Optimising your website in 2018 - #MondayMotivation 9

A decade ago, any talk of optimisation would have been focussed solely on making your website design as compatible as possible with Google's guidelines in order to get to the top of the organic search listings which they dominate. The less scrupulous web companies had a ton of tricks and gimmicks to essentially scam Google and rocket your website to the front of the line. Despite that darker side to it, good ethical SEO and optimisation techniques brought a degree of egalitarianism to web searches and allowed small businesses to punch with the same weight as major corporations.

Those days are gone.

Today, you still have to stick to Google’s rules – even more so since they now penalise you fiercely for any infringement – but the fact is that they now so dominate and monopolise web searches that the only way to get to the top of the page is to pay for the slot using Google Adwords. The acceptance of these paid ads has been driven by mobile devices – no one can be bothered scrolling down too far on a phone so if they see 5 ads first then the chances are they will click one of them and not look for the organic searches at all.

This can be demonstrated simply by checking how many companies who have a #1 listing organically on Google also pay for a #1 ad listing. If the organic listing was still working why pay more?

So optimisation now has to mean optimising the landing page that you have set up in your ad campaign so that a) the ad trailer attracts the right kind of visitor and b) when they land on the page they are motivated to engage further with you, be it by buying or downloading or signing up. After all, if every single click costs you money, you need to make sure that every single £ you spend with Google is money well spent.

It’s not good enough anymore to just add keywords to pages and deliver content Google will index – you have to work with Google through your digital marketing partner in order to deliver that critical ROI through advertising.

That old saying “I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted – I just don’t know which half” no longer need be true. Working closely with a Google partner to optimise your click budget can pay enormous dividends.

What will you do this Monday morning to optimise your website? Why not call me to talk through your ideas – advice is free!

by Chic McSherry