It is no secret that a powerful online presence is essential to the growth and stability of any business in today’s technologically-advanced world. In many cases, consumers who need answers and solutions or who want information about businesses, products or services will turn to the internet. A well-designed, informative and easily navigated website can provide much of the answers, solutions and information that is being looked for, but simply because it exists does not mean that consumers will just “happen upon it”. A business’ website needs to appear near the top of search engine results in order to be visible to consumers. In fact, studies have indicated that more than sixty percent of an average business’ internet traffic comes from search engine queries. So how can a business best use these search engine results for their growth and development?
Building Search Engine Optimization
Despite the fact that Google is not the first or only search engine, it is widely recognized as the biggest and most used search engine and as such their guidelines for search engine optimization are often duplicated and used by other search engines. There are roughly sixty-three thousand Google searches performed every single second, adding up to five and a half billion searches every single day. It is safe to say that at least some of these searches are being originated by your business’ potential customers, prospective business partners, future employees, or even journalists seeking information.
Whenever an individual enters a query into a search engine that has to do with a business’ name, products or services or other related issue, they are presented with pages of search results. What these search results communicate, especially on the very first page, can greatly affect how consumers view your business, and whether they will choose to pursue a relationship with your business. It is therefore in your business’ best interest to know exactly what these results have to say, and how you can improve them.
As part of improving your business’ search engine results, you need to watch for and handle negative results quickly and thoroughly. Negative search engine results, especially those that appear on the very first page, can have an extremely detrimental effect on your business, thoroughly convincing users that it is in their best interests to completely avoid considering your business for any of their current or future needs. It is therefore very important to monitor for these types of results, and take quick action to handle them. Some content publishers do not intend to harm reputations, and will remove their content from search engine results if asked to do so. If unflattering content is both false and damaging, it can often be removed from search results through legal means. If content cannot be legally removed but is unflattering to your business, you can often “push it down” off the first page of search results by moving more flattering content up.
In order to attract positive attention, and help push down any negative attention and content, you will need to create and foster large amounts of valuable web content that improves your search engine results. Some of the types of valuable web content that can have a marked effect on your business’ search engine results include strong and consistent social media profiles across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram, flattering, honest third-party profiles on other sites such as Wikipedia, truthful news articles about your business by the media and third-party bloggers that are earned (not paid for), paid advertising, and frequently updated, well-written, high-quality blog posts that contain keywords and keyword phrases that will be recognized by search engines and used by consumers.
By both monitoring and improving your business’ online presence, you can improve your search engine results and thereby experience the business growth and development you desire.