How To Get Your Website To Show Up On Google – For Small Businesses

Every year large companies like Target and Walmart spend tens of millions of dollars to maintain their top positions on Google and stay there. But your growing small business doesn’t need the same kind of visibility as large retailers. But you need to be visible to your ideal clients and customers…your tribe. You don’t need millions of dollars to achieve that.

With the right information and a little bit of training you can turn your website into a money-generating machine. Here are the basics you need to know:

How To Get Your Website To Show Up On Google

Hire a Professional Developer (don’t try to do it yourself)

A professional developer knows what Google looks for in a website and can build your site using best practices. Best practices mean more than just adding some keywords. Google has specific recommended guidelines and a pro knows them inside and out. This is one reason that a do-it-yourself website is not the best choice. You have skills and talents, but if website development isn’t one of them, it’s best to leave it to a pro.

If you love your current website and are not ready for a redesign, think about getting it updated to be more Google-friendly. However, if your site is four years old or older it’s time for a rebuild. A lot has changed in the past few years and if you’re wondering how to get your website to show up on Google again because it used to have great positioning, it definitely needs an update. 

Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly (a good experience on any device)

A website that is “responsive” will automatically resize and reformat when accessed on a mobile device. With more than half of internet searches performed on phones and tablets today, this is a crucially important element you can’t ignore. Yet, clients and students come to me all the time who have never viewed their own website on a phone. It can be a humbling experience to see how visitors see your site when they’re not sitting at a computer.

More than just providing a poor visitor experience, a website that is not mobile responsive may actually be penalized by Google. That means it may not show up at all on a phone. Google is not just trying to be mean here. They are simply protecting users from sites that are hard to use, slow to load, etc.

Add Fresh Content on a Consistent Basis (in other words – blog!)

Google wants to deliver the very best information to their valuable users. If your website is just sitting there and is rarely (if ever) updated, it’s unlikely that your site will show up, unless it’s searched for by name.

What’s more, research shows that business websites that contain consistently updated blogs receive 74% more visits than ones that don’t. That’s huge!

Use On-Page Optimization (it’s not hard!)

Uh oh! This sounds techie, right? Don’t worry! On-page optimization is quite easy once you get the hang of it.

Here’s a very basic explanation of on-page optimization. For each page of content, you’ll choose a unique key phrase. It’s a phrase that you know or believe your ideal customer uses to search for the solutions you provide. Next, you’ll place your key phrase in very specific places on your content pages. Then you’ll add relevant inbound links (to pages on your website) and outbound links (to pages on other websites).

Finally, you’re going to get under the hood and update your page metadata including the focus key phrase, your snippet, etc.

On-page optimization is a key part of the training in my virtual marketing course for entrepreneurs called Blog School. I have seen for myself that with the right training, any business with a WordPress site and an SEO plugin can easily do this.

Publish Useful and Relevant Blog Posts (share a bit of your special sauce)

Google takes into consideration metrics of your site such as the amount of time visitors spend there and the number of pages they view. Blogs are one of the best solutions for how to get your website to show up on Google. There is a fine line between Google-friendly posts and reader-friendly posts, so here’s what you have to always remember: Write for customers first. Google second. 

Get Your Blog Content Out There (it won’t help you if it sits on your site)

Social media and email are effective ways to attract visitors to your website. And the more visitors your site receives the more authority it has with Google. Getting that website traffic is crucially important for your online visibility.

Here’s an analogy: Say you routinely walk past a restaurant in your neighborhood but never try it because it’s always empty. You really don’t know for sure if the food is awful, but because it looks like no one ever eats there, you assume that it is and you keep passing by.

It’s sort of the same with Google. Google’s bots can detect the volume of visits to your site during an average month. If you rarely get any visitors, your site will be passed by. In the same way that you don’t want to risk having a bad meal, Google doesn’t want to risk leading users to a bad website experience. One of the key tactics on how to get your website to show up on Google is to consistently add content.

Run Google Ads (don’t say no before you investigate)

When you need to be absolutely guaranteed your website will be on the first page of results, Google ads are your best bet. Many businesses have never considered advertising on Google, especially if their competitors don’t. But no competitors is actually a benefit and it’s worth speaking to a Google certified professional about advertising. You may be surprised that they are affordable, effective and provide easy to track ROI. I’ve been experimenting with Google ads for Be Visible and getting some interesting results.

To get deeper insight into Google Ads, I recommend this article: None of My Competitors Run Google Ads, Why Should I?

Getting your website to show up on Google requires some TLC, but it’s worth it. Think about it this way: your website is your company headquarters on the web. Wouldn’t you rather be located on Main Street than down a dark alley? Google is Main Street!

I’ve got the fix!
Find out how to feel a profound shift
in the way you market your business,
Check out Blog School here..

Thanks for reading!