10+ years ago – you “searched the web.” Today – most people “google” things.
For you English majors – like it or not – Google is now a verb. You don’t hear anyone say they “binged it” or “yahoo’d it.” But people say they “googled it” because that is by far the most popular search engine around today. eBizMBA Rank ranks the top 15 search engines – and to little surprise – Google is clearly ahead of the competition – to the tune of 800 million more estimated unique monthly visitors than Bing.
So when your customers’ google your service or product offerings – where do you show up on Google? It ultimately depends on the keywords you’re using and how often you modify them to keep your content fresh and with the latest key phrases people search for. Or shall I say ‘the latest key phrases people google for.’
Want to improve your rank within Google search rankings?
First – analyze your web traffic. I personally prefer Google Analytics given the level of detail I can dive into on where the traffic came from. But you want to see what keywords people are using to locate you today. If it ain’t broke – don’t fix it.
Second – figure out which keywords to use. You want to use keyword tools to determine what keywords match your content. These services vary from paid to free – but I use the Google Adwords tool to see which keywords are being used, how much competition there is for that keyword, and what the global and local hits are for that keyword. Hint: choose keywords with low competition with high hits.
Third – make sure the content, URL, title tag, and keywords match. From there, Google bots then analyze your links, determine relevancy and rank link authority, then rank your site. Combined with your web traffic – it’s an algorithm (probably written by one of the really smart kids you went to high school with) that determines rank of page 1, 2, etc.
Fourth – go back to the first step. Has your traffic increased? If so – have the sources or keywords of your traffic changed? Repeat process.
As people change, so do the search terms. In fact, I’ve seen the top search term for marketing change drastically by nearly 500,000 hits in one week. So I’d suggest a weekly check of this.
So at the very least – perform this task monthly, if not weekly.
