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The 2nd Page Of Google Effect – Part 1 – 13/12/2018

The way that Forest Traders works has changed dramatically over its 6 years to fall in line with how society moves with their use of technology and their needs. Only 10 years ago we were all relying on big yellow books for all of the phone numbers we needed; fast forward those years and those books are no longer even in production. It‘s exciting to see how we advance and embrace technological improvements to our lives but at the same time, it‘s scary to see just how much is changing. As a business, it‘s even harder to try to keep up!

I have come across a lot of business owners who have been running successful companies for years who don‘t want a bar of anything that is online or to do with social Media. That works if you have an amazing client base and have a proven way of bringing in new business through other marketing methods but long term, will it continue to be sustainable as the “young generation” turn into the “old”? Most businesses have and need to therefore begin to embrace technology in some way for their marketing.

For all of us who have utilised Google over the last few years, there is no escape from the knowledge that if you‘re not on page 1 of Google, you might as well not be on the internet. According to https://digitalsynopsis.com “The very first organic result on the first search engine results page (SERP) sees about 32.5% of overall of search traffic in terms of clicks. The 2nd domain sees 17.6%, while the 7th only sees 3.5%.” That‘s a scary thought; you might have paid all this money for this amazing website but if it‘s not on the first page, it might not even be visible to your potential customers.

There are plenty of things you can do to help yourself (for free). We‘ve compiled a list of a few ideas below for you;

Keep your website updated – the worst thing you can do is not touch it! You might have nothing new to add but find something – make some text changes, check whether your services are still correct, have you added anything/stopped offering something? Are your contact details correct? Have you used a recent ad that you can upload to the site to show something new? Have you adapted it to suit seasonal events (such as Christmas)?

Blog – if this doesn‘t come naturally then it may well sound like a nightmare but it doesn‘t have to be. If you offer a service, talk about pros/cons to situations, if you offer a product, talk about how it would be beneficial to the user or hows best they can use it. Top 10‘s are another great way of writing blogs. Blogging is all about you showcasing your knowledge in your area of work to help solidify confidence in your work too. Remember to aim for a minimum of 300 words and the golden rule is DON‘T HAVE YOUR BLOG ON MULTIPLE SITES! Google does not like duplicate content and if caught, the penalisation to your own site as well as the host of the other site is not worth it.

Join social media platforms – this could be one, it could be them all. Whatever you do, don‘t start any unless you can see using it long term. You‘ll need to allocate time (and/or a member of staff) to regularly keep it/them updated. Aim for a minimum of 3 times a week (more is even better) and make sure you mix posts for engagement (asking questions, talking about something relevant) with your selling posts (links to websites, showcasing of products/services).

Add live feeds onto your site from your social media platforms. This will help keep the site looking like it is being updated to Google slightly – it isn‘t as good as actually updating the site but it all helps!

If you‘re sending out newsletters to your client base, have a new page where you upload them onto the site for people to read – everyone loves reading about the latest news!

If you win an award or have a new affiliation, update this on your site – people love to see who you‘re connected with.

Just remember, something is always better than nothing!

Part 2 of our blog discussing how tagging on social media groups can also suffer the 2nd page of Google effect will be released shortly.