Are you being outperformed by new companies?
“Me and my company have been around for years and have a good website, as well as an SEO team that I pay a good amount monthly. Why are these newer companies outranking me in the search engines?”
Sound familiar?
If you’ve found yourself questioning why other new businesses are outperforming you on Google, even though your website is well-optimised and professionally maintained, you’re not the only one. This is a common concern for local service providers.
So, what’s causing it?
The way we always begin to explain this to clients is to first remind them what the goal of a search engine actually is. Google, Bing and other search engines have one job, which is to show the right websites to the right searchers. In order to do so, the search engines focus mainly on one thing:
How do people actually behave on your website?
SEO isn’t everything. Your images, videos and content could be perfectly optimised for the right keywords. But, that doesn’t guarantee you the top spot. And that’s because…
Positive interaction trumps SEO, every time.
What does this mean, exactly? Well, if people stumble across your perfectly-optimised website, they still may not have found exactly what they’re looking for.
SEO is for search engines, not website visitors.
As a business, your website visitors are often looking for something specific. However, they’re also looking for things they’re not conscious of. They need to trust you and your website. They need to be emotionally engaged with. They need to find it both easy and appealing to make an enquiry.
These are things that keyword SEO can’t do for you.
No matter how much time you put into SEO – new images, videos, infographics, blog posts, landing pages and everything in between – if your website isn’t optimised to convert, you’re never going to conquer the top spot in the search results.
Google wants to see positive user behaviour. Not just keywords.
What it all comes down to is what the search engines see from your visitors. For example:
Say Google sees Bob arriving on your site after he searched for “dog grooming in London”. After a short period of time on your website, without looking around your site or making an enquiry, Bob leaves and continues his search.
What has Google learned from this?
Bob wasn’t satisfied enough with what he saw when he arrived at your website. At least, not enough to stay on the site for an extended period of time, or make an enquiry. Therefore, Google sees this is a failure, and next time, will consider showing a different website to someone searching for that same keyword.
The takeaway
Improve user behaviour and you will be rewarded with increased visibility in the search results. SEO shouldn’t be your only focus. Of course, it’s something you want to be doing if you’re in the game for maximising your chances of being found by your target audience.
However, you should also be looking at ways to engage with your website visitors in ways that earn their trust and encourage them to become a customer of yours.
Hiring an SEO company is worth the money, assuming they’re putting in the work. However, consider hiring a company that looks at all areas of your online marketing and not just keyword-optimised content.
Your chosen company should be looking at website performance, conversion rate optimisation, advertisement campaigns, search engine optimisation, social media marketing and everything in between. If they’re not doing this already, and are solely focusing on SEO, either talk to them about expanding their services or consider another provider.
Get a free website assessment
If you’d like to know what can be done on your own website in order to maximise engagement, improve visibility and increase conversions, send us a message and we’ll respond with a custom report, manually written by one of our online marketing specialists.
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