Make Google your customer

Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to the process of optimising your website and web pages to for search engines to rank your website as high as possible. Needless to say, this is critical for businesses.

To many small and medium business owners, SEO is still an alien subject. It is viewed by many as a technology issue that should be dealt with by the respective technology personnel, web designer or IT department. But SEO shouldn’t be delegated to people too far from the business.

We encourage companies to treat search engines like Google and Bing like a real person, a very important customer:

Honesty

Search engines don’t like to be fooled. Google and Bing are constantly updating the way they index search results so that misleading websites get scored lower. Therefore, relevant content is key.

Relevance

Search engines want a website to serve relevant content to the keywords the website is designed for. Just like a customer appreciates relevant accessories when visiting a running shop, a search engines will reward websites with relevant content.

Clarity

Like with a real customer, you have to be very clear about what you have to offer (the elevator pitch). Search engines like to be told what the website is about in a clear and concise way. Though website developer can help with this by providing the right coding context, it is important to have already a very clear and well structured story. There are a variety of storytelling tools, such as the Power of Three and the Key Message House that will help with the structure of a good story

Reputation

Just like with real customers, it will take to ‘win over’ the search engines. The best optimised website will not come to the first page Google if the website has just launched. Search engines favour older sites. They also favour sites that get regularly updated with relevant content and have a regular social sharing base. So it is important to have an ongoing relationship with search engines and this requires attention to the details on an ongoing basis.

Up to date

A customer visiting a certain address expects a business to be at that location, likewise in the virtual world; it is important to have links and contact information up to date. Search engines will index sites lower with out of date information. Additionally, search engines like it when your business can also be found on their maps application so make sure that information is also up to date.