When is a Website Useless?
What Not to Do
We have been working with NZ Used Appliances. When you go to their website, it is available to be claimed. Obviously this doesn’t help much. When people try to go to the website they don’t know if they are out of business or if there is a technical glitch.
What the story is, is that they paid someone to create and run the website for them. They got no leads from it and stopped paying them. Just having a website is not enough. It is like putting out an Open sign on a store that no one ever drives past. No one will know it is there.
What They Did Right
They created a Google My Business page so that they could show up on the map in searches. Many people make a mistake here by doing the bare minimum. Google gives brownie points for filling out the information as completely as possible. The listing will rank higher that way. NZ did a pretty good job filling out their listing.
What to Do Better
For the map listing, getting more citations is better. A citation is where another website lists your name, address, and phone number. This could be a directory, a social media site and other possibilities.
The next thing is content. Pictures are great for customers to see what you are selling or doing but search engines like Google and Bing rely on words to figure out what a website is about. The reason so many Wikipedia articles rank so high is that they have a lot of content and are very authoritative. The more helpful information and pages you provide the better. Don’t just copy content. Duplicate content is not looked upon favorably and can get you listing pushed down in the listings.
The other key item is the number of websites linking to yours. Why is that important? It is kind of like a popularity contest. If someone doesn’t like your website, they are unlikely to put a link to your website from theirs. So the more websites that link to your website, the more likely that people find your website worthwhile. Search engines want to give people a good search experience so more links usually means higher rankings.
However, not all links are created equal. A brand new website with no history linking to you will not have much power to help you. However, Wikipedia, NBC, NY Times or a similar website linking to yours will have a huge effect. It can have the same effect as links from tens or hundreds of small websites without much power.
Social Media and Advertising
The above was about getting a website seen in organic rankings. However, there are also strategies for getting seen on the various social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. That is for another article.
It is also possible to advertise on Google, Bing, Facebook and others. There are a number of strategies to accomplish this and they vary depending on where you are advertising, what you are advertising and to whom. It is possible to sink a lot of money into online advertising very quickly but it is also possible to make a lot of money if you know what you are doing. Once again, that is a whole other article or more likely articles.