A website is a great way to promote your business, it is part of a marketing toolset. But it needs to do more than just exist - it will need to be found through search engines like google, bing and yahoo. You have two targets for your website - the human customer and the computer search engine. Sadly if you can't please the search engine, the humans are unlikely to see your website. Every website has a ranking and the better it is, the higher the chance there is of your site being found in searches. There are several ways you can help this....
1. Write new content
Keep your site fresh - add new content regularly, either as new pages, or products and images, or even a blog post. Search engines regularly re-index your site and notice when there have been changes and you'll get a tick in the ranking list for 'regularly updated'. Try to write between 300-500 words on each page, if you have a lot to say, consider splitting it into several pages.
One of the metrics for a website is the text to HTML ratio. This is basically how many actual human readable words there are in comparison to how much code has been written to make those words appear nicely on the webpage. Ideally you need between 25-70 percent. Some of the 'drag and drop' builders can help you create an attractive site if you are not very technical, but you do pay the price as they typically generate huge amounts of unnecessary code and we have seen sites with a text to HTMl ratio of less than 5!
2. Write a blog post
Blogs are super helpful and are a great way to connect with your customers. You can share info about new services and products you have, any sales or discounts (if you are selling online) or just share your knowledge.
3. Promote your blog post on social media
You can't just write a blog and then sit back and wait for all the new hits to come to your website.... you have to point people to it and that is where social media comes in. On the social media platform you use (on all of them if you want) write a short summary about your new blog - add a picture to it and then share the link to the blog post - the purpose of your blog is not to just inform people about what you do or sell - it has to send people TO your website.
4. Chat about your site
Even if you haven't written a blog, still chat about your site on social media - whether it is on facebook, linkedin, twitter or instagram - just keep the conversation going.
5. Chat to your developer about things you can do to improve your website's ranking
There are some technical things that your developer can help you with:
- Submit your sitemap to google - make their job easier by sending them the index of your site
- Add an SEO module to your site - this can help you hone the keywords for each page and help improve your page rankings on the search engines.
- Check out https://www.seoquake.com/index.html as this is a handy tool that can give you some ideas to improve things on your site too.
- Take a look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights - this can show you some further improvements you can make on your site - although some may need code changes, it can show you where performance could be better.
And Finally.....
You can use paid for marketing - google adwords for example. However, we would recommend at least trying some of the ideas above first, just to make sure you are not wasting your adwords budget because your site is missing something.
You can, of course, always contact us for more info on how to get your site found :)