Does Your Website Measure Up For Search Engine Visibility?
The process of creating a new website is so exciting! You’re preparing to have a new online presence for your brand and awesome web pages that showcase your products and services. We’ve identified 8 critical things you should check before and after the launch of your new website. Steps 1-4 should be completed prior to the launch of your website. Steps 6-8 should be completed right after launching your new website. Each item listed will boost your search engine optimization which ultimately results in driving more traffic to your website.
Pre-Launch:
1. Optimize Your Content for Google
Review your website’s content and be sure it’s targeted to your buyer persona. Address their pain points and offer useful information that helps solve their problems. Write your content in a conversational style and use your key words naturally throughout your content. You don’t need to over-stuff your page with key words.
2. Include Page Titles
Make sure each web page on your website has a relevant title. The title tag tells search engines what your page is about. It gives your viewers a quick, brief overview of your page and helps them decide if that’s the result they want to click on. Your page title should coincide with what your page content is telling the viewer.
3. Add Meta Descriptions
Create meta descriptions for your web pages. You can enter a separate meta description for each page. This should be a brief summary of the content on each web page. Include keywords in your meta description while also making the description interesting enough that the viewer wants to click on it. Your description should be about 150 characters long. Your meta description will be displayed as a preview snippet in search engine results, which most people read to determine if the link matches what they’re looking for.
4. Internal Linking
Did you include internal links throughout your web pages? Links that take the viewer from one page of your website to another page on your website are called internal links. We’re referring to links within the actual content of your pages. We recommend you set up your internal links to link to pages that are most important to the viewer or most profitable for your business.
Using internal links:
- helps Google to be able to crawl your website and find all of your website’s pages
- boosts your website’s credibility, therefore boosting your rank
5. Set Up a Schedule to Blog Regularly
A blog is a section of your website where you regularly add new content. This content helps solve a pain point for your buyer persona and generally focuses on one specific topic per post. Blogging also helps position you as the “expert” in your industry by offering useful information. Over time, it drives more traffic to your website which increases your credibility. Google can recognize that you’re adding useful content and crawls those pages to return them in search results. Including social sharing buttons on your blog posts also helps these pages be found. It can quickly boost page views and sharing statistics.
Post-Launch:
Make sure your website gets indexed by Google. Every time Google crawls the web, they add new sites to their index. If you have a new website, you can let Google know by simply submitting your URL at www.Google.com/addurl. Bing has a URL submission site, too, at www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url.
7. Submit a Sitemap to Google Webmasters
You can submit all of your website page’s URLs to Google by submitting a sitemap through Google webmasters. You can log-in to Webmasters at www.Google.com/webmasters (use the same log-in information as your gmail account). A site map gives Google the full map of all your site’s pages and posts. It helps Google to better index your website by making sure Google knows about all of your site’s pages. It also gives you reports about the visibility of your website. You can find more information on sitemap submissions at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592?hl=en&ref_topic=6002029
8. Register for Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free service from Google that allows you to review a wealth of data to help you measure the results of your website. It will give you detailed information on:
-Your most frequently viewed web pages
-Bounce rate
-Average time a viewer spends on each page
-Demographics of website viewers
-Key words viewers are using to search for your website
-External links that viewers click to get to your website
-Social media pages that drive traffic to your website
-And so much more!
You can even set up reports in Google Analytics to be emailed go you on a regular basis to continually monitor your website success. For more information on Google Analytics, go to https://www.google.com/analytics/features/.
Complete these 8 steps and you’ll be well on your way to creating a website that’s visible to search engines. We recommend setting aside time to update your website regularly with relevant content and helpful blog posts targeted to your buyer persona. You can follow up on how well your updates reach your audience by measuring your results with analytics.
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