How to Get Google to Love You and Your Website

As coronavirus relegates many Americans to working from home, website traffic is up according to NPR. With more people browsing the web, search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever to help drive more traffic to your website.

“SEO evaluates how well your website is set up to reach your customers,” explains DeLaune’s website and SEO specialist Jeff Rose.

The benefits of a well-executed SEO strategy include higher website visibility ranking in search engines and more organic traffic to your website.

How Much is That Doggie in the Window?

“Think of your website as a storefront window,” Rose says. “You put things in the store window to draw people into the store to buy something.”

While you might like the storefront window to be interesting and entertaining, the ultimate goal is to showcase items that customers might buy.

An SEO campaign helps identify and fix problems on both the customer-facing content and the backend code that might get in the way of your customers finding you. SEO helps Google, the biggest search engine of them all, identify you as a key provider of what the viewer is searching for in order to send them to your website.

The Right Keywords are Key

“Keywords are an extremely important part of people finding your website in the crowd of other websites,” says Rose.

An initial SEO audit asks clients to provide a list of the top keywords they think customers are using when they do a search in Google. Our SEO Audit uses tools to evaluate those keywords to show the volume of search queries.

“Surprisingly, the audit often shows that what the client thinks are important keywords aren’t,” he says. “We can then suggest other terms that can drive more people to your site.”

How to Tell Google Your Site is Valuable

“Often, companies have a website that is attractive, easy-to-read, full of entertaining and interesting information, but is still not getting a lot of visitors,” says Rose. “In SEO, we want to appeal to Google to tell them the website is a valuable resource and fix any coding problems.”

Common website problems that DeLaune finds in an SEO Audit are slow-loading images and broken internal and external links.

Conversion from Visitor to Leads

Once at your site, turning visitors to actual prospects or customers is another important feature of SEO.

This “conversion” involves analyzing what pages visitors are coming to, how long they spend on each page, and what action are they doing on your website.

Are visitors downloading PDFs? Are they watching videos? Are they filling out contact forms for more information?

One Easy Step to Take Now

While a full SEO audit and subsequent fixes are affordable and easy to implement, we asked Jeff what one step companies could do today to help their website as they are getting their ducks in a row to implement a full SEO campaign.

“Make sure that every page has an easy way for potential customers to reach your company:  Make sure phone numbers and email addresses on your site are all linked with one click to the company and make sure each website page has a clickable Call-to-Action and a contact form to fill out.”

“You’d be surprised how many company websites don’t have an easy way for prospects to reach the company for more information,” he adds.

When people stop by your website storefront window to browse, make sure they have an easy way to contact you to actually purchase something they want.

If you’d like to know more about how DeLaune can help you get Google to love you and your website, contact us.