We charge up to thousands of dollars to give websites the tools they need to get good rankings, but many of those things can be accomplished by a business owner with a little time to work on it. Since business websites are more important as time goes on, if you don’t want to pay for your hits, here are some things you can do yourself to improve your Google rankings.
Googling yourself is the easiest and probably the best way for a “layman” to make a difference in his web stats. I’ll use Besnier Financial as an example. They are an existing, real client of ours that has not had the time to do this, so you will see how it can be done. The company President, Dick Besnier, was a wrestling coach at William & Mary, so he has a bit of a head start as far as the internet goes, but you will see that without some work, that head start is wasted as far as his company is concerned.
So here we go. Google “Besnier Financial” without the quotation marks (the results will be different). First on my list (your results may be a little different) is Dick Besnier – LinkedIn, which is great, LinkedIn is a free business directory, and he already has a listing. (NOTE: Since writing this we have managed to get the Besnier Financial site to the top of this search page… Yay for us!!!!) When you follow the link though, you’ll notice that his company’s WEB ADDRESS is not listed in his profile. Dick should (since he’s already registered) contact LinkedIn and submit his company web address. LinkedIn is at the top of his business’ Google search, so you can see how a link to the website might help.
The second result is his company’s website itself. This is because his web address (besnierfinancial.com) includes the search term. Even if you have to have your webmaster get a new web address, having that address be a common search term for your industry can be CRITICAL. Even better than having your business name in the address would be to have important search terms for your industry included. Remember, people who know your business can find your website. You want people who do NOT know your business to find it with a search engine.
The Google links under that are for va.serviceslisted.com (another free business directory), the Better Business Bureau, HotFrog (another free business directory) and Cortera.com (another free business directory). Of these, HotFrog and the Better Business Bureau do list his website.
So to review, when you Google Besnier Financial (not counting their own site), three of the first five links do not even take you to their website! Think about that for a minute. That is a complete, utter waste of resources.
How do you contact these business directories? Dick Besnier already has an account with LinkedIn (unlike many business directories, LinkedIn’s listings come from the people listed there), so he just accesses his account and adds his company’s web address to his listing.
On the va.serviceslisted.com page, there is no obvious place to change the listing to include the company web address, so you’d have to use the “Contact Us’ link at the bottom of the page, thank them for the listing, and request that they add the web address.
The Cortera.com listing shoes an “Edit Company Profile” link, so you can go through that process. Sometimes when you do that, the company will try to sell you a paid listing, which may or may not be a good investment. Remember, at this point you aren’t looking for the business listing to do anything for you except point Google toward your website as a link. Google LOVES links to your site from other industry related websites.
There are literally HUNDREDS of free business directories out there. Go Go find them!
OK, that’s your first lesson/assignment. Another thing you can do yourself might be to check the online phone books you advertise in, often your website won’t be listed, which is easy to fix. Remember, you need quality links back to your own website, preferably from business related sites or really high traffic sites.
It takes a little work, but it’s work that YOU can do yourself.