Other than a Facebook business page, or at least an alternative to Facebook – you NEED a Google account, even if you refuse to embrace any other 3rd party media site.
Its benefits are monumental. This means starting off setting up a Gmail account – You don’t need to use the email account. It’s the universal login details you need. That one username and password can be used across the board for every Google-owned property.
From there you can open a personal Google Plus page – once again, a personal G+ isn’t necessary to update in detail, but what’s most important is opening a Google+ ‘My Business’ page. This is imperative because it gives you the chance to validify who owns the business, who manages the website, where you are located and your opening hours – helping customers easily locate your place of business. This also gives your site a chance of appearing on Google’s first-page map results.
This flows onto easily creating a Youtube channel to host your company videos. Even if you only have one company video, this will give you some incentive to build up more clips for your website – which you can never have enough of.
Once you are part of the ‘Google family’ your login details give you access to use the “Google Keyword Planner” which is a keyword tool that drills down on search terms that your prospects are using to find your goods or services. The Keyword Planner is designed to help you with finding the best search terms – how many people that are searching for a keyword per month, and how much a ‘click’ will cost you if you choose to use their Adwords “pay-per-click” (PPC) service. It does not matter if you don’t have any intention of using their PPC service, but I recommend you use these highly searched for terms within the sales copy of your website content. This is in order for Google’s indexing ‘spider bots’ to find the thematic relevance of your website easier – but don’t overuse them (this is called “keyword stuffing”). Sprinkle them sparingly and try to use the best ones within your page titles and H1 tags. I recommend not targeting anymore than 5 keywords per webpage. If you find you have too many juicy keywords, try to group them according to relevantly and create separate pages to so your website isn’t ‘over-optimised’. Lastly, if your pages are low on text content, be even more sparing with these search phrases as it will trigger a mild Google penalty (meaning you never make it to page one).
With your universal login, be sure to take advantage of Google Analytics. This is an incredibly powerful tool which is designed to give a website owner a clear understanding of three major factors.
The first is web visitors. You can find out how many clicks a day you are getting, where visitors are coming from, how long they are spending on your site, where they came from geographically and how they found you. This also comes in the form of a traffic graph to keep tabs on monthly and yearly performance.
Next is data based on the content of your pages. It’s very empowering to know what pages perform the best, and what generates the most traffic. On the flipside, which pages perform the worst.
On top of that, Analytic’s reveals your top performing keywords. This is important as it tells you which keywords that generate the most traffic and sales.
When first starting out with analytics, the first thing you should take note of is your ‘bounce rate’ – this is a calculated percentage of people who clicked onto your site then ‘bounced off’. This is one of Google’s many quality score factors. Although it won’t create a giant penalty, a high bounce rate is an indicator that consumers are somehow put off by your site. Perhaps by the absence of video?
Then you have the equally empowering tool Google webmaster tools. Although it can often be confused with Google analytics, it is designed to give you an overall picture of how your site is operating. With this, I mean how your site is seen by the search engines. This is very helpful with diagnostic problems such as broken links (and external links to your site), HTML errors, duplicate content, site configuration, malware detection and whether or not your site is being ‘crawled’ by the search engine ‘spiders’ to name a few.
If you are serious about your company website, these free tools are absolutely essential to your sales arsenal. I recommend doing some research on implementing these Google features (there are many Youtube tutorials on the subject). If you still feel uncomfortable with doing it yourself, accept it, and simply hire someone to put it together and teach you how to read and crunch the data to ensure you have the best possible chances of maximising your sales and brand visibility.