So you "SEO" your sites? Really?

Google offer all businesses a My Business page. In fact, Google set this up no matter you ask or not. If they locate a business they create the page. You then claim it.

If they haven’t yet done one for you, create it yourself: https://support.google.com/business/answer/6300717?hl=en-GB

Once that’s done you have the option to setup a Google website for the business. Loads of businesses only use this single page website as their main site. But, you can set it up AND still have your own website.

When I looked into this lots of people said don’t, as it’ll conflict with your own site (if you have one), but I read the Google docs, and they say that won’t happen. From what I could make out from the usual Google gobble-de-gook, IF as part of the My Business setup you specify a domain for your site and then don’t apply this to the Google website, Google will give priority to your main site not the Google one.

The cynics say that ain’t so. And that’s fair, as who believes anything Google says? But there are a lot of articles out there saying it’s correct, and setting up a Google website to run alongside and feed into your main site is a good idea. So I tried it, and initial signs are it does indeed drive traffic and improve rankings. This is only initial findings though, so buyer beware.

Setting up a Google website: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7032839?hl=en-GB

Hopefully that explains what you were asking about?

3 Likes

Gotcha, of course I’m all up to date on Google My Business but I never looked into the website section. I’ll give it a go, thanks.

Interetesing - have you literally created the new site and left it. or are you running a blog or some’inc?

1 Like

Hi, I’m not now sure what I’ve actually covered above, as I’ve done quite a bit on this now, so to recap…

  1. For my main web business site I always had a Google My Business page, but never the Google website connected with it, so I set that up and started posting to it, much like a blog really.

  2. That seemed to work really well, so I also started to add products to it. My business model is pre-built templates which I customise for clients, so whenever I launch a new template I now add it as a product.

  3. Encouraged my clients to leave me a review on Google.

Those three things alone, no SEO work to the site itself shot it up the Google results. Traffic from Google is now about 300% higher than it was. Is this generating business? Hard to say. I don’t focus too much on Google for business (the above was more an experiment than anything), I have a mailing list of about 100k which gets a send every couple of week, I’ve been doing this for over two years solid now, and almost all my business comes from it. Often a new client won’t remember where or how they heard about me, but when I check my lists, they’re on it, so I figure that’s how they heard about me.

As I tell my newsletter clients: Mailshots are not about instant sales/enquiries but brand recognition/recall.

I have been super busy this last six months, but that could be as much down to lockdown, where lots of people have taken the time to get their websites sorted. So as we’re in very odd times right now, it’s hard to say if the Google traffic has generated any business. My instinct is it hasn’t. It’s generated traffic, but it’s low-quality traffic. I’ve pretty much always been of the opinion that search engine traffic is mostly low quality, this is based on 20 years doing this, as a retailer and now a website maker.

As well as that I also built a stand-alone site for web design, using a new domain which includes the area covered and some “website design” keywords. I put this out there with zero marketing, just added GA and sorted it a Google My Business page. This site doesn’t even figure in search results, not until you get past page 20! This I more or less expected, but I wanted to prove to myself that a well SEO’d site and a relevant domain name doesn’t do shit nowadays.

My conclusion: In terms of external SEO, If you only ever exploit the tools Googles makes available to you for free you can get some pretty good results, assuming search rankings is the goal. But as I said, this traffic is most likely low quality, so don’t expect it to make you your fortune!

1 Like

Out of interest @steveb what tool or plugin are you using to get mail signups (assuming you are using RW to do this)?

Just a regular form with some hidden inputs.

Joe also makes a stack called Post Office. I used to use it, but got too many spam attempts as at the time it didn’t employ honeypots. I think it does now though.

1 Like