Search Engine Optimization is more than just a Set and Forget. Having a website is only the first step in getting Google and Bing to show you in their results pages to people who are searching for you.
Topical Authority
Search Engines need to know you have useful information on your site before they include you in the listings. This is called Topical Authority.
Depending on your business this could take the form of the services you offer, the products you offer, your location, or the information you provide. Your Authority can also be influenced by the number of other web sites that point to your site.
Think about this:
Google indexes hundreds of billions of web pages. You need to show Google that your page deserves to be included in their search results.
Matching Customer Intent
A big part of SEO is matching the text on your page with what the customer is looking for. The content feeds into the Search Result display of your listing. If it doesn’t closely match then the customer may skip right by you.
Getting the Customer to Do Something
So, your page is in the Search Results and the customer has clicked to your site, how do you get them to become a customer?
This is where a clear, easy-to-find Call to Action is critical. Make it as easy as possible for them to become your customer.
Call You? – Great, place the phone number prominently. More than likely, they are on their phone. Make the number a button to call you from their phone.
Fill out a Form? – Place the form at the top of the page and include as few fields as you need to get their information.
Buy Something? – Make the Add to Cart button as prominent as possible and the purchase process as simple as possible.
What about AI?
It seems everyone is using AI systems to search these days. And while it’s use is growing, AI Search is just a drop in the bucket compared to the 16 billion searches done on Google every day.
But, as it grows, you want to be found in the AI citations. How AI search systems work takes pages to describe. But, for our purposes it is really simple.
If an AI system doesn’t already know an answer to the search query, it goes out and uses Google or Bing to find the answer!
It’s known as a Query Fan-out. Here’s how an AI Query Fan-out works:
- The AI engine will make multiple queries to the search engines
- It will get the list of ranked sites and scan each one of those pages to gather information
- It will process the information to create a summary of the answers
- Respond with an answer including links to the sources it used (that were retrieved using a search engine)
The true and correct answer of how to get included in an AI response is to great SEO on your pages.
The Top Tip for Great SEO
One of the greatest fallacies about how SEO works is that search engines look at your website as one big site. They actually only see one page at a time. Search Engines rank pages not sites. They will know about other pages in your site either because of your site navigation links or from internal links between your pages.
But, great SEO is done one page at a time.
Need a Great SEO? Call Searchlight Design.
