Search Engine Marketing to Attract Customers

So you have started your business, now what?

To help your business grow and attract customers, it needs to be visible online, especially through search engine marketing. According to Statista, the UK has the most advanced eCommerce market in Europe. However, this market can also be very competitive, which is why using the right tools can maximise your business’ potential. Here are a few tips to enable your business to be seen online.

To begin, ask yourself these questions:

• “What do I want people to see?“,
• “How do I want them to find me?“,
• “Can they find me easily on Google or any other search engine?“.

These are all things from a user perspective, which fits into the customer’s journey. So, what can you do to be seen? There are several things to do to improve how you are seen online, particularly on Google.

List your website on Google and Bing search engines

To list your website on search engines, you will need to provide Sitemaps, which can be generated through websites or third party plugins, such as Yoast. Sitemaps help search engines understand the structure of your website. Although Google and Bing are the leading search engines in the UK, it may be worthwhile to consider additional search engines such as Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.

List your business on Google My Business

To be more recognised as a business on Google, you will need to create a Business Profile. This can be done through Google My Business through these easy steps:

1. Sign in or create your Google account.
2. Enter your business details: the business’ name, category, etc.
3. Choose whether to add a location.
4. Provide contact details: opening hours, contact number, website(s), photos, and a description of the business’ background.

After completing these steps, you will need to provide a postal address to verify your business, through a verification code, that arrives within 21-28 days via post. What now? As obvious as it sounds, keep your business data up-to-date. This includes:

• Having complete data,
• Keeping accurate hours,
• Manage and respond to reviews,
• and adding photos.

The primary reason that it is important to keep details up-to-date on Google, is so that the platform can show accurate information to new and returning customers. According to Google, any business detail updates, i.e., change in address, contact number, etc; should be done in a timely fashion. Likewise, businesses are encouraged to use the Google My Business tool, as stated above, as this will also help with SEO and also allows you, as a business, to engage with customer reviews or comments.

Optimise your website for search engine marketing

Website listings go through a process known as “crawling”, which collects relevant website data, through algorithms, for search engines.

This includes:

• Google’s Algorithm changes constantly, which can affect how your business displays on Google, unless certain conditions are met. E.g., if your website page(s) have a slow loading speed, it can contribute to a poor customer experience and is considered a negative factor. A slow loading page could mean that potential consumers will abandon your site and shop elsewhere. Such experiences can impact customer trust and retention, which could gradually affect your Return on Investment.
  
• Using proper links, this includes reliable hyperlinks and “<a> href=” tags. This helps crawlers to run checks to list the website pages, without the appropriate tags, the crawler cannot check them.
  
• Meta Tags – Meta Tags allow for search engines to find your website through using “metadata”. Metadata is not visible on a website, but allows for search engines to understand what the website/page is about.

Still not appearing on Google’s search engine?

Never fear, there are a few reasons as to why this may happen and some can be overcome by using the Google Search Console. One possible reason is because your site is new, so Google probably hasn’t listed the site yet. Check your website’s navigation is easy to navigate. As easy as this sounds, if a web crawler (web spider) struggles to go through your website, you may not be discoverable on search engines and this could impact your search engine marketing performance.

Using appropriate links to other internal website pages and external websites can also boost your search presence. For example, an external website is known as an outbound link, while another page on your own website is an internal link. Although Alexa.com also highlights some of the misconceptions to this, outbound links are a good way to both appear on Google search, and to gain traffic from other sites, and this improves on SEO. and when this is on the same website, this is referred to as an internal link.

Backlinks also provide credibility to sources, especially for websites/blogs which rely on using facts. Backlinks to credible sources can offer a level of value to what you are offering. These also provide an opportunity for some businesses and creators to promote one another and gain a rapport – meaning they might feel inclined to also link your website, which could also improve website traffic.