Create great content
In Google’s own words, it’s important to “provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do.”
This clearly illustrates that Google wants website owners to focus on quality content when creating their website. To create great content, think about what questions your potential customers have, and create clear, authoritative content that addresses those FAQs.
It also helps to perform keyword research to see what kind of terms your customers are searching for online. By creating quality content around these popular terms, it gives your website a chance to appear in search results.
How you display your content is important as well. Easy-to-use navigation bars and internal linking can help users and search engines easily find the answers they’re looking for. If you’re planning on writing many articles, consider organizing those in a blog. Or, if you plan to add FAQs to your website, place those on an easy-to-find FAQ page.
Secure your site
Google takes security seriously. They want users to have a safe browsing experience using their search engine and favor websites that have strong security precautions in place. The backbone of website security is having an SSL (secure sockets layer). In fact, Google shows a warning to searchers when they try to visit a website without this secure technology. Even if you have great content, if you have an unsecured website, Google will likely not show your website in search results.
Display trust icons
For many potential customers, their first impression of your business will be when they land on the homepage of your website. As mentioned in our first point, it’s important to have quality content on your homepage, so users will quickly know what your business does and what your mission is all about. Your homepage content should also show potential customers that you’re a trustworthy business. One easy way to do this is by utilizing trust icons.
Trust icons can include things, like the logos of clients you’ve worked for in the past, a badge from an association you belong to or a badge that displays your online reviews (like Top Rated Local).
This is another example of social proof at work. If you’ve worked with high-caliber clients, have met the requirements to join a prestigious business association or have great online reviews, highlight those achievements on your website. Seeing these kinds of trust icons will signal to users that you are a professional business with industry experience.
Get links from websites
Another way Google determines online authority is by looking at what other websites link back to your website. Think of a link as a reference, or a recommendation — if high-quality websites link back to your website, Google will see this as a positive recommendation. However, if your links come from low-quality sources, they won’t be as beneficial.
There are a few different ways to get these kinds of quality links:
- Create great content: Going back to our first point, if you publish quality, relevant content, chances are, other websites will want to link to that content. Or, people will share the content on social media. This is another way having great website content can help grow your online presence.
- Ask for links back from associations: If you’re part of a local or national association or group, ask for a link back from any online directories they may have.
- Build profiles on local directories: Create up-to-date local profiles on online directories, such as Google Business Profile, YellowPages, Top Rated Local® and Bing Places. Not only is this important for overall SEO and online authority, but these directories often feature a website field where you can enter your URL, which creates more backlinks to your site.
Overall, the more inbound links to your site from other trustworthy sources, the more likely Google will recognize you as trustworthy in return.
Embrace social proof
Social proof is based on the idea of normative social influence, which states that people will conform in order to be liked by, similar to, or accepted by the influencer (or society). Online, one of the most important ways Google can determine social proof and authority is by looking at online reviews.
This is especially true for local businesses. When deciding what businesses to show in the Maps results, Google looks at three things: distance, relevance and prominence. Prominence takes online reviews into account, and as Google says, “High-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility and increase the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your location.”
Having a review generation and management strategy can help you gather more reviews and respond to new reviews in a timely manner. In turn, more positive reviews can improve your local reputation and give your business a competitive advantage in local search results.
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If you have questions or concerns about your online presence give Stratedia a call at 860.415.0430 or visit us online at stratedia.com. We‘re ranked #1 as the top seo company CT by Clutch.co! Let Stratedia help you, GET TO THE TOP!
