Comprehensive web development, e-commerce & digital marketing services in Fife, Scotland.

3 key things to start work on before the website gets built.

Core Services

Google indexes pages, not sites. If you stick all your services on a page titled "services" you dilute the chances of ever being found on google for any of them.  You need a page for each core service, and you need to write enough text about each of the services to let google know that you know what you're talking about.  Bullet points are not going to help you get a decent rank over a competitor who has taken the time to write about various aspects of a product or service in an engaging and informative way.  You need to demonstrate authority on that topic - at least 250 words. At least!

I bang on about this, because google changed their algorithm back in May 2011 (nicknamed the 'panda' update after the guy who did a lot of work on the natural language recognition techniques), and lots of people with poor quality content lost their search engine rankings and complained about it.

When they complained, google came back and wrote this blog post about the changes.  When people ask me about what they should write on their site about their services, I direct them there - reading this post is about as close as 'straight from the horses mouth' as you're going to get with google.  They're looking for high quality sites, and they provide a checklist of what they believe constitutes a high quality site. Go and have a read and see if you can answer yes to each of the points on the list for your site.

Keywords

There's a lot of confusion about online keywords.  People know that they're supposed to have them, but don't have a clue what to do with them.

That's fine though - you do need to have target keywords, because you need to measure your success on google rankings for given phrases.

You need to choose the target keywords based on their relevancy to your services or products and the competition for them online.  This google keyword tool is invaluable for giving you insight into those statistics. Type in your service and location, choose "exact" in the left column, make sure the location is correct for the country you want search information for (UK most of the time for me) and hit search.  The 'local monthly searches' column tells you the average monthly searches carried out for each of the specific "exact" terms on the left.

Look at the figures. I know the short phrases with big numbers look appealling. Unfortunately, they're competitive as hell and big brands have probably been battling over them and spending blue chip marketing budgets on ranking for them for years.  Go for relevancy, and stay away from broad keywords.  Try your best to think of those figures in terms of monthly leads, rather than comparative statistics.  Longer, more descriptive keywords generally result in higher quality, better qualified traffic to your site, and a healthier bounce rate.

Now you've got your target keywords, use them as a page title and then write about the subject without forcing yourself to jam unnatural phrases into the content.  In fact, once you've decided the page topic (be it a service or product), just go and write about it. One of the biggest mistakes you can make here is to spam a bucketload of keywords into an unreadable mess.  Even if that did work to get you a google ranking, who's going to actually get in touch with you once they read that incomprehensible stuff on your site?

That may have once worked as a ranking technique, but no more.  Just write good quality, engaging and relevant content, and let google's amazingly advanced natural language and latent semantic analysis algorithms figure out that, yes, you  are an expert on this topic, and yes people should know that you're the go-to person on this page topic.

(I'm not saying this is perfect yet, and there are a few structural nudges we can add to ensure that google understands what the core topic is, but this is the only strategy to follow if you want to build your sites rank and authority over the long-term).

Regular Updates

Get a blog or a news section sorted out, and update it regularly.
Update it with work you've done, descriptions, photos, links.  Industry news, opinions or developments. Do this as often as you can and you'll reap the benefits.  

First, google sees that your site is fresh, always has some new , relevant information on it, and considers it more valuable to potential readers than stagnating brochure sites that haven't been updated in years.

Secondly, over time you build up content, a library of blog posts or news items that start to become traffic generators for long-tail phrases.  These are the type of long, detailed phrase a lot of people type into google, which you're unlikely to attract traffic for unless you've written something relevant.  So - because you blogged about the time you fixed a blue widget up a tree, you get the traffic for the next person searching for someone to fix their blue widget up a tree.

Third - it shows your business is alive and functioning, interesting and active - more than just a collection of services or products.

This stuff becomes a massive competitive advantage very quickly - just don't start a blog, post in it twice and let it rot - nothing says "no longer trading" than a blog or news page that hasn't been updated in a year.

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