So, you’ve been though your website with a fine tooth comb, optimised key meta descriptions, page titles and content for top keywords, because you want to climb search engine rankings. But your website is still failing to rank well? You’ve spent all this time on your lovely website and still to no avail in search results. We’ve all been there. Its frustrating and disappointing.
It may be that you started to see some improvement, but then saw a decrease in rankings or a plateau, these things can happen in search. But there are things you can do and there are other solutions for these issues. So read on if any of the above seems familiar.
Give it Time
Time is our foe when it comes to digital marketing, especially if you’ve been focusing on organic SEO and optimising your website. It will take some time for Google’s bots to come and crawl your site and results to be achieved. Just give it time, anything from 2 weeks to 2 months is the timeframe to start seeing results.
Google Analytics
Are you using Google Analytics? Analytics is your first checkpoint, you can find out what’s happening on your website such as drop off points, bounce rates and much more by using this tool.
Link Google Search Console to Google Analytics
Allowing Google Analytics and Search Console to link together, means that you can enable additional SEO reports in your Google Analytics account. These reports are found at: admin>property settings> search console. Within this section you can find detailed reports on:
- Search Queries
- Landing Pages
- Geographical Summary
- Devices
(You will need full property management permissions, and a verified property in Search Console to be able to do this). If you are able to get these reports, you can analyse a lot about who your audience are and how they are finding your website.
What these reports can tell you:
Look for popular keywords people are using and finding your website with. Once you know them, optimise your website for these keywords.
Landing pages with a good click through rate. These pages can be easily run through an on-page optimization process that will improve their rankings.
Look for pages with high bounce rates; this will indicate that the page isn’t relevant to the majority of users, or that you could add an additional angle to extend user journey, like a link to more relevant content on the topic etc.
What the countries of your organic visitors and who your target market is.
Have Clear, Defined Goals
The key to success online is having clear and defined goals and setting up ways to track and measure these goals. It is not enough to have a lovely website, you need to be able to change and optimise your user’s journey:
Decide on answers to these questions:
– What do you want people to do on your website?
– What actions do you want them to take (purchase, time on page, donation, social media share etc.)
– What secondary actions do you want them to take (E mail Sign up, Social media Follow, link click etc.)
Once you know what these are you can review and optimise your user journey and set up measures to track conversions at each point.
Google Tag Manager
Once you know what your goals are, the next step is tracking them. This can be done with Google Analytics, but the best way to track goals is using Google Tag Manager on top of the Analytics platform:
How standard Google Analytics tracking code works:
Add the Google Analytics code to your website, enabling Google Analytics tracking and then add your own goals to the Analytics interface as normal.
How Google Tag Manager integration works:
Google Tag Manager is a tag* management system that allows quick and easy updates to tags and code snippets on websites and mobile apps, such as those intended for traffic and marketing optimisation.
Set up a Tag Manager container, which is like an account with Google Tag Manager. From here, add the Tag Manager container code to the website (similar to adding the standard Google Analytics code), this enables Google Analytics tracking and all data can be viewed as normal in Google Analytics.
When using the Google Tag Manager integration, you are able to add tags enabling a much wider range of tracking on site, without any technical intervention. This is highly useful for example, if you want to track phone link clicks on mobile devices, which cannot be done with standard Google Analytics code.
* A tag is a snippet of code that sends information to a third party, such as Google.
Google Webmasters/ Google Search Console
If you haven’t set up Google Webmasters/ Search Console, you need to do this now, here and set this up. Although you don’t need to sign up for your website to be indexed in Google’s search results, this is a free service designed to help you maintain the search presence of your website.
- From here you can submit a sitemap, which helps Google index your website.
- Within Search Console you can specify content you don’t want indexed.
- Monitor and resolve malware and spam issues.
- View search queries that actually caused your website to appear in search results.
- View mobile stats and review performance.
Google/ Bing Ads
Another way you can kick start your online strategy is to use paid advertising; you can do this on both Google (AdWords) and Bing (Bing Ads). This obviously is costlier than organic search, but there are some major benefits that shouldn’t be discounted.
- Ads have immediate effect.
- You can ensure that you rank for keywords you aren’t ranking organically for,
- and you can make sure they you are competing with key competitors in the areas that you need to.
You will also find that there are vouchers available to new AdWords and Bing customers that can really help you run a trial phase with the advertising platforms.