Ignore Your Website and it will Go Away!

My Website Looks Really Good!

Okay, so you were trying to save money when you started your business. Your friend's wife does websites in her spare time using Weebly or Moonfruit, so you asked her to design yours, and it looks pretty good. It has a home page with some nice motion graphics, an "About Us" page, a page showing the services you provide, and a "Contact Us" page. You've even gotten a few compliments on it from friends.

So How Come I'm Not Getting Any Calls?

Now that you've been in business for a while, you notice that you get calls from referrals and a few from that expensive Yellow Pages ad, but hardly any from people who found you through your website. Where's the so-called magic of the world wide web? You know your site can be found because when you type the name of your business in the search bar of Google, it shows up right there on page one. Heck, you submitted the URL to Google yourself!

Google Beauty is More than Skin Deep

Assuming your site is at least somewhat appealing to your potential audience, chances are you’re not appearing on or near the first page of Google results. That’s because beauty (or popularity, actually) is more than skin deep for Google purposes. There’s a whole range of things going on that aren’t readily apparent to the casual viewer of your website. Some of these things are page titles, meta tags, headers, keyword rich text, clear syntactically correct html, robust content, and the number of other sites that link back to yours.

Robots are Searching for You as We Speak

The search engines like Google and Yahoo! have automatic software systems sometimes called “search engine robots” or “spiders” that constantly patrol the web, looking for information that tells them how popular a website is. All those things we mentioned above are important. So if your competitor’s website is equal to yours in almost every way, but their page titles are more effective, their site will appear above yours in the Google search results. If enough other sites have better SEO features than yours, your site might not appear until several pages down.

Page Two is Like Outer Space

Putting aside the pride you justifiably feel if your site appears on Google search results at all, think about the last time you used Google to find something. Did you even bother to look past the first page of results? What if you found something even somewhat relevant to your search on page one? You probably clicked on that link and never bothered to return to your search results. That’s what’s happening to your site. Very few people who are looking for your product or service are going to get past page one, and not every one who sees the listing for your site is going to click on it.

Page One is Where You Need to Be

One study found that 90% of searchers click on one of the listings on the first page, and 14% of searchers click on the #1 result! That means you should try everything in your power to get on page one, and if possible, at or near #1 on the first page. The bad news is that (1) everybody wants their website to be at number one, and (2) it takes a series of things done right to get there.
There is some good news, however, and the good news is that there are people (like SEO Ann Arbor) who know how to get your site moving toward page one, and perhaps on page one. Those people are trustworthy, they’re hard-working, and they’re real people who live and work in the Ann Arbor area. They’ve got a track record of success, and they are constantly studying the science of SEO to make sure their methods are at the cutting edge. Best of all, you can call them and get a free initial evaluation of your website! Don’t wait! If your website isn’t on page one of Google, contact SEO Ann Arbor today!