How do you Rank?

Surely you know your business and industry well, but does your website portray that?  What I mean is that when someone searches for key terms that are known in your industry, does your website come up in the search engine results?

Test out your website

Give it a go! Go to Google or any search engine and type in a few of the popular keywords for your industry, or specific phrases as it relates to your products or services.  Scroll through the first page of results (10 per page are organic, 10 are paid search results), then to the second and third.  Is your website there?  I’ll wait while you test it out.

Did you try it?

Hopefully you gave it a go.  How did you do?  What page of the results was your website located on?  Per a study by Search Engine Watch, a few years back, it was mentioned that average organic click thru rate dropped dramatically after the 1^st ranking.  Yes, you read that right, 1^st ranking, not 1^st page.  The first ranking spot would see an estimated 36% CTR (click thru rate), followed by around 13% for the 2^nd ranking, 10% for the 3^rd ranking and further continues to decrease.  The 10^th ranking spot received around 3% CTR, so if you are sitting on page 2 for organic ranking position 11-20, you are seeing an expected CTR of less than 3%.  How are your odds looking now? Not so great, huh?

Are you shocked?

You should be. Of all of the businesses in your industry, there are only 10 spots on the first page and only half of those are above the fold and you/they are all fighting for that top spot.  It isn’t easy and it won’t happen overnight, but you need to be realistic and realize that you have your work cut out for you.

If you have no idea about how to improve that ranking, you may want to consult a search engine optimizer, such as myself, and get a consultation on how to improve your ranking or save your time by spending a little money each month to have them mess with moving your website up the search engine results ranking.  Remember that your time is valuable and you should be spending your time where it makes the most money.

It takes time

Please note that if you do your homework, and you should, and a SEO marketer guarantees they can get you on page 1 in the #1 spot, you should run!  If someone indicates they can get you there in a month, you should also be running.  SEO will take several months to start to see any movement, but this will also depend on how long your site has been live, what you have already been doing on your website, how many pages you have on your site, what kind of content you already have on your pages, how keyword rich your content is, if you have already done some SEO efforts like link building, working on your meta tags and some various other little things.

See, not so easy now, huh?

It’s not easy, and it does take time, but if you find the right person that you know, like and trust to work on your website, it will be worth it to your business.  Again, your website is meant to be maintained for working order but also for optimization on a monthly basis, not a one and done thing.

If you have a storefront, you have something that those who only have websites don’t have, but your website is still very important to your business because you will definitely have a much farther reach online than you could have with a brick and mortar.

If you don’t think you can afford to optimize your website, then to be brutally honest, maybe you aren’t fully into making your business grow.  They say that you have to spend money to make money, and that still rings true in this instance.  If you spent the money to build a website, or have it built, in the first place, don’t you think the point of it is to be found? It isn’t a one and done type thing.  Imagine your unoptimized website, is similar to that of the phone book or yellow pages without the A-Z or the categories… good luck!

I hope that you have learned something about your website and your business and that I have instilled the importance of having your website work for you, not against you.  Should you want some help with the optimization of your website or want a consultant for your website and how you can Do It Yourself, I offer both of these services and would love to help.  Feel free to contact me with any questions or for more info on how I can help you and your business.

~Kristen

Kristen Day

CEO/Founder of A Visual Business

Kristen is a small business owner and thus dedicated to other small business owners by helping them improve their online presence with search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing and pay per click advertising all of which are necessary 'evils' in the digital marketing sphere but enables small business owners the opportunity to compete with larger companies. When not in the digital arena, you can find her riding her Honda VTX1300 or drinking a margarita.