Struggling getting found online? Want to appear further up the search engines? Simply want to attract more visitors to your website? Stress no more! I spoke to KAYBE’s Technical Expert, Luke Brennan, for his top tips on improving your site visibility and getting found by potential customers.
Having worked at a multi-award-winning agency for some time, and making tonnes of improvements daily to a wide range of websites, helping them increase visitors and sell more, Luke’s certainly an expert when it comes to getting found online.
When considering the question, “why am I not getting found online?”, he breaks it down into several potential issues. Let’s uncover these in detail…
Not getting found online reason 1: SEO issues
The first issue Luke highlights as a possible problem when it comes to getting found online is SEO issues. So, what exactly does he mean by this? Well, there are several factors that come under this category – the first being indexing…
Indexing
Luke explains, “If your site hasn’t been indexed by Google, it isn’t going to show up on Google. So, you need to ensure your website has been indexed by search engines. Make sure to check whether your site is being crawled and indexed.”
Site maps
The next SEO issue that can result in not getting found online is poor or no site maps. So, what can you do to resolve this? Be sure to submit an XML site map (an XML file). Luke says, “This is a way for indexing tools to read what pages are on your website – from blog posts to web pages and so on, which helps search engines crawl your website to see what’s available, and help you get found.”
Quality content
Another key SEO issue when it comes to getting found online is poor quality content. It’s so important that your blog and web content should always be original, relevant, quality content is important. No duplicates or low quality content, as that can hurt your ranking. Most of all, it should always be valuable to your audience.
Keywords
The final point to mention when it comes to SEO issues is keywords. Are you doing enough keyword research? Luke explains, “Keyword research is vital. You should be looking for and catering towards relevant keywords that are appropriately included in your content, titles and meta descriptions.”
Ok, so that’s the most common SEO issues that can often lead to problems with not getting found online. But it doesn’t stop there. What about technical SEO?
Not getting found online reason 2: Poor technical SEO
Another factor that can impact whether or not you’re getting found online is technical SEO. What do we mean by technical SEO? It involves various frontend and backend work that’s geared towards helping search engines crawl and index your site better. Let’s break it down into the most common aspects: website speed, mobile optimisation, security, backlinks, and local SEO.
Website speed
When it comes to site speed, this can be a real sticking point. Luke points out, “The slower your site loads, the lower your ranking will be. Google’s algorithm pushes sites that have a slow loading time down the ranking. This will negatively impact your ranking.”
So, what can you do to improve your website speed? Luke advises the following:
1. Optimise your images
Making sure your images don’t take up too much space and that they don’t take too long to load, as this is the number one reason for a slow loading website.
2. Caching
If you’re not making many updates to your site, caching is great, as you have a stored version of your site accessible. At KAYBE, we use a CDN (content delivery network). There are little hubs all over the world that store a cached version of your site wherever you are. This highly improves load speed, as you’re not constantly accessing the server and requesting a brand-new load of the site every time.
Mobile optimisation
Is your site mobile friendly? Luke says, “With mobile users making up over 50% of web visitors, it’s never been more important to optimise for mobile, using responsive design. Even on B2B sites, where people are accessing the site on their laptops, there’s still, generally, a mobile majority nowadays. In fact, of all of our clients, I can see that each and every one – regardless of industry – is seeing majority mobile visitors.
There is a tool called Google’s Mobile Friendly test, which can scan your site and see if it’s mobile optimised, and whether it loads well or not. If it doesn’t, this will hurt your search engine rankings, as they won’t display a site that isn’t going to load properly.
SSL certificate
Does your site have an SSL certificate? Safety is key when it comes to visiting a website, so making sure your site uses HTTPS is crucial. According to Luke, “Not only does Google prefer secure sites, but using HTTPS also ensures no one can intercept your data as it’s being transferred. Google Chrome won’t let you access most sites if they don’t use HTTPS, and from a technical standpoint, not having an SSL certificate means you’re far less likely to rank.”
Backlinks and off-page SEO
If you’ve tried to get them, you’ll know that quality backlinks are very hard to build, but they are a significant ranking factor – especially from an authoritative source. Luke explains, “The higher the brand authority of the site you’re getting backlinks for, the better your site’s going to rank.”
Guest blogs, being featured on other business blogs, and user generated content are all great ways to help build backlinks.
Local SEO
Do you have Google My Business profile set up? If not, create and fill in as much detail as possible. This is crucial! Why? Luke says, “People are then able to get direct access to your phone number, email address, website, and so much more when they search a particular local term. Make sure you have local listings in local directories, and have consistent NAP (name, address and phone number) listed for different locations (if you are present across multiple areas).”
Not getting found online reason 3: Poor content marketing
Getting found online doesn’t stop at SEO, either. Another essential factor is the level of your content marketing efforts. Let me explain in more detail…
Blogging
Are you publishing high quality blogs and web content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience? This is a highly effective way to get seen online. And ensuring you post on a regular basis, but – more importantly – that you are posting relevant content that serves a purpose and is of value to your audience, is vital.
Social media
Having a social media presence is extremely important, too – especially for brand and domain authority on Google. This tends to help your ranking. Particularly when you have a strong, consistent strategy in place.
Video content
Having great video content really helps with getting found online, as well. Publishing across your website, YouTube, and social media channels, all helps with getting your site seen by more people. Plus, as with the point about blogging, above, if it serves a strong purpose and provides value, that will be so beneficial to both you and your potential customers.
Not getting found online reason 4: Poor user experience (UX)
UX is so incredibly important – not just where it comes to getting found online, but in general – so getting this right will help you get seen by more people AND delight them when they do find your site. The first point to mention here is navigation…
Navigation
Luke explains, “Ensuring your site has a clear and intuitive navigation structure really matters. This includes having menus, drop-down menus, easily accessible menus with Alt tags, and metadata.” Why is this so important? Well, essentially, it affects how users and search engines interact with your site. If you have poor navigation, neither will stick around.
Accessibility
Something else that’s recently exploded is accessibility. Luke says, “Search engines love accessibility, so getting this right is a must. In fact, Google is beginning to penalise sites that don’t have accessibility.” So, really focusing your efforts on accessibility is a must. Not just for ensuring search engines rank your site highly, but mainly to ensure you’re giving all of your users the best possible experience.
Monitoring your metrics
For Luke, “Monitoring your bounce rate, pages per session and average session duration is key so you can figure out where issues lie and can resolve them. Why? Because poor engagement hurts your ranking. It’s also really effective in discovering where you’re going right and what you’re doing wrong so that you can keep on improving.
Not getting found online reason 5: Technical issues
Technical issues play a big part in affecting whether or not you’re getting found online, too. Thankfully, many of these issues are easily fixed, meaning you can still be seen by your target audience when they need you. So, what kinds of things are we talking about here? Let’s take a look…
Fix broken links
Luke explains, “The first thing to do here is make sure there are no broken links. This is easy to fix. It’s simply a case of redirecting to a different page. If it’s a page that’s been deleted, redirect to a relevant page or to your home page. A redirection is far better than a 404 error, as Google does track the number of 404 errors that people come across on your site, and the higher the number, the more your site will be penalised.” Yikes!
Have a custom 404 page
For Luke, it’s important to “make sure you have a custom 404 page rather than the standard HTML, which search engines don’t favour, as, in general, it leads to decreased time on page. Plus, it looks unprofessional.” There are plugins that allow you to see how many 404s you have and create redirects based on this information.
Sort server issues
Do you currently have server issues? If so, this will definitely be resulting in you not getting found. Luke says, “Ensure you have a reliable server that gives minimum downtime. If your site’s down a lot, all search engines are going to penalise you, so it pays to invest in one that will give you maximum uptime.”
Not getting found online reason 6: Weak marketing strategy
Last but not least, having a good marketing strategy will pay dividends when trying to get found online. There are several things you can incorporate into your strategy (though this is not an exhaustive list) that will help…
Pay-per-click (PPC)
Pay-per-click advertising drives immediate traffic to your site, and you can do this while you’re working on your organic SEO. PPC lets you bid on specific keywords that are relevant to your business, and allowing you to reach the people who interested in your offerings. Because they appear at the top of search engines, your site is one of the first things a user will see when they type in a specific key term. Even if users don’t click on your ad, they will see your business name and, creating brand awareness.
Email marketing
Email marketing is another great way to help you get found online. It enables you to send out specific, targeted messages, encouraging people to visit your website. Luke says, “Building a list and sending newsletters helps drive traffic, engage with your audience, build brand authority and domain authority.”
Influencer marketing
Finally, if you have a niche business, and you find the right influencer, this can really help you not only get found but also drive business. Luke says, “influencer marketing can help you get found online by really taking advantage of the reach, credibility and engagement that the right influencer can bring.”
Still worried about getting found online?
Hopefully, you should now have a clearer idea of how to improve your chances of getting found online. Yes, there are lots of things to consider, and it can take time to see the true benefits of SEO, but with trial and error and a lot of forward-thinking, you can see a real difference to the amount of traffic to your site. And if you’re still unsure about what you can do to get found online? Get in touch to see how the experts at our multi-award-winning agency can help.
