Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Shane Williams Google’s home page in South Africa

I’ve designed and built a few websites for small to medium sized businesses. These businesses often don’t have a marketing budget or any marketing at all. They believe a new website is the golden nugget, that people will be flocking to it the minute it goes live. But when the website does go live, they have a hard time understanding why they are not appearing at the top of a Google search. This is when they come to me and ask to be number one on Google. This is my response to their question…

You now have a live website and want to be at the top of Google. Your website has been built with SEO in mind (meaning Google can easily read and trawl through your content), and Google is going to start looking at it and ranking it in its search results.

If you’re not in the top search results, chances are no one will find your website.

There are millions of websites out there, so how does Google decide who appears first in its search results? The short and simple answer is, the most relevant, trusted website content will always be at the top. What does this mean for you? The more relevant, valuable content you have, the higher you will appear on that list. Being relevant in some ways also relates to the most recent content. The easiest way to do this is with a blog, publishing content of value that talks to your target audience and relates to your business. Publishing regularly and consistently is key, and when you reach around 60 of these published articles, Google will start to regard you as an authority in your industry and start ranking your website higher in search results. This is the basic of concept behind organic search engine optimisation (SEO).

As you can imagine, it can sometimes take time to build trust with Google and appear organically at the top of Google’s search results. So what do you do in the mean time? This is where search engine marketing (SEM) comes into play. This is paid for advertising that ensures you appear alongside the top search results (Google Ad Words). This works by targeting specific search terms relating to your service, products or industry. As you start to appear higher in organic search results, you may then decide to reduce your spend on SEM.

Social media is another opportunity worth pursuing

Social media is another avenue to attract clients, if people follow your Facebook page, they will start to see your posts in their Facebook feed. By including your blog article updates in your posts, you will start to drive traffic to your website via Facebook. Not everyone may decide to follow you, and, similarly to Google, this is where Facebook advertising comes into play. Paid for adverts that appear on the side of people’s Facebook feed. The difference here is, instead of targeting search terms, you can target specific types of users based on anything from their interests to location, you can be very specific about the person you want to target.

All this paid for advertising is usually managed by a media planner. I’d suggest this over doing it yourself unless you have a lot of experience in managing online marketing campaigns.

An often overlooked detail is where all this advertising clicks through to… simply arriving at your website’s homepage is often a bad idea. If you are advertising a product, adverts should click to that products page on your website. In some cases, specific landing pages may need to be created to ensure your advertising converts.

This should give you a very high level understanding of how everything fits together.

In summary

Step 1:

Identify the keywords or sentences people will use when searching for you on Google — this will inform the type of content that will need to be catered for when creating blog posts and planning for SEM.

Step 2:

What is your planned marketing budget per month, from this you can work out how much advertising you can buy and how much you can dedicate to your blogs in buildings your SEO presence.

Step 3:

Will you be using your own media planner, if so, get in touch with them so they can start managing this process for you.

Suggestion:

Decide how frequently you’d like to post blog articles, then commission a large quantity of blog posts at once to a ghost writer, then schedule each written article to go live on your website according to a schedule. This way you can deal with this in one go upfront, then focus your entire budget afterward this on paid for marketing.

Try not to get too technical when answering this question and clients will understand, hopefully, they’ll then start implementing some of your suggestions and have a more human-centred approach to their website.

What I tell clients when they ask to be number one on Google was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What I tell clients when they ask to be number one on Google

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