When you’re looking for a new product or service, what is the first place that you go?
Unless you’re really into using carrier pigeons, you probably use Google.
We all know how powerful Google has become in determining which products and services we buy. Roughly 3.5 billion searches are made on Google every day, and that traffic increases by 10% every year.
How often do you search for something, whether it be “coffee shops near me” or “best shows to watch on Netflix,” and you choose one of the first results on the Google search page?
If that’s you, you’re not alone — the first five organic results (not paid ads) receive 67.6% of all the clicks!
Now, what does this mean for your business?
It means that if your business isn’t on the first page of Google when someone searches your company (or what your company offers), then you’re at a significant disadvantage. Yes, someone still may find your brand, but you won’t receive the amount of traffic you deserve.
But don’t give up just yet — claiming a spot on the first page of Google results may seem like an impossible feat, especially if you’re just starting out, but there are some key ways you can market your content to grab Google’s attention.
After reading this article, you will understand why it’s important not just to be visible on Google but also to target them specifically with your content marketing strategy. Let’s get into it!
Step #1: Create Amazing Content
In order for people to find your business, you not only need a website, but you also need content.
What qualifies as content? When it comes to marketing, content is information that presents a story, gives valuable information, elicits an emotion, or persuades the reader to buy a product/service. It can take the form of text, video, audio, or images.
Here are examples of content you’ll find on a successful website:
- Well-written, long-form blog posts or articles (above 1900 words)
- High-quality photos (JPEG is preferred for web)
- Podcast player or on-brand music
- Engaging, informative videos and webinars
Why does content like this matter? Well, for starters, it’s how your audience gets to learn about you! It’s what convinces them to take an action, whether that’s investing in your services, getting on the phone with you, or listening to your podcast.
Secondly, Google LOVES high-quality content. It’s designed to search for this type of content and bump up websites that have it. The Googlebot crawls your website, diligently searching for new and updated content, and then registers this in the Google Index. Think of the Google Index as a gigantic library, with thousands and thousands of new books being added every single day. The Googlebot is the librarian, looking through all the new and updated website pages and adding them to the library catalog.
If your website houses pages with little to no content, the Googlebot isn’t going to be super impressed. So get to work on creating content to build your authority, provide value to your audience, and woo that Googlebot!
Or better yet, have a marketing agency do it for you so you can focus on what you do best — creating value and making an impact!
Step #2: Repurpose That Content
It’s not enough to just create content — you have to multiply it!
For example, you can release an incredible YouTube video that gets 1 million views, but if you don’t multiply that video across different channels, then you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. People may watch your video on YouTube, but that’s the only place they’ll see it!
Imagine if that video was on your website, your Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook? So many more people would be able to find it and engage with your brand. Just hear it from our Founder Jim!
[insert Jim’s video about google as your biggest customer]
Here’s another opportunity — you’ve created a blog post that is full of great content, but now it’s time to get some more mileage from it. You can publish the same article on your company website, or you could write an e-mail newsletter about it. This will send that traffic back to your site and give them another opportunity to engage!
When you repurpose content, you make things easier for yourself while getting more face time with Google. Of course, make sure you’re not posting the same blog article verbatim on your website — Google likes repurposed content but not duplicate content, meaning that it can’t be exactly the same. If you post duplicate content to your website, you’ll actually get dinged by Googlebot, which pushes your site further down the search page. Yikes!
Instead, take a podcast episode and turn into into a blog post, or take a video and share it across several platforms. Google will make sure that your audience sees it — that’s its job after all!
Step #3: Improve Your Page Speed
In a world where almost everything is instantaneous, we hate having to wait.
Did you know that the probability of a visitor leaving your site increases by at least 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds? When you get to 5 seconds, that bounce rate increase is 90%, and when you get to 10 seconds, it’s 123%.
Yeah, we really don’t like waiting.
And Google doesn’t like it either. When Google crawls your site, it analyzes your page speed on both desktop and mobile. If it’s slow (over 3 seconds), then you risk over half of your visitors leaving your site and choosing a competitor. Plus, Google will rank you lower than sites that have a faster site speed, so yeah… it’s time to speed things up.
Here’s the great news — here are two tools to help you discover your page speed and improve it if needed!
- Google PageSpeed Insights: Just paste the URL of your website, and this handy tool will give you a score from 1-100 on your page speed, along with suggestions to make it faster!
- Lighthouse: Using Chrome Dev Tools, you can use Lighthouse to analyze your site’s performance, SEO, and page speed!
There are a lot of ways to improve your page speed, including reducing the size of your images, enabling file decompression, decreasing the number of requests to external resources on each page, and reducing redirects. It can get pretty techy here, though, so make sure to partner with a professional to ensure it’s done properly.
Step #4: Invest in Search Engine Optimization
This last step is a crucial one. If you’re not optimizing your site for search engines (specifically, Google), then the other steps are pointless! There’s no point fixing up your content and making it easy to read if Google can’t find it because of an improper title or URL structure.
Here’s what SEO experts can help you with regarding your website and content:
- Identifying content that’s trending or relevant to your audience
- Optimizing titles for searchability
- Crafting meta descriptions (the HTML tags that describe the content of your website)
- Inserting trending keywords in the content
- Improving site performance, including speed, user experience, and structure
- Leveraging backlinks to boost your authority
- And so much more!
Think of an SEO expert as your personal Google liaison — they know what Google wants to see, and they come to you with an arsenal of tools to help your content rank higher and higher. They’ll also tailor their approach based on what kind of business you run and what your unique goals are.
Sounds incredible, right? And the best part is, you can do all of this while staying true to your brand messaging, design, and goals! You might not be selling your product to Google specifically, but Google is selling your product to your prospective clients. Make Google happy, make your customers happy, and make yourself happy. It’s a win-win-win.