Do you want your website to show up on the first page of Google? Silly question you might say.
But is your website SEO adequate enough to ensure these results when your prospective customers are searching for your services? Let me put it this way, when your customers take to a Google search with their problem, such as ‘beauty therapist Whangarei’ or ‘best plumber in Whakatane’, will they see your website on the first page?
To give you a better chance to make that happen, your website needs rock-solid SEO. Although most business owners are aware that search engine optimisation is important for online success, most are still baffled by how it all works.
You probably know that your website needs the right keywords to show on the first page of Google, but there’s a lot more to it – meta titles, page slugs, meta-descriptions, headings, image tags, link building, user experience, mobile first indexing, and more. It’s a balance of on-page, off-page SEO, reviews and other technical stuff but bear with us, we’re here to simplify it for you.
Let’s start with the basics, what is SEO? An acronym for Search Engine Optimisation and the only search engine we care about in New Zealand is Google. The process of SEO is improving the quality of your website so the search engines will show your website and lead traffic to it. We’re talking about free, organic, natural search results here. Great SEO is the best way for your website to appear on the first page of Google without a big budget for digital marketing or pay per click advertising.
How does Google search work?
Only Google knows exactly how Google works, but there are some resources available and we’ve found this quick video to be one of the best that explains the basics of their search process. In essence, Google search works like this:
Crawling: Google downloads text, images, and videos from the pages it finds on the internet with automated programs called crawlers, also known as bots or spiders. They go from link to link and feed data back to Google’s servers. When a user speaks or types a query into the search box, the search engine uses algorithms to pull out what it believes to be the most accurate and relevant list of results.
Indexing: Google then analyses the content on every page of the website and stores the information in the Google index which is a large database. That’s where Google keeps track of it all. As you can imagine, this Google Search index is enormous! It holds hundreds of billions of webpages. When Google has indexed a webpage, it’s been added to the database for all the words it contains. Can you rewrite this last sentence as it doesn’t quite make sense to me.
Serving: A search engine results page, or SERP, is the page people see after putting their words or question into the Google search box. When a user searches on Google, it returns information that Google has spotted as being most relevant to the query. Please note: Google never guarantees that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even if your page follows Google’s guidelines and policies for site owners. But there are things we can do in the background that helps Google to notice you.
How we can help you get more visible
SEO is important for every business website, no matter what industry you’re in. There are more than 400 billion websites online these days, and they all want to appear on the first page of Google. If your website currently shows up on page 4 for your key services, or worse, your website SEO needs work. Having a website that doesn’t show up on the first page means that your website is practically invisible, our short attention spans want the solutions as quickly as possible.
While no-one knows exactly what the Google Algorithms are, we do know that our tried and tested strategies will help your website reach the first page of Google. The Monster Creative team is fully up to speed with what you need to get the best results. We specialise in service based businesses and are always up-skilling our team with the latest in SEO best practice standards. This is an evergreen space that is constantly evolving, so you simply can’t do SEO once and then leave it untouched.
When you decide to work with us, our digital analysts will pull up a report that shows the most relevant keywords and phrases, based on what people are looking for online in real-time. Our copywriter will weave those words into unique, creative, and easy to read text for each of your pages, and our developers and techies do the rest. All our websites cover the basics in SEO best practices.
If your service based business is in a very competitive market such as the trades than you’ll need more than the basics to get onto page 1. We’ve got you covered here too and know all the best tricks on how to ramp up your website SEO to get into the prized position. Organic SEO is not an overnight fix, for this you will need to run Google Ads, however a consistent and quality focused approach over 12 months is the best way to go.
Getting your website to show up top in search results without paid ads is considered the holy grail and earns the utmost respect that your competitors can only dream of. If you need instant results and then a combination of paid and organic is the most rock solid plan to achieve fast results and enquiries.
SEO is never a set-and-forget process and should be reviewed often. It can get quite complex, but the Monster approach to SEO is always result-focused. We’ll pull out all the stops to maximise your organic search results, improve your website’s visibility, and drive more of your ideal clients to your (virtual) door.
Book in a call with our Overlord now if you want to know more about SEO or a new website that performs. We’d be more than happy to explain what can be done to take it up a notch and get you to the first page of Google.
