Google+ may not be the most popular social media network by any means, its user base has nothing on Facebook or Twitter as an example, but it is the one many SEO agencies recommend, mainly because of its SEO advantages. With Google+ you can create a company page that people will find when they search for you in Google. Your Google+ page can include relevant information such as maps, product photos, interior photos, outside photos, reviews, telephone numbers and a quick link to your website. When there’s the opportunity to add more relevant information about your business to Google, you should take advantage of it. If you have professional photos, lots of people willing to review your products and services and plenty of information to share, you can create a Google+ page that sits highly in Google when people search for your business, so make sure it looks the part.
Author Archives: James
Content that’s fresh and filling
Google hasn’t made any major changes recently with regards to content requirements, but minor tweaks to the algorithm over the last few months have pushed companies with lots of high quality content to the top of rankings. There’s no doubt about it, the more engaging and lengthy your articles are, the better your website is likely to perform in search engines. A terrific 400 word article will easily be topped by a 1000+ word articles with visuals, bullet pint, infographics and videos. The more quality you’re giving your visitors, the more they’re likely to engage with your brand and spend time on your website. It’s not just quick tricks that will boost your traffic. Google rewards businesses that spend time producing high quality content for their visitors. If you can give Google content that’s fresh and filling, you’ll perform much better going forward. That at least seems to be the trend for now.
Live Chat – The drawbacks
Many big brands have live chat options on their website and it can play a big role in improving enquiries, conversions and sales. While this may be a great tool for big companies, there can be some drawbacks for small to medium sized businesses.
If you only have a small number of people available to answer questions, you’ll only disappoint visitors who find your chat service too slow or offline too often. You can obviously combat this by outsourcing the chat services, but then you lose some of the technical knowledge that may be required to answer visitors’ questions properly.
Live chat may also be a massive time waster for smaller businesses. Your customers and people who are very interested will happily contact you via email or by phone, but half interested individuals may swamp your team on the live chat, and they could well be timewasters.
Keyword Density
Far too many websites are completely over optimised for various keywords. This tactic used to work back in the day when Google wasn’t quite able to combat spam, but nowadays it’s a hindrance. Of course, there are no clear rules as to what constitutes as ‘over optimisation’, but if you have a keyword density of 30 or more for one particular phrase, such as ‘T-shirts for sale’; Google may mark you down for producing poor quality content. Google wants websites to be human friendly, so that means not having too much repetition for certain keywords. Try to pick similar words and create some sense of variety, otherwise you may bore your visitors, or worse, drop down in the Google rankings. There are many tools on the market that can help you check your keyword densities fast, and many of these come as free plugins for your browser.
Don’t rely on direct traffic forever
As a web marketing consualtant, I often hear from small business owners that they don’t need SEO because their direct traffic is through the roof. My response is simply “it won’t stay like that for long”. You have to do a serious amount of advertising online and offline to continuously increase direct visits to your website and whilst that’s possible you should never forget organic visits. The great thing about organic traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing is when you start to rank you’re getting tons of visitors for free. You’ll obviosuly have to pay your SEO agency a fee but you’ll be getting a much better return on investment for you businesses. If your organic traffic is on the way down and direct is on the way up it’s probably best you focus some attention on SEO because if you had the best of both worlds your business will be flying!