How To Make Your Website More Visible On Google
There’s pretty much no point in having a website if nobody visits it.
Your website is your 24/7 salesperson — it should be enticing potential clients in and doing the selling for you before they’ve even picked up the phone to chat with you!
How do you get people on your website?
Improve your visibility on Google.
Getting ranked high on Google’s search results may seem difficult, but it’ll make your life a whole lot easier if you can get your company to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Google can process over 3.5 billion searches every day so it’s no surprise that so many companies are fighting for the top spot on Google. Businesses are scrambling to get involved in SEO (search engine optimization) and take the necessary steps to be found online. Here’s how you can help get your site more visible on Google.
Register your site with Google Search Console
Previously known as Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console is a free service run by Google. It allows you to submit your website along with its sitemap for indexing.
If you submit your sitemap to Google Search Console you’re letting Google know that your website exists. This is, as you’d probably expect, the first step to appearing on the search engine’s results page.
Google Search Console can be useful for a lot of different reasons. Not only does it allow Google to be aware of your website but it also helps you:
Check who or what is linking to your website
Ensures that Google isn’t having any issues with crawl errors on your site
Let Google know if there are different versions of your website that exist for different countries
View what sort of queries your audience is searching for and what questions drive them to your site
Let Google know when you’ve updated a piece of content so that the new version can be displayed on the results page quicker
Google Search Console is the perfect tool to help you maximize the visibility of your website on Google’s search results page.
Increase your site’s load speed
Google has been ranking sites based on its load speed for years, which is why it's important to make sure your website loads as fast as possible.
This means that you should;
Lower the number of HTTPS requests on your website and eliminate render-blocking resources. Learn more.
Make sure your image files are the smallest size they can be with adequate resolution. Optimized images load faster and consume less cellular data. Learn more.
Use fast hosting services (this is not an issue if you choose the Squarespace platform for your site b/c your site is hosted on their enterprise-level servers).
Improve your loading speeds for mobile devices
Google rewards sites that load quickly on mobile devices by ranking them higher on their results page.
It's incredibly important to make sure that your website has a fast load time on mobile and that the user experience for smartphone users is as good as possible. A lot of smartphone users won’t have the patience to sit and wait for your site to load and will often click away and try a different website if they’re not satisfied with your website’s performance.
We intentionally hide some of our images on mobile with CSS. For instance, if you look at our website on desktop, you will see photos of us in the hero image area and midsection of the home page but we hid them when you go to our site on mobile. It’s not necessary to have them load and possibly impede readability and usability.
You should also bear in mind that Google tends to prefer mobile sites to be clutter-free and will often penalize websites that are cluttered and difficult to use. This means that having any popups or advertisements on your site causes poor mobile user experience and slows down the load time of your website.
PageSpeed Insights
Want to test your page speed performance on mobile and desktop? Use PageSpeed Insights to analyze the content on your website. It will generate suggestions to help make your web pages faster.
Register with Google My Business
Registering with Google My Business (GMB) will definitely help your business become more visible on Google. You’ll be able to appear in relevant search results especially if they match with your location.
You can read more about setting up a Google My Business account in our previous blog.
Google My Business is perfect for letting Google know where your business operates. This means that you’ll have a better chance at appearing higher in the search results for people who are searching for a business like yours in their geographical location. GMB is also great at improving your local SEO which means that you’re more likely to appear on searches from people in your area.
For example, if you have a graphic design company and somebody in your local area types ‘graphic design’ into Google Search or Maps you may be shocked to see your own business listing popping up a lot higher-than-expected in the search results page.
Google My Business is a huge part of local SEO and if you want to attract customers from your own area to your business it’s vital that you register with this service. Plus, it’s completely free. Sign up here.
Keep your Google My Business up-to-date
Once you’ve registered with GMB it's important to keep your listing updated with any new images, contact information or opening hours.
Customers are more likely to see your GMB information before they encounter your website which is why it’s important to keep your information up-to-date. Any incorrect information will only work against you and can make your business seem unprofessional and sloppy.
Get Reviews
Our Google Reviews!
Encouraging happy customers to leave positive feedback and reviews on your Google My Business is a great idea. It provides social proof and encourages new clients to look at your services.
Having five stars beside your business name can increase your click-through rate which can have a positive effect on your SEO.
Although we’ve been in business since 1996, it’s only been in the last year that we started to ask our clients for reviews. We tell them to cite the issue they’re having, how our service solved it and most importantly, the result of their business. Reviews are mostly for a potential client to know the specifics then decide whether you’re a good fit for them.
You should also try to respond to all of your reviews, positive or negative. This will show your clients that you care about their opinions and their feedback. It will also increase your trustworthiness, expertise, and authority as a business and improve your search rankings.
Create backlinks for your website
Backlinks are when someone links to your website from their site. The more sites that link to you, the higher you will rank in Google.
Relevant page titles and amazing meta descriptions won’t mean much to your website if you don’t have any ‘backlinks’ pointing customers towards your website. Even a flashy URL is quite useless in this situation — Google wants to know your website has friends.
Having backlinks from other websites to your own is essential for any successful site. If you think about it this way they’re like votes endorsing your content. Google counts these votes and depending on how many you have depends on how high Google thinks your website should be on the search engine results page.
Keep in mind all backlinks aren't equal. You should definitely avoid companies that give you the promise of creating thousands of backlinks for you. These will often be of low-quality and do more damage than good. Instead of rewarding your website Google will penalize it as this amount of backlinks comes across as spammy in their eyes. Get backlinks from authoritative websites with related content.
You can generate backlinks in three ways:
You can use outreach, which is asking other sites and blog owners to add links to your content on their platforms.
You can create long blog posts rich in keywords that are relevant to both your industry and your niche. If these blog posts are of interest or have value to your customers then a lot of customers may create backlinks to them.
Get people to share your blog posts and website via social networks.
There are many factors that Google uses to rank a website
There’s so much that goes into improving your visibility on Google, that it’s hard to get everything into a single blog post! Your audience, your goals, and your niche will help you figure out how you can make your website more appealing to search engines such as Google.
If you think your website isn’t performing how it should be or you need a little extra help, we’ve created the Power Plan to help small business owners figure out exactly what their business needs and create an actionable plan to get started.
Did you find this guide on how to make your website more visible on Google helpful? Let us know in the comments!
