Now is the perfect time to improve your SEO while the lockdown is still going on – check out these top tips from Shake & Speare.
Have you been meaning to get around to fixing up your website for ages? Just keep forgetting to prioritise it, but have suddenly found yourself with a lot more free time? Now is as good a time as any to dip into your bulk-buy box of Yorkshire Tea, make yourself a cuppa, sit down at your computer and figure out what it is that could be improved about your website.
Here at Shake and Speare we know just how important a professional, search engine optimised website is. A website that has undergone such processes allows more customers to find you and provides a greater ease for contacting you. And we specialise in building well optimised websites for trades.
People sometimes tell us ‘Oh, I’m too busy to think about my website right now’, or ‘I don’t really see the point’. However, now that most of us are in lockdown, improving your website might be your perfect ‘rainy day’ project.
Putting effort into improving your website will pay off. With people discovering a majority of their goods and services online right now, ensuring your website isn’t hiding on page eight of Google is in your best interest. Making sure your website is easy to find and use is crucial in this current climate.
So what can you do to improve your website whilst you’re self isolating? We’ve put together a handy list of five questions for you to ask yourself:
1. Are your contact details displayed at the top of your site?
2. Is your site mobile friendly?
3. Do your social media links load your social media pages when clicked on?
4. Have you got separate web pages for the different services you offer?
5. Have you included your pricing structure anywhere?
Are your contact details displayed at the top of your site?
It’s really important that your customer doesn’t have to go digging for your contact details. Having your contact details on your homepage is good, but having your contact details displayed in a banner at the top of your site, no matter where your customer has navigated to is better. Not to be rude about people but… people are ultimately lazy. So, the easier you can make it to contact you, the higher the chance they will.
We recommend you make your phone number and email address into clickable links, instantly connecting you and your customer.
Is your site mobile-friendly?
You probably already know the importance of making sure your site’s mobile-friendly, but we’ll just throw some statistics at you to emphasise the point. In 2019, 52.2% of web traffic came from mobile phones. 80% of all internet users use a smartphone.
Basically, it’s highly likely customers will discover your website whilst using their mobile phone. If your site doesn’t work very well on mobile, they just won’t bother engaging with it.
It is worth loading up your mobile and spending some time flicking through your site. This will allow you to comprehensively check whether everything is loading okay, that your links click through to where they should and that your site fits your phone’s screen.
Do your social media links load your social media pages when clicked on?
Unless your customer is highly motivated to do so, it’s unlikely they will bother to open up a separate app or tab and search for your socials. If you’re putting effort into your social media, you’ll have created a friendly, personable space for your brand – you don’t want your customers to be missing out on that content.
Display links to your social media near your contact information and ensure that when clicked on, your social media pages pop up.
Have you got separate web pages for the different services you offer?
If you have a site that spans multiple pages, don’t just chuck a load of text advertising the different services you offer up on the homepage. Instead, have separate pages for each service that you offer.
The reason for this is simple – say you’re an arborist that offers tree surgery, general garden maintenance and tree removal. Those are the three things that customers are going to be searching for in order to find your services. If you plonk all three search terms onto one page, they’re going to fight it out amongst themselves for Google’s attention. Google ultimately gets confused, isn’t sure what the most important term is and doesn’t display you high up on its results pages.
If these search terms have separate pages, Google will understand what that page is about, that it’s relevant to your potential customer and display it higher up in its search results.
Have you included your pricing structure anywhere?
People may be more motivated to buy if they have an idea of your pricing structure. Consider, if possible, providing your basic pricing scheme. Potential customers may be more likely to get in contact with you if they know, before calling, that you’re within their price range.
If you’re not keen on providing prices, perhaps because your quotes show a fair amount of variability, you could instead provide a ‘quick quotes’ feature. Check out the one we built for . Do you think something like this might make a potential customer more likely to get in contact with you?
Really climbing the ranks of Google
These are great tips to improve the usability of your website, and Google will love them, but they will only have so much of an impact. In order to really climb towards that coveted Page 1 Rank 1 spot you’ll need to put some more complicated work in.
In order to help trades make the most of these unusual times, we’ve massively discounted our SEO packages from £250 to only £99 a month for the next 3 months. There’s absolutely no contract, no minimum sign up period. You’ll get your website completely optimised for SEO, receive a new piece of content for your website each week and we’ll build the authority of your site (so Google loves you more). If you’d like to find out more, drop us a line.
Time to get started
These tips should act as a good starting point for you doing a little website housekeeping. If you’ve worked your way through them and are curious about what else you could be doing to help more people discover you, feel free to get in contact at [email protected] – we love a chat! We’re happy to give your website a free health check and generate a report for you (who doesn’t love a good report?).
