So you’ve finally climbed up the ladder to the top of Google for your target keywords and you have sat patiently by the phone for a week and it has not rang. What do you do now?
1) The Stuff You Should Have Done At The Start –
Use Google’s keyword planner to check how many searches there are a month for the exact keywords that you rank for. Hopefully you won’t be presented with a “0” or “-” but a nice high number.
As a very rough guide divide that number by 4 to estimate how many of those people should be visiting your site. Then typically between 3% and 10% of those visitors should enquire depending on your site. So if you rank first for a term that gets 1,000 searches a month you may get 250 visitors, leading to 7 – 25 enquiries a month. Usually the higher number is for simple e-commerce transactions and the lower number is for more complex service based transactions that require the person to contact you for a price.
2) The Other Thing You Should Have Done At The Start-
Perform a search on Google and check who else comes up on the first page. If the websites that come up aren’t competitor’s then you may have misinterpreted the meaning of your chosen keywords. This is a lot more common than people realise. When you work in a particular industry the vocabulary you use has a very different meaning to you then it does to other people.
Even a search for a common word like “cat” will bring up many different types of site. When I search for it today the results include a manufacturing company and the Centre for Alternative Technology.
Another big error is if the keyword stands for a particular website and is not a generic term i.e. it is actually the name of a competitor then a high majority of people will go straight to the site that they were looking for, skipping past your website in the process. These are called “navigational searches”.
3) How Does My Site Appear Within Google –
I get to test a lot of different ad headlines and ad copy as part of running Google AdWords so I can assure you that the wording of your google listing makes a big difference to the percentage of people that will click through to your site. Your headline (which comes from your page title) should include the keyword that your site appears for. Otherwise people may skim past your listing. Words that match what the user searched for appear in bold so you want as much of your listing to appear in bold as possible.
4) As well as the headline the text that appear underneath is important –
Google gets the final say on what text appears either the meta description form your page or copy from your page that matches the keyword. However you can encourage Google to use your meta description by including the keyword in there too. That way you can write your own ad that makes more sense then random text pulled of the site.
Here is my listing for the term “SEO Wirral”
As you can see the headline matches the search term and it has used my meta description too instead of using an extract from the website content.
5) Is Your Baby Ugly?
Get a second opinion on your website. Is it set up to encourage people to make enquiries. Obvious things to look for are: do the contact details stand out, is there a clear call to action like call now, does it say who you are asking them to call, are you providing the information they need to decide if they want to make an enquiry or not, are there indicators of credibility on your site like testimonials / reviews / accreditations / awards you have won.
6) Is the wording right?
Does it encourage people to contact you? Is it relevant to what the person is searching for? Is there a lot of wording in the site that isn’t relevant to encouraging the visitor to sign up. E.g. having your twitter feed take centre stage probably won’t persuade people to sign up.
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