You’ve heard the saying, “If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it?”
A similar question can be asked of your business:
“If someone searches Google for your type of product or service and you don’t show up on page one, how will new customers ever discover you?”
Now granted, Google is not the necessarily the be-all, end-all source for driving new prospects or leads to your door. There are many other ways people can find out about you—and you may be confident that positive word-of-mouth alone will generate plenty of leads for you.
If you’ve been in business for many years, that may well be the case. If so, congratulations and keep up the great work!
Otherwise, be aware that younger, hungrier competitors will be doing their best to siphon as much traffic away from your business as possible on Google—the world’s 800-lb. gorilla when it comes to online searches.
Why We Care About SEO At Go For Launch—And So Should You
Here’s how the top three search engines stack up in terms of their worldwide share of eyeballs:
In terms of where people go to search online, it’s a no-brainer: Google
And what happens when people search on Google?
The majority of them find something on the first page of the results, then they stop looking or go somewhere else.
In fact, the first page of Google results captures between 71%-92% of search traffic clicks. The second-page results are far below that, with less than 6% of all website clicks. (Source: Moz)
That means if you’re not on page one of Google, you will likely never get any clicks to your website.
No Traffic=No Leads=No New Customers
You know what they say:
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades…
Photo by Mikael Seegen on Unsplash
How to Get On Page One of Google
So how can you get found on page one of Google?
There are several options:
Option 1: Pay for it — by using Google Ads
Option 2: Rank organically — by improving your website (and other factors) over time
Option 1—Pros and Cons
The first method, buying ads, can work well but be very costly, depending on the search terms you want to show up for. Of course, many people automatically “tune out” or skip the ads. But there is value in gaining impressions, and you don’t pay unless people click.
Option 2—Pros and Cons
The second method is better, but ranking naturally will also take time, can be very competitive and will require continual work to stay on top of Google’s constantly changing algorithms.
In reality, most businesses in competitive markets will use a combination of paid and organic SEO to increase their website traffic.
At Go For Launch, we can position your business using both pay-per-click advertising and by improving your search rankings through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
What Search Engines Are Looking For
There are many factors we will look at in order to determine how to get your business ranking higher on Google. A partial list of these factors includes:
Relevancy — how relevant are your pages to what people are searching for, and what they see when they land on your website
The quality of your content — how useful and informative it is
User experience — what’s it like for your visitors to engage with your content
Site speed — does your site load as quickly as possible
Cross-device compatibility — are your pages optimized to be displayed properly on both desktop computers and mobile devices
Internal linking — are you properly linking to other pages within your site
Authority — how authoritative does Google deem your site to be
Meta descriptions and title tags — is the underlying information on your site pages optimal from Google’s perspective
Properly tagged images — are you using effective tags to identify all images on your website
Local SEO — is your business properly listed on Google My Business and other local search directories
Social media — is Google seeing positive signals of your business from other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
Get A Free SEO Audit
Are you unhappy with the way your site is ranking? Do you have a clear idea of what’s broken, and what you need to work on?
We will be glad to send you an initial SEO audit, free of charge. Just complete the form below and we’ll send it to you within one business day. We’re also available to schedule a call to discuss your SEO needs and prepare a customized proposal.