How Your Website Appears in Search Results
You navigate to your favorite search engine, type in your search term, hit ENTER, and then methodically begin checking out the choices you’re offered, clicking on each site and then clicking back to the search engines results page (SERP) if you don’t find what you want. As long as a page ranks well enough for you to see it ahead of its competitors, as long as the site is good enough to keep visitors there, you’ll be likely to explore it and be the willing recipient of the marketing message it offers you.
That’s how the web used to be. Not anymore.
All the major search engines are working to give web surfers more info right on the SERPs. Their goal is that a web surfer can make a good decision from the search results page and not have to do all that clicking around. With Google Instant, Bing’s preview callouts, and Yahoo’s advanced algorithms, web surfing is becoming a lot more direct and a lot less like surfing. And that’s before we even consider Twitter, Buzz, and others of that ilk.
What this means for your website is that you need to think about the SERPs, as well as rankings and the user experience for your page.
When you type your company name in the search box on your favorite search engine, you need to come up at #1. You can also own the rest of the page, with your LinkedIn profile, your Amazon account, your Twitter account, your blog and your employees’ blogs, your YouTube channel, your well-optimized video and images, your podcasts… See where this is going?
Take advantage of emerging media not only to own the SERPs when people search for your company name but to give a positive impression of your company right from the search page. When you do that, searchers will make the decision to click through to your website and give you the opportunity to show them just what you can do for them.
Steps you can take right now to improve your company’s look on the SERPs:
- Check your meta descriptions and make sure they give an accurate and enticing picture of the content of the page — each and every page.
- Make sure that all your media is well optimized — not just the text.
- Encourage staff to make good use of social media and online networking tools.
- Contact Oyova today to discuss ways to make your website represent you better — on the SERPs, on the net, and on your customers’ desktops or mobile devices.