If you are one of those small business owners whose website never appears in the search results on Google, here are three easy ways to gain more visibility and move up in the rankings.
Step One: Do a little research into keywords. There are plenty of books and resources available on how to conduct keyword research, but if you are like most small business owners, you don’t have much time. So, one of the best shortcuts is to simply do a search, pull up your competitor’s site, put your cursor on the page and right click. In the pop-up box, choose the “view page source” or similar option. This will bring up your competitor’s html code. Near the top of the page, it is almost guaranteed that you will see something that says “metatag keywords” or “metaname keywords” followed by a list of keywords. Copy that list of keywords. Take that list of keywords and use Google’s keyword analysis tool to see the monthly search volume for each. Contrary to popular opinion, you are NOT going to use the term that has the most searches. Look for keywords that have at least 2,400 searches per month (if possible in your niche) but no more than 75,000 searches per month. Cross out any keywords that have too many searches. Take the revised list of keywords and go to Google. In the search box, type the phrase allintitle: followed by the search term you are considering within quotes e.g. allintitle: “small business website.” When the search results come up, look at the top right of the page and you will see “Results 1 of X sites.” This is an indication of how many competitors are using that keyword. Choose the keywords that have the fewest competing sites to focus on. Hint: you will typically have better results of you choose phrases instead of just a single word.
