3 steps to help your business appear in search engine results

This is the final post in our three-part series about improving your business website. Be sure to check out our previous articles about ensuring your site has the basics covered and helps customers get what they need. Today we’ll offer some tips to help your site show up on search engines like Google and Bing.

Attract and keep more happy customers with reputation management software. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!

Vexed by the problem of how to get more customers, most small businesses have found success over the years by following the traditional playbook of treating customers well and advertising their services locally. While those efforts are still important, every business must now have at least a basic Web strategy to stay competitive.

7 out of 10 people search online to confirm business credentials before deciding to visit for the first time. Google processes more than 1.2 trillion searches per year, which means lots of people are looking for things online, every second. So, you need a solid business website, and customers need to be able to find it when they perform online searches.

You can use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to increase the likelihood that your company shows up in customer searches. SEO is a broad topic, so for this post we’ll focus on the basics.

If you want to dive deeper, read through our local SEO tutorial and be sure to check out the one simple thing every small business can do to climb local search rankings.

But first, get started with three simple steps.

Make sure your website loads quickly

Google, in particular, rewards websites that offer a good experience to users, and its search algorithm reflects this. Search engines know that slow websites lose users. In fact, you only have around 2-3 seconds to get your site loaded before users will give up and go elsewhere.

The Website Highlights feature in Womply’s dashboard gives you a simple view of your website’s load speed score. If your page is loading too slowly, this feature will also provide tips and direction for fixing the problem.

Fix broken links

Hyperlinks provide easy ways for users to consume information across various websites, and the “webs” created by these links make it easy for search engine “spiders” to crawl around and better understand your site’s content. When a link on your site no longer works, however, it stops these web-crawling spiders in their tracks, preventing your site from being indexed and ranked properly.

You won’t always know if a site you’ve linked to has become defunct or redirected, and it’s a lot of work to manually check all the links on your website on a regular basis. Womply tests all the links on your site, and Website Highlights lets you know if you need to fix any broken ones to save you time and ensure that bad links aren’t hurting your chances of higher search rankings.

Link to your social media and reputation sites

As we outlined previously, the Internet is a literal web of interlinked pages. That means it’s critical to ensure that any web page your company “owns,” including social media profiles, are linked to your primary website, and vice versa.

Linking to your social media profiles has at least an indirect impact on your page ranking, and it provides additional avenues for customers to find your business. Linking to your pages on review sites makes it easier for customers to post feedback about your business and improves your chances of showing up in local web searches.

Go deeper: The best types of social media posts for small businesses

Website Highlights makes it easy to see if all your social media and reputation sites are linked from your website. If not, the feature gives you specific guidance on which profiles need to be connected so customers can find your business online and post reviews.

With Womply, you can easily ensure that your website is covering all the important basics for attracting customers and giving them what they need. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!

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