Improve web presence for your website
There are lots of ways to improve your website ranking on search engines and to get more visits to your site. We'll just be covering a few basic steps to help to ensure that your website can be found.
Local business SEO first steps
If you are running a brick and mortar or local service you'll want to setup Google Business and Bing Places accounts, provide as much detail there as possible. In Bing Places you can choose to link the accounts together so that you only need to manage the Google account and Bing will update too. You may want to link to some of your social media and business directory profiles there or set them up beforehand.
More ways to improve your search results
Some other things that you'll want to setup are the Google and Bing webmaster tools accounts. Make sure to verify your site ownership by any of the methods they suggest (adding a metatag or adding a dns record). Then you will have a good idea if there are any problems when you check back in a while to see the reports.
When that is all said and done you may consider using the webmaster error reports to find any issues that could be plaguing your site. Things like duplicate page titles, missing page or image (alt) descriptions or slow loading speeds can cause you to lose your position in the results. Before you start optimizing you may want to install an SEO plugin (like Yoast) and then submit your sitemap to the search engines and ensure it is found correctly and listing the pages you have published. The plugins will also offer some help with figuring out what could use some improvement in terms of descriptions and titles and content even.
Advanced tactics
There are many things you can do at this point like using lighthouse in the development tools built into chromium browsers (edge/chrome). There you can find more detailed info about loading speed and usability reports that could be used to improve the scores. Try to ensure that the mobile scores are healthy first as Google uses the mobile first indexing methodology. Images are also always a consideration, you can try to find a plugin that optimizes them or optimize them before uploading etc. If you have an older site, here are some old but good tips about images and loading speed.
When you have your site tidied up and everything is ok in the webmaster tools etc then you may want to consider adding Google analytics to your website with a plugin or using the SEO plugin for your CMS. After creating a Google Analytics account and linking it to your website it may then make sense to start advertising your site. You'll be able to see the results and so will Google since you are sending the traffic activity and they will see that your site has visitors and if they are reading and returning then Google will see that as a positive signal. Also, patience is key. It can take up to months for some changes to show up in the results as of now.
