How to Get Your Business on Search Engines

The main way visitors find their way to your website is through searching for the types of products and services you provide, and clicking on a link on the search engine’s results page. If you’re not appearing on these search engine pages, prospective customers just aren’t going to be able to find you. With Google being the biggest search engine on the market, that’s the place where all businesses want to be found.

Getting your site listed on Google is the best way to improve traffic to your website. There are multiple ways of driving more traffic to your website, and it should be thought of as an ongoing process rather than you do once and forget about. This process of boosting your site’s visibility is called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO.

Organic Search

Organic searching is when people type the product they are looking for into Google without knowing the name of a particular business. They may type, for example, “jewellery shops in Brighton” or “accountants in Cardiff”. These sorts of searches account for more than half of all web traffic, so ensuring that your website is displayed if you are an accountant in Cardiff is critical.

There are a few ways of getting your website listed on Google. The easiest – and least effective – way, is doing nothing in the hope that the Google software will stumble across your site online. The Googlebot is the company’s automatic indexing software, which will scan the internet looking at new sites to decide what’s worth adding to the search engine. It’s also a good idea to use the Google My Business portal, which allows you to tell Google the basic information about your business such as the market you operate in, your address, telephone number and operating hours. These basic listings are free, and there’s no requirement to purchase the additional advertising and SEO services which Google offers if you don’t want to.

Ongoing SEO

There is lots more you can do to improve your site’s SEO, and the amount of time and effort you wish to invest into this will depend on the size of your business and your marketing budget. The basic steps all small businesses should be taking are to keep your website up to date with your products and services, and to perhaps set up a blog to communicate news or product launches to customers. Here at 118businesdirectory.co.uk we can help with your SEO if you don’t feel you have the expertise for the project.

Directory Listings

Another great way of raising the profile of your business without spending huge sums on digital marketing is to take advantage of free listings in business directories. Start by setting up free listings in the household names like Yell, 118businesdirectory.co.uk, Bing or LinkedIn, and then start to look for specifically targeted directories for your type of business or local geographic area. Listings will also link back to your website, and these types of credible links can also help boost your site up the rankings.