How do I Improve My Google Search Results?

That’s a question on a lot of peoples minds, how do I improve my Google search results?

There isn’t just one answer here and I had a great experience last night presenting to some local business owners who wanted to know the answer to that very question. Being able to share my knowledge for the benefit of others is very rewarding and I hope I armed some people with the desire to look into internet marketing further. Day to day I talk to people who are successful in business but don’t understand how a little investment in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can really boost their online profile. Radio or print advertising is here one day, gone the next. You invest your energy into raising the bar when it comes to the search positioning for your website and you can reap the benefits of that marketing spend for years to come.

In the greater scheme of things there are two types of websites:

1) A website which is just an online type ‘business card’ that showcases your company.

OR

2) The website which is also utilised as an extremely effective marketing tool.

I love my role because I get to show people first hand how improving their organic search results can pay dividends for their business and why their competitors rank higher on Google than they do. Then it’s a matter of showing them what we need to do to get their website into those those top positions. If it’s a low competition keyword or phrase, sometimes just the right amount of SEO can have a catapult effect on their search results. What I like most about New Zealand and the services AppThat provide, as compared with the rest of the world, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in a lot of industries is still very much in its infancy. This means low competition and an easier upgrade path to the top of the ladder. Unfortunately for me, my company is up against a lot of other very savvy people in the digital media space. Luckily, I thrive on a good challenge! 😉

Here’s an example; if I want to run a pay-per-click campaign to all the people searching for the key phrase ‘web design tauranga’, the competition is fierce and I’m paying around $5 per click. This is because a lot of other digital design businesses already advertise in this space which in turn drives the advertising prices up. In contrast I ran a recent campaign for a client where they were paying, on average, 40c per click because hardly anyone was advertising on their keywords. I can’t even begin to tell you how cost effective it is for this customer to carry out this type of advertising.

You may be thinking, “how did we go from ‘how do I improve my Google search results’ to ‘pay-per-click advertising'”. If you’ve read our info on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you’ll know SEO is one of the ways to start getting a higher ranking. What we haven’t mentioned is the second way to get onto Google’s top search results page. Yep you guessed it, online advertising, and if you ask us one of the best in the business is Google Adwords. When carried out correctly you can, near instantly, appear on the first page of Google’s search results and dodge the long haul SEO strategies. Most importantly, pay-per-click advertising can be very cost effective because you only pay once you’ve won that click.

Just like any marketing campaign no matter what channel you’re using, planning and strategy is of the utmost importance. There’s a number of ways to improve your online advertising efforts:

• utilising landing pages
• constructing the right type of offer
• keyword research

That’s just a few of the techniques we use to increase the click through rates for any campaign we run for a client. There’s so much information to go over and we’ll be diving deeper into all of these topics in future posts.

Finally, showing up both organically and using paid advertisements is an extremely effective way to get your message across. Nothing screams “look at me” louder than two appearances on Google’s first search results page.