How can I get my website to appear in Google? A quick guide to your options.

We’ve all been there, perform a search on Google and your business is nowhere to be found. If you can’t find your own business how will your prospects? So you’re left asking yourself, how do I get my website to appear in Google? How can my business be found in the search results by my future customers?

In B2B markets, every buying journey starts with a search so appearing in Google becomes even more important. Google is the most widely used search engine in many markets, but not all.

Increasing search visibility by improving website rank is a challenge every business faces and you are not alone. In one global multinational company I worked with, the site struggled to rank for one of its main product lines; we had to re-write a lot of the content. In a small business, we knew ranking the site would be a huge challenge. We needed to improve our visibility so our approach was to use PPC advertising as a short-term tactic and SEO as a long-term tactic. There is plenty to consider when trying to attract more visitors and be found by your future customers.

What are your options for getting into the Google search results?

The aim of appearing in the search results has one objective, improve search visibility for your B2B website and as a result make it easier for your potential customers to find you. When challenged with how to get into Google search results, there are two ways of improving the visibility of your website, organic optimisation or paid advertising. Paid and organic are both known as B2B search engine marketing tactics. Your options for increasing website search visibility and being found in the search results.

• Increase search visibility organically: Organic traffic is great because it’s free. However, it takes a lot of time to appear in the search result organically. Remember that all your other competitors also want to appear at the top. The process of taking steps to increase your website ranking organically is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
• Increase search visibility with ads: The alternative to organic optimisation is using paid ads. These ads appear in the search results in return for specific search terms you are targeting. You as the advertiser you pay for each click on the ad, giving it the name ‘pay per click’ advertising.

I want to use organic tactics to get my website into Google

B2B businesses have a great advantage in SEO. Our customers are experts in their fields. They use much more complex, if not technical searches. This gives us, B2B businesses and marketers many more terms to target. Here are a few things you need to think about with B2B SEO.

1. Remember that your Google page rankings aren’t the only ones that matter. If your business operates in international markets, check which search engines are most popular. In Russia it’s Yandex, in China Baidu and in Japan it’s Yahoo.
2. If your business operates in a local market, rather than a global one, there are a different set of considerations you need to make. Local businesses need to think about map listings, using their address on websites and local citations.
3. SEO is competitive, ranking for the most competitive terms is almost impossible in the short-term. You need to think about the broad range of phrases your B2B audience might use in their searches.
4. Increasing your website rank isn’t just about what you do on your website. You need other sites to link to yours, so you need to give them a reason to link, that’s why websites need good content.
5. Search engines show more than web pages on results pages. When you need to increase search visibility for your business, have a look at what else is shown on the search results page. Optimised videos, for example, are great for increasing the search visibility of your B2B business. Google shows video results for many search queries.

There is plenty to consider when you want to increase your website ranking in the search results and that is just the tip of the iceberg. That’s why many businesses prefer the paid option.

I want to increase my search visibility using paid options

1. The advertising platform for Google is called Google Adwords. AdWords will allow you to advertise on any Google search and also other Google properties such as YouTube.
2. Advertising on Google is based on a pay per click (PPC) model. You only pay for the clicks you receive.
3. The amount you pay per click will vary based on multiple factors including, but not only, competition.
4. One advantage of PPC over SEO is that you can control where you send visitors. B2B campaigns deliver the highest ROI when you send visitors to targeted landing pages.
5. AdWords allows you to target hundreds of different search terms locally or globally. Optimising the setup and management of your AdWords account will help deliver successful PPC campaigns. The worst thing you can do is have lots of keywords in an unorganized mess.

PPC is great when you need to rapidly increase your website visibility. Perfect for campaigns when you need a boost of leads or when you can’t afford to be missing from the rankings for your most important phrases.

Marketing tools will help with search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is a time-consuming process. Investing in the right marketing tools before you begin your SEO journey can help ensure you are focused on the right things and can measure success.

1. Google Analytics — Ensure you have Google Analytics set up on your website. It’s free and will allow you to measure the changes in organic traffic to your website.
2. Google Search Console -Google Search Console will give you great insights around any technical issues Google might encounter when it crawls your website.
3. KWFinder — This is a must-have SEO tool for any marketer considering search engine optimization. It’s part of an SEO suite of tools. KWFinder will help you understand what your prospects are searching for on Google.

Find more SEO Tools

Marketing tools will help with PPC marketing

1. SEMrush — The must-have tool in the PPC marketing space is SEMrush. One of the unique features is the ability to audit competitor ads to see what works or doesn’t. Learn from their mistakes. Read our SEMrush review.
2. Instapage — with any PPC activity you need to use dedicated landing pages. Landing pages are the key to profitable PPC and Instapage is the best tool you can use to build landing pages. Read our Instapage review.

Need a done for you SEO/PPC solution?

As your B2B SEO expert, I can take the burden of ranking in the search engine result pages off your shoulder. I’ll optimise your website so that your prospects find your business, even if they don’t know it’s you they need.

I want to make it easier for your next customer to find your business. With my experience of helping B2B businesses increase their search engine visibility, I can help you get there.

Originally published at fullerfunnels.com on March 3, 2019.