How To See Your Website On Radar

I bet your website is not as visible as you think.  Chances are, you’re not on the radar.  No radar, less revenue and brand awareness.  You have five seconds to hold the attention of a site visitor.  If you don’t within five seconds, they are gone and may never come back.

If you type in your business name on Google and it comes up on the first page, most businesses think they’re fine.  Think twice.  The customer you’ve never met has no idea you exist, let alone what your company name is.  They search for keywords not company names.  They search to match the conversation going on in their head.  That conversation is often far different than the conversation going on in your head.

Here’s a good test.  If you want to think outside of the Google box, think Alexa.  Alexa is a ranking site that measures both the global and domestic ranking of your website with all of the other existing websites.  In 2010, my site had over six million sites (world-wide), ahead of it and roughly three million sites, (domestic U.S.), ahead of it.  Now, my global rank is 477,434 and my domestic U.S. rank is 73,946.  Not a bad improvement over a three year span.  There are far less sites ahead of me.  Stronger radar signal.  More revenue.

Here’s how you can do this:

• Change your site to WordPress and use the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast for both your pages and posts.
• Include an integrated blog into your website and post two to four times per month.
• Submit a sitemap using Attraca.com at least once per month.  It’s free.
• Run a consistent Google Adwords campaign.
• Use the keywords learned from Adwords in your website page copy.
• Use a cache program so your site loads faster.  Google ranks speed.
• Go to webpagetest.org to see your speed grade.
• Use strong external and internal links to and from your website.
• Use E-mail marketing & social media to direct traffic back to your site.
• Monitor your site traffic through analytic programs like AWSTATS, Alexa, and Google Analytics.
• Keep your site simple.  Very simple.  Reduce your text by at least 50%.  Reduce more.
• Use a heatmap like Crazyegg to track exactly what people do and where they click when navigating your site.
• Attractive does not mean effective.  So many websites are focused on the color, design, logo, and pictures that they forget the importance of their message and usability factors.
• Once the preceding best practices are applied, hire a good SEO company.  However, be careful with SEO services–there’s lots of “snake oil” SEO companies.  If you need a referral, let me know.
• Keep failing, learning, and tweaking.

A good website is hard work.  Keep working…

Stuart Atkins