While starting a business entails plenty of challenges and hiccups––from disgruntled employees to long working hours––generating leads and making money will always be the biggest. Fortunately, it is now easier than ever to do so, and businesses can and does start out with minimal resources in this day and age. You just need to create an online presence for your company so that you could be visible to a lot of people. That means investing in search engine optimization strategies as well as social media campaigns, which are much more efficient than traditional marketing approaches. This is how you can manage your business and appear in Google search results.
Start by submitting your website
The goal is to become visible to more people and generate a lot of leads. But that cannot happen if Google is unaware of your existence. True, you will eventually be discovered by the all-powerful search engine, but you need to expedite things a little bit and get on Google’s radar quickly so you can get to work. You can do that by submitting your website to the search engine by sending the sitemap to Google Search Console, which will basically help you index your business website and start reaching people as soon as possible.
Improve your website
Indexing your website is one thing, but having it rank higher in Google’s search results is a whole other ball game. For that, you will need to work on your search engine optimization strategies, and that is a lot of work. For starters, you need to improve all aspects of the site so that you’d provide visitors with a pleasant user experience, which will reflect on your search engine ranking. You can do that by making sure your website loads quickly, as studies have shown that most users dismiss those that take more than three seconds to load and move on to another.
You should also make the navigation process simple and seamless, because people don’t really want to spend minutes trying to figure out how to take an action or check out. So, you should make different tabs easily accessible and visible to site visitors, and they would definitely appreciate it and possibly take the action you need on your website.
Content and keyword placement
Content is another crucial factor that plays into your search engine ranking, and it has to be of excellent quality. If the content on your website isn’t interesting or regularly updated, people won’t stick around and they most likely will not visit again. They need fresh material on a regular basis, and this is how you keep them interested in your business. So, always update your content and make sure it is on quality and value, and avoid problems like old posts appearing on the home page and duplicate content.
Keyword placement is an integral approach to people finding you more easily. When a person in your area looks for a service, they open Google and type ‘plumber’ or ‘lawyer’ in said location. If you don’t have such keywords carefully placed, then people won’t find you––it’s as simple as that.
Use Google My Business
The great thing about Google is the fact that it wants to help businesses make it and rank higher, because they also benefit from that happening. So, they provide a lot of great tools like this one, which is of huge importance for businesses getting on Google and wanting to rank higher. GMB simply allows you to add a listing for your company in your local area, which allows you to control how your business appears in local search results. You can add all sorts of details on that listing that customers really need and want easy access to, like a location on Google Maps, working hours, phone number, address, and any other details that you think might be important to someone who’s after a service/product like yours.
Consider pay-per-click ads
Even though they may be pricey, PPC ads are quite an efficient approach to ranking higher on Google for a particular keyword related to your business. You just sign up and select the keyword you’d like to bid on with how much you’re willing to pay whenever someone clicks on your ad. Your rank will be as high as you’re willing to go when it comes to the cost of a click, and there are no limits, really. The cost of keyword ads will vary depending on the industry, and you need to remember that every time a person clicks on the ad, you pay money. So, make sure this approach won’t break the bank before going with it.
Backlink
Backlinking is one of the smartest ways to manage your business and appear higher in Google search results. This is why other websites link back to yours through their content, which can do your business a world of good. Whether it is bloggers or partner websites doing it, when Google sees a link on another site linking back to yours, it ranks you higher. The more backlinks you have, the higher you will rank, because this is an indication for both Google and users that yours is a trustworthy website that is of certain credibility and competence.
You should be very careful not to resort to shady websites for this, though. Some business owners pay infamous websites with a good reach or those of untrusted origins to add links to their company website, which will most definitely get you into trouble and damage your search ranking, because this kind of underhanded approach doesn’t work with Google.
Creating a powerful online presence is extremely important for any business to reach its target audience, but it’s a lot of hard work. You need to invest the time and money needed so, your business could become visible on Google, which will keep getting you more leads, and in turn, money. While there are paid approaches, working on organic reach is always the best and most affordable strategy, and you can do that with a few simple steps like website optimization, regularly updating your content, using free tools like Google My Business, and others.
