Three things you can do to improve your website's visibility

by Suzy Stanton, founder of Wish Freelance Writing

When it comes to showing up online, we often only think about social media. But if your website isn’t visible and being seen by the people you want to do business with, you’re leaving money on the table. 

A lot of us spend time and money creating a wonderful website that showcases our products or services, but don’t spend time making sure the foundations are right. Without strong foundations, it won’t attract the right people and bring in new leads and sales.

Search Engines Optimisation (SEO) are words that make a lot of small business owners come out in a cold sweat. Until a few years ago, I was the same.

 I’m Suzy, a copywriter and the editor of a digital adoption and parenting magazine. When I launched it, I was convinced that because the articles were amazing and the website looked great, I’d have huge numbers of people reading the articles.

Guess what?

I didn’t.

For a long time, I had no idea why. 

 And then I found out about SEO. But like many small business owners, rather than getting to work on it, I buried my head in the sand because I thought it was too complicated. Once I found the right support and learned that website visibility and SEO doesn’t have to be complicated or time consuming, I started to see the power of it as the readership of the magazine grew. It’s now read by over 2000 people every month.

What is SEO anyway?

 SEO (which is basically getting your website in shape so that it’s picked up by search engines and  shown to the people you want to do business with) isn’t the most exciting of things to talk about if we stick to the traditional language and thought processes of words like “disavow” and “crawling”. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I want to shake things up and add a bit of sparkle to how you think about it to help you want to take action.

The two fundamental parts of it are using the right words and then filling your website with content and copy that showcases your knowledge and expertise. It’s actually a bit like dating. When you want to attract your ideal partner, you dress up in your best outfit, or put on your sparkly heels, or bright red lipstick. Whatever it is that makes you feel amazing. And then once you’ve found the perfect someone you think will be the perfect partner, you start to build a lasting relationship with them by getting to know each other through conversations and spending time together. 

 It's the same with your website. Some of the words you use are your sparkly heels or red lipstick which attract the attention of search engines. Once they’ve found your site, search engines look at the quality of your content to see whether it should be shown to the people looking for the solution to a problem you can help them with. That’s where your content helps you build a relationship with the people you want to work with, like your personality which starts to shine through during those all-important first few dates.

Three things you can do today to improve website visibility

Rather than looking at the big picture, break down improving your website’s visibility into manageable chunks. Little and often will help you make progress towards improving your site’s visibility so that it’s shining brightly and attracts the right people. 

Keywords

Spend five minutes writing a list of the first 10 things that come to your mind when you think about your business. What is it that you do? What are your services or products? Who are they for? Then spend 15 minutes typing some of those words into search engines. What type of websites appear in the top three or four results? Click on them and make sure they’re in your field. 

If you’re using Google, scroll down to the “People also ask” section as that shows you other search terms people are typing in when they’re looking for what you do. 

Once you’ve done that, spend another 15 minutes making sure those keywords and phrases are in your headings, tagline (the line underneath your site title which might not show when your website is live), and page titles.

Search button

One of the things search engines look at when they’re considering how much authority and credibility to give a site which then affects how high up in search results they appear, is how long users stay on the site. 

If users land on a site and then bounce off again within a few seconds, that suggest to search engines that there isn’t anything worth reading and so they’ll put that site towards the bottom of the results. Therefore, the longer users stay on your site, the better and one way of doing this is to make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for. A search button does that. It helps users navigate around your site, finding all of the posts and pages that relate to the topic they’re looking for.

If you don’t have a search button, spend 15 minutes researching how to add it.

Website visibility: Content

If you’ve already got a blog section on your site, pick a couple of posts and spend 20 minutes updating and republishing them. This helps to show your website is up-to-date and open for business and it also gets new eyes on your content. 

Remove references to specific dates, check all of the links still work and if they don’t, remove them, if they’re on the short side (600 words or more is best) add in a couple of relevant paragraphs. 

If you don’t have a blog section, spend 30 minutes researching how to add it and planning three posts you could write, ideally one being about you sharing things like how you got to where you are, what you love about what you sell, your favourite way to relax and things like that. 

Despite what you may have heard, blog posts are here to stay and are a key factor in determining how high in search results your website appears. Regular, well-written posts that are engaging and add value will show search engines your site is open for business and that you know what you’re talking about.

Blog posts are also one of the best ways of helping potential new clients build the know, like, trust factor which is so important when it comes to building a relationship with them.

Join The SEO Club

Do you want to learn how to improve your website’s visibility so that it attracts more of the right people? Join The SEO Club, my free weekly newsletter that’s packed full of tips and chat with the odd bit of dating banter thrown in too. When you subscribe, you’ll get a free download “Start Selling With SEO” to help you get started.

If you’re looking for some support to improve your website’s visibility whether that’s learning the skills yourself or a service that does it for you, have a look at how I can help. My website has all the details about the ways I can help from my Website Visibility Foundations course to a Mini SEO Audit and Blog Packages.