Can your future customers find you?

Connecting with potential customers and the community is vital for the success of many organisations. If like most you go through considerable effort to engage with customers, other businesses, and the community, then you may find this stat surprising - about 70% of web traffic on average still arrives via Google searches in our experience.

Therefore, despite all of the important and expensive marketing and outreach activities that you perform, Google still takes the top spot and is the most vital tool in your locker to connect with people. The good news is that it is inexpensive and often easy to make the most out of Google and to ensure that you engage with as many people as possible.

In this short article, we look at how you can make sure that you are being found by those who look for you, with our fast 5-point checklist.

1 - Know how people are finding you at the moment

The first step is to discover what search terms people use when they come to your site. You can also find out which search terms you show for, even if the user doesn’t click through to your site. To do that, sign up to Google Search Console (or login) and look at the Search Results report where you can compare impressions, clicks, click-through rates and pages. Pay particular attention to the search terms which don’t include your brand name, as these may represent an opportunity to capture an audience who hasn’t already heard of you.

2 - Think about how people might be trying to find you

Next, you’ll want to sit down and think about what search phrases and keywords you would like to be found for. It’s also important to look at your competitor's websites to see which keywords they are ranking for. Paid tools such as Semrush will help you to come up with additional keywords or to prioritise them, as well as find information about competitors. You may want to consider some paid Google ads for search terms that are valuable to you.

3 - Make sure your website is as findable as possible

Once you have a clear idea of new opportunities, you should take care of some housekeeping on your website and update your content to meet those opportunities. To do this, run an SEO checking tool across your website (or ask us to) such as Screamingfrog. This will audit your pages and tell you if there are improvements to be made. You’ll also need to check that your website is set up with best practices such as logical document hierarchy, appropriate meta tags or schema, image descriptions and a good link structure.

Once you’re happy with the best practices, think about the keywords you identified in step 2 and how you can work those into your content. Google always strives to display relevant results, so the more that your content matches what the user is looking for, the better.

4 - Make sure users have a good experience

Once users are finding your content, and arriving on your website, it would be a waste if they had a bad experience to cause them to leave. So it is crucial to look at your most popular or important pages (either by traffic numbers or conversions) and optimising the experience on those:

• Does the page load quickly?
• Does the page answer the user’s need?
• Does the page include a clear call to action and next steps?
• Does the page have a good (and consistent) visual design?

5 - Measure what matters when they find you

Last but not least, you must continually monitor how your website is performing and how users behave on your site. Are users bouncing when they arrive via Google to a key page? They may not be finding what they expected. Are they converting, and if so which search terms or journeys result in the most conversions.

There’s a lot to be explored in this topic, and we can help you to set up a measurement strategy, but the first step is to make sure you have the necessary tools in place - we recommend Google Analytics GA4 and HotJar as a starting point, along with trackers for any ad or social networks where you have paid ads. Many of our clients also find Google Looker Studio useful to quickly summarise KPIs and we can help you to set up an engaging report for your stakeholders.

To discuss any of these ideas in more detail, or for ideas on how you can improve conversions or measurement, why not drop us a line below and we can start the conversation?