It's surprising a lot of businesses still don't have a website and those that do often struggle to get people to visit it.
It's not your fault you're struggling with SEO and traffic - there are just too many moving parts in the digital marketing world and it's hard to keep up! With the way Google is changing its algorithm on how websites are being ranked, it can be overwhelming for a small business to establish a strong digital presence.
Hungry Ram is a simple solution for small business owners looking for their first or next website. We aim to provide valuable information for your business to succeed. Read on to find out how you can improve your website!
Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Every business should have a responsive website by now and it's obvious why it's so important to have a responsive web design. With the way that the world is going, everything is on the go and having your website accessible through the phone is important to how your customers view your business. There's a good chance that you're losing customers because your website is not responsive. That means they're not willing to take the time to navigate a difficult website to learn more about your business - which is bad news for business growth!
Use this tool by Google to see if your website is responsive: Mobile Friendly Test
Keep in mind this tool doesn't guarantee an accurate result. So it's always best to ask a professional if you're unsure.
There are tons of benefits to having your website look good on every screen size. Responsive designs load faster than traditional websites because less code is being used to output how your site detects a screen size. If you want to rank your site past your competitors, you need to look into getting a responsive website built out as soon as possible.
It's likely that if your site is not mobile responsive, you need to find a new theme that is responsive or talk to a developer to create a new responsive design with your own branding.
Make Sure Your Site Has a Sitemap
Do you want to make sure Google can find all your pages on the website? Or control the pages that Google sees? You might be wondering why wouldn't I just have Google crawl my entire website for all my pages. This can be bad because you don't want Google to be crawling sites that you're not looking to index, this can be pages like your admin page, 404 page, or even a thank you page. It's best to tell Google to crawl websites with valuable content.
Having a sitemap makes it easier for search engines (not just Google) to crawl your website. That way they don't miss anything when you have your website launched. Not having a sitemap can potentially hurt your SEO.
Most website providers generate sitemaps by default now and will automatically add in new links every time a new page is created. However, publishing a new post or page and having it on the sitemap doesn't mean the new page will be seen. So we need to tell Google to recrawl the sitemap for new pages that were created.
Submitting Your Sitemap to Google
There are several ways to submit your sitemap to Google.
- The Search Console
- Pinging Google
If you're unfamiliar with the Search Console, it's important for your website to have this tool. This will watch the performance of your website and find out backlinking and more! Go through the steps of configuring Search Console by adding in the domain name and verifying ownership. Click on Sitemap from the left menu and entire in the URL of the sitemap, then submit it.
The second option is to Ping Google using the link below.
https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml
Once you enter this in the address bar, just hit enter and it'll be submitted.
These are just the simplest way to submitting a sitemap. There are more complicated ways done through APIs but this post is best suited for someone that won't need API access.
Updating and Adding Engaging, Valuable Content
Writing relevant content that is related to your business will help your SEO. Making sure that the content is relevant to what people are searching for will help tremendously. For example, if you own a business selling bikes. It would be best to write content about biking events and where the best spots to ride would be. Anyone searching "best places to ride bikes", your post will now have the potential to be listed as a result, putting your website in the user's eye and eventually ranking you above your competitors.
Writing engaging, valuable content is not easy work. Most business owners who have a sudden interest in starting a blog can get burnt out fairly quickly and run out of ideas. Hungry Ram has been helping businesses keep their website relevant by bringing in more targeted traffic through our SEO services which include blog writing. Want us to publish a few blog posts to see if we can write the perfect content for your business? Contact us and we'll help you get the traffic you need!
Take Advantage of Your Social Media Presence
We know how important it is to be active on social media. This is the age of growing connections through social media and a lot of business owners are not taking advantage of growing their audience. Our follower count isn't huge but it's the quality of your followers that matters. Being active on social media and showing your business and the process of your business has worked for us, so why not give it a try! The commitment is the hard part.
Social platforms like TikTok and Instagram are powerful for growing your audience for your business. To find out how businesses are succeeding, check out certain hashtags that relate to your business. For example, you can search #realestate or #realtors.
Want to be more specific and find out how your local competitors are doing? Let's give the hashtag a more specific keyword. Let's go with #realtorincalifornia, or #losangelesrealestate. Observe other accounts and see how they're running their account. The type of designs and posts they're creating. This is all competitive analysis and a part of building a strong business.
Get your website seen!
A website is just the basic foundation of your online presence for your business. And we see a very high percentage of business owners stop at the website. What makes a website valuable if no one knows about it?
We focused this post on providing value on how you can get your website seen by a larger audience. It's meant to guide you on how to properly cater to your visitor's experience through a responsive design, get your website seen by search engines, and utilizing free advertising of your website through social media posts.
Hungry Ram has utilized all of these methods and has seen amazing results and always inform our clients to do the same after we launch their website. We understand as business owners time is valuable. This is why we started helping our clients create engaging content and ensuring everything is seen by robots and humans.
SEO is a long-term game. It's always best to go into this with low expectations for the first few months. But after pushing out valuable content consistently, we'll be able to focus on organic traffic, which is a lot more valuable than paying for visitors.
Contact our team at Hungry Ram for help with getting your website seen!