first page for 150 keywords or 10?
Keyword research is a tough job that requires researching trends, search volume, and competitiveness. Hiring a qualified SEO Company can take much of the guessing out of this task.
Do you use keywords and phrases in your website content you hope to be found for? If you’re trying to get rankings for the keyword “timing belt replacement” do you use that keyword string and related keyword strings in your content? Do you know what words Google considers the same? For example right now Google recognizes that the words “replacement” and “repair” are very similar, so serves results that are very similar for the searches of “timing belt replacement” and “timing belt repair”.
Understanding keyword similarities and using variances of these keywords on your websites text will help you achieve ranks for these desired keywords.
Do you measure “bounce rate” by page on your website? One of Google’s engineers explains bounce rate as “I came, I puked, I left”. High bounce rates point to one of two problems with your website.
Serve the information your visitors want. Is there something that is distracting your visitors and making them want to leave? What keywords is that page being found for? If a website visitor thinks they are mislead when visiting your site, they will simply back out and look elsewhere. So if you have a webpage about “timing belt replacement” make sure your information on that topic above the fold, where the visitor will see it quickly. Making a visitor hunt for what they are looking for does little more than inflate your bounce rate.
Design and layout above the fold. Is your page to busy? Is your page confusing? Page layout and message can start a prospect down your sales funnel, or can kill it. Using heat maps of web pages can help web designers fix high bounce rate issues regarding layout and design of a web page. Google Analytics also offers “In-Page Analytics” to help show click tracking on a page.
How often do you update the content on your website? Is the content new and about topics that will get your website traffic? One of the most important things that can get search engines coming back again and again to your website is creating new content. I typically recommend two new pages or posts per month for each of the small businesses I work with. Having Quality Content and constantly Updated Content builds a firm foundation for SEO success.
I’m not going into this as I wrote a previous article titled “Quick and Easy SEO for Small Business Websites” that covers this exact topic. I will say that Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and Heading Tags all play significant roles in helping achieve rankings on SERP’s.
The search engines want to serve websites that are easy for normal people to use. If your website is not easy for a search engine spider to use, they will assume it will be hard for a normal human to use also. Making it easy for a search engine to find ALL of your websites pages, using alt-tags on every picture, limited or non-use of flash and using an Xml Site Map will help the search engines index your website.
Conversely, disabled back buttons, pop-ups, hidden pages, doorway pages, certain types of redirects, heavy use of flash, text in picture format and others make it hard for a search engine to index and will hurt your rankings.
This is defiantly one where you get what you ask for. Your website speed and page load speed are factors that the search engines grade heavily on. Pages that are loaded with lots of pictures, big header pictures, picture sliders with to many pictures, self hosted videos and flash laden websites all slow load speed of a website. Search engines want to serve up websites that are quick and give their customers the information they seek quickly, and a slow website is counter-productive to that.
Cheap, inexpensive web hosting can hurt the speed of your website. Google offers a free on-line website speed tester to see how fast your website is. The tool also offers advice such as: browser caching, image optimization and others to help fix your speed issues.
There is a little controversy these days over url’s with keywords in them getting better rankings. There has been a lot of speculation over the last year that Google would be dropping this from their ranking algorithms, but since it hasn’t been announced, I will cover it here. URL Keyword Tagging is the practice of buying highly sought after url’s with keywords or keyword strings in the url. For example, a carpet cleaning company in Portland might be interested in buying the url PortlandCarpetCleaning.com to try and target people searching that phrase. The hope here is that the search engines will give added weight to that website since the url contains those keywords.
I typically don’t recommend spending the money that many of these highly sought after url’s cost for two reasons.
However, there are studies out there that point to these types of URL’s getting more SEO traffic, so ultimately I leave this decision to the business owner after weighing their options.
Next article in this series will be: Website Ranking Factors for Small Business – Off Page SEO
Recently I read an article from PPC Associates titled How To Spot Fake Google Reviews, obviously I was enticed to read the post as gaining reviews for local businesses is one of the best ways to affect rankings and help set your business apart as a trusted partner. I often talk to my clients about the importance of reminding their customers to write reviews about the service or product they received. In fact I had one client that took this to heart and emailed his past clients asking for reviews…and to my surprise he garnered 15 reviews which shot his business to the first page for a highly sought for keyword. But the reason the above article caught my attention is explained below.
It’s can tempting as a SEO company to help your clients position out by writing a few fake reviews for them. After all you might think that your helping them get to the first page, they get business, and you look like a hero, right? Wrong. Fake reviews are black hat.
Earlier this last summer I met with an insurance agency that wanted to get to the first page for the keyword string “Auto Insurance Portland”. One very well known company here in town known for their outrageous commercials and well known slogan was the first Google Places result for the search. After looking at this company’s place page, it became pretty clear that whomever was handling their SEO was involved in Black Hat tactics to get their client to the first page. The biggest factor was Fake Reviews. Whomever had posted these fake reviews didn’t even try to hide the fact they were fake. Instead of writing a review, they had just stuffed a bunch of keyword strings (keyword stuffing) into several different reviews. Keywords such as:
were repeated over and over again in all these reviews.
So after reading the article on How To Spot Fake Google Reviews, it made me think of this well known insurance company. So of course I went to Google to see how this companies Black Hat SEO Tactics were working. And to my surprise, this company has been been removed completely from the results on “Auto Insurance Portland”. I did find their Google Place Page after doing a name search and found that not only did Google remove all the Keyword Stuffed reviews, but they also placed the page back into “unclaimed” status. One lone review still remains…and from what I saw it still stinks to high heaven, I’ll let you decide for yourself below:
I decided to block out the company’s name for obvious reasons. But it seems to me that whomever wrote this review is trying for rankings for:
Moral of this story? If some SEO Company promises you rankings, find out how they plan to do it. I’ve always tried to use the rule that if a Google employee asked how I gain rankings for a client, how would I feel when I told them the answer?
One of the things I am continually amazed at is how many small business websites don’t really sell the benefits of doing business with them. How does your website sell benefits of doing business with you, rather than your competitor? This is probably one of the very first things I ask any new business, right after I ask them if they’re satisfied with how their website is working to produce leads for them. Almost always the response I get is no, or I have no idea how it’s working. In this post I will cover a tactic that I have found very helpful in converting visitors into prospects.
Might seem silly to say websites are sales people too, but sometimes small business owners need to be reminded of that. In the almost 10 years I have been doing this, I’ve heard websites referred to everything from “online brochures”, “24 hour sales person”, “online menu of services” and so on, and however you may view your website, one question every business owner needs to ask themselves is: How does my website reflect upon me and my services/company? Sharp or sloppy?
Websites need nurturing, just like a sales person would. Do you keep up on your website? Have you trained it on your newest products and/or offerings? Does it talk, in detail, about what you do, how your business is different, and what the benefits of doing business with you versus one of your competitors? If the answer is no to any of the above, it might be time to make a change.
I come from a background of sales, so when I started City Ranked, it seemed a no brainer to me that a small business website needed to sell the very best attributes a small business had, sell the benefits of doing business with said small business and how that business made it easy to do business with them. With convincing from one of my very first customers, we tested a new website layout that almost “punched” a website visitor in the face with the benefits, confidence and convenience factors of doing business with them, on every single page.
After conducting an exhaustive list of services the client offered, we dived into what set them apart from their competition. This client offered Junk and Garbage Hauling Services, and because it only takes a couple guys with a truck to offer this type of service, the market is littered with these types of business, both local and national and fly-by-night operations. So making sure that we remind website visitors the “benefits” of doing business with this client were key. As you can see from the above screenshot, we came up with 8 key points that we needed to remind visitors of, as a side point their old website only mentioned 3 of these points in tiny small text within the website text.
Almost immediately the quality of customer leads and phone calls coming off the website shot up. No longer was “price” the driving question behind what the customer was providing. Questions such as “how fast can you come?”, and “Do you pick up from ___?” became the norm. Second we saw website conversion percentage increase dramatically. People that would have normally visited then left, were now visiting and calling. Obviously more calls = more sales. Also customer has seen an increase in calls from commercial clients.
So what did my customer and I learn from all this? Building a website, that sells a small businesses best qualities, right up top, where every visitor can see them nets results. For me I can safely say that I have a very satisfied customer, for my customer, their website is finally working they way they always wanted it to work. My customer even stated that their sales were up over 80% versus the same period the prior year! Now obviously other factors such as local search optimization, professional SEM, and website SEO went into those results…but at the end of the day, we can drive tons of traffic, if the website still doesn’t sell, it does no good.
If that doesn’t convince you to build a website that sells, I don’t know what will.
How to build a small business website that’s blown out for Google Caffeine…
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