Every business that works is solving a problem somebody has. These days that somebody goes to the internet to find the fix, and picks from whatever the search results hand them. So the question is where your business lands on that list. Most people never scroll past the first page, which is the whole reason search engine optimization (SEO) decides how much work comes in the door. More customers start their search on the web every year. By the time one of them reaches your site, your design and the content on your pages are what close the sale or lose it. Worth knowing which.
The Juicy Details on Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is crucial in getting your business the spotlight because over 80% of people take advantage of the internet’s many resources when searching for the answer to their wildest dreams. (Source: Template Monster) So you need to be competing wildly for a spot because research also shows that 95% of traffic lives on the first page, and a meek 5% for anything on the second page, even less for the third! (Source: Chitika) How many results does Google show on their first page anyway? About 10. That’s it! That is way fewer spots than there are competitors of yours fighting for those spots.
There are over a dozen different factors that weigh in on how well Google or other search engines rank your site and pages in their listings. But the top two that hover over them all is web design and content. And content won’t even matter if the search engine robots can’t crawl to your content or understand it. Wait…. crawl? …Understand? …. ROBOTS? What does it all mean?!
Wait, what was this about robots and my website?
It used to be that webmasters would build a site and make it beautiful and easy to use and that was all that mattered, but because SEO is a big player in the battle of the businesses, other factors must be considered. Robots are a way for search engines to investigate your website and determine its value. Many things determine value but here are four important ones:
**Link Authority:**What about the links in your content? Do all the links work or are they broken? Does your site link to other sites? Do other sites link to you? The more links you can amass on your website from external sites, the higher authority search engines give you.
Reliability: Does everything work well on your site? Are the picture carousels flowing smoothly, pages loading quickly, playlists loading seamlessly?
UX: Can you move from the homepage easily to every part of your website that you want to show customers and search engines? If you have a blog and there isn’t an easy path from the homepage to the blog, then the robots won’t be able to see it or index it in their listings for your customer’s search queries. Location of the content on your site, how things are spaced out and placed all matter in search engine optimization.
Content and Keywords: What problem are you trying to solve? What keywords get your customers calling or showing up? The more content sprinkled with targeted keywords on your website, the better.
Now What?
Those four are the starting point, not the whole list. SEO has a lot of moving parts and they all lean on each other. Content the robots cannot reach does nothing for you. A fast, good looking site with nothing to say does not do much either. Neither one fixes the other. Take an honest look at where your own site sits today, and whether the design is helping or quietly working against you. If you would rather have someone else crawl through it, that is the job. Talk to your favorite digital marketing agency today!