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Getting ranked on Google is still an unsolved mystery for a lot of folks, everyone may not be confused for the same reason but at some point confusion ensues trying to get your website to show up when you search for it. Building and stylizing your brand and website is only the beginning, if you run your own business then you're probably very familiar with the saying that "there's always something to do". Having your website rank on Google sort of works the same way, especially if like most people you want to show up on the first page.
If you've done a little research you may have seen varying information on how to get your site to rank on Google, we're here to clear up the smoke and make some distinctions for you on how you'd do that.
For starters, if you want to take the quick route it's going to cost you some money since you'll need to allocate a budget for Google Adwords. This would be the SEM route working with adwords. You can also try the organic route, which I recommend everyone start with, you wont be paying for adwords but the work does need to be put in content wise for those keywords if you want to rank for them organically. This would be the SEO route, you are not required to deal with ad costs in this sense.
There are many factors to consider but our agency specializes narrowing things down and making them digestible for your business if we can help.
Knowing which keywords you want to try to rank for is essential, this can also vary based on your products, services, or even some seasonal instances. Here at Vizualz By Von we're able to focus on your competitors, whether you know them or not we'll find them, and move on with our strategy from that point.
Keyword research is an important part of SEO and SEM and depending on how skilled your keyword researcher is and how well they analyze search data. We can save a lot of time for you in this area being well versed within the space and knowing some best practices, analyzing search data is one of our specialties.
Below is an example of a Website Audit performed on our own website. These audits will make sure you're able to pinpoint and iron out any technical issues it may have. Before you worry about showing up on Google or competitors you have to verify that your website is: indexed, crawlable, and that you don't have any internal linking or load time issues.
The MOST important thing to note here is that issues that affect Google's ability to crawl your website mean users will have a hard time finding you in a search engine. Either your website or certain pages weren't indexed at all OR you could have an issue with your sitemap (XML file) or your robots.txt file. In some cases it could be a hosting issue, we would know this immediately when we attempt to crawl your website as our software would prompt us of an issue with crawlability.
In the screenshot above you have 3 separate categories: Errors, Warnings, and Notices.
Errors: These should always be first on your list of things to do. Googles Bots will notice them first when your website is crawled and they could prove to be more detrimental than Warnings and Notices in most cases.
Warnings: These are the next step on your list of things to do and can be pretty important to take care of depending on what the issue and the current state of your website is.
Notices: I look at these as extra credit personally, some of the things that show up in here may be intentional like having naked links on your pages. You may want visitors to see the URL. These can be ignored in many cases, if you have fixed pertinent errors and warnings you should probably be on to keyword research or creating content at that point.
In the second screenshot below you can see there are only actually 7 warnings.
At first glance, the 42 warnings can look rather daunting if you don't know what you're at. Keep in mind most of the time the fixes will be "2 birds with one stone" and you will see the issues deplete by more than one at a time usually -- we try to make a practice of doing things this way at Vizualz By Von at least.
The primary takeaway here is to manage the site health to Google's standards and ensure its functionality from a technical standpoint. If you have questions about your own websites technical standpoint and would like an audit with some actionable recommendations let us know. Not only will you have a comprehensive audit with recommended fixes but you'll also have a comprehensive plan created for you to implement yourself if you'd like to take that approach opposed to letting us handle it.
