OK, the holiday season is behind us and we’re settling into the new year. But will 2016 be just another year or could it be a great year?
Below we’ve compiled a list of 5 simple things you can check and analyse very quickly to see if your website and online presence is active and really working for you. Don’t underestimate any one of these points, each one WILL help to boost traffic to your website, encourage leads and enquiries and ultimately boost your sales.
We have proved time and again for forward thing businesses that doing these things will have a positive effect on your business.
If you’re happy with just another same-same year in business, feel free to ignore and don’t worry about your online presence, let it sit there and it’ll continue to do the same nothing for you. You HAVE to put effort in online to get it back, and you will if you try.
Start with these 5 simple things that could be done in a few minutes:
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Claim & Fill Out Your Google My Business listing
A Google My Business listing is critical to helping you get noticed in local searches. We’ve all seen the map pack that comes up when you search, say for a local Chinese Restaurant:
Have you claimed your Google My Business listing? We are constantly surprised even in 2016 at home many businesses that are coming to us for help with an online presence, have not claimed their listing. It seems most web designers do not check this for their clients, and if it isn’t claimed it’s not really helping you and could even be giving a wrong address, wrong phone number or even worse, sending a potential customer to a competitor…
So how do you check you have it?
Easiest way is to try searching your business name, perhaps also adding a location.
Another way is to go to the Google My Business page and trying to add a listing, usually if there is already a listing they will show it to you.
Google will want to verify you are who you say you are and where you say you are, so they’ll likely send a postcard to you with a code number or perhaps if you’re fortunate they’ll give you call with a voice recording of a code to input.
Next step, COMPLETELY fill out the listing
So either you just have, or you’ve had the listing claimed for many years, that’s great!
But, you also need to check it is FULLY completed, including photos.
Check things like, opening hours, address, phone numbers, website even the blurb are all there and accurate.
For more information see our blog from early last year.
Finally get some reviews!
Encourage customers to leave a review for you and then like us once you get about the 5 or so reviews you’ll get an attractive star rating and stand out even more from your competitors.
We can help with an easy strategy for getting reviews, contact us for more information.
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Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Is your website mobile friendly? As per our blog last year Google is actively penalising websites that are not mobile friendly.
A check of the 500 or so websites under our control shows that as many as 75% of a website’s visitors are using a mobile device to view the website.
Here’s the easiest and quickest way to check if your website is mobile friendly, with Google Mobile Friendly Test
If your website isn’t mobile friendly contact us to discuss options, which involves either recoding the public pages or maybe it’s time for a great, modern new presence.
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Check Your Contact Form is Working
When’s the last time you received an enquiry via the contact form on your website?
If it’s been a while, then make sure you do a quick test to ensure all is working. We have seen contact forms either fail or get blocked by junk mail filters – yes even your own systems.
It’s a quick check to ensure you’re getting enquiries that you can quickly respond to.
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Does Your Website Have the Basic Search Engine Elements?
Around 60% of the ranking of a website comes from on-page factors. Things such as ensuring your page title, headings and other code are correctly focusing on a key word or phrase.
Run a free test on your website in 60 seconds, with our SEO audit tool.
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More Content – When Did You Last Update Your Website?
In addition to the above it’s critically important since the past year or two to ensure that you have good content on your website.
Time and attention needs to be paid to this and it is worth the effort.
Ensure that all pages have a good amount of text (usually minimum of 200-300 words, but an ideal page size is about 500-2000 words).
Also build your footprint online with more informational pages. To help with this many companies incorporate a blog and write about different trends, results, explain technical terms, tips and services etc…
Also ensure that you don’t just have a brief services page with at worst a list of your services and at best a boring paragraph per service. Build on those and make specific one service per page entries on your website. You’ll be surprised at the impact it has on rankings over time as you build a footprint.
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It is worth the effort to ensure you have basic elements in place and that you are building upon your website and online presence.
To discuss further ideas and strategies or to simply get an objective opinion, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’d love to assist you to make 2016 a real winner for your business!
