Reach a larger audience

It’s estimated that Google alone, receives over 3.5 billion searches every day worldwide**. Expose your business to these potential customers and help drive more visitors to your website by increasing how often and how high up you appear in search results.

Target niche customer groups

Capture the interest of those who are most likely to want or need your products/services by targeting the specific words or phrases they're searching for.

Increases sales/donations

Make it easy for customers to find exactly what they're looking for on your site by configuring the language on your site to match their search words, and ensuring they go to the right page when clicking on your link. This helps create a seamless customer experience, which improves conversion rates.

**http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/  

Set up data analysis

While it sounds technical, these 'Analytics' come with easy to follow instructions to help you understand who is visiting your site and how they're getting there, so you can target your marketing efforts appropriately.

• Select analytics tools that will be useful for your company. Free tools include, Bing Webmaster Tools^†, Google Analytics^† and Google Webmaster Tools^†. Paid tools include Majestic SEO ^†, RavenTools^† and SEOmoz Tools^†.
• Set-up the analytics tracking by adding a bit of web coding to your site. Follow the instructions provided by the specific analytics platform or, since this can be complicated, hire a web developer to do it for you.

Research keywords

Use free keyword tools, such as Bing's Keyword Research Tool^† or Google's Keyword Tool^†, to see which words and phrases related to your company receive the highest volume of searches each month. You will be able to sort through all the words to select ones that are commonly searched for, but aren't highly competitive or expensive. Then, make sure those keywords appear throughout copy and titles on your web pages and marketing content.

Optimise your website

Search engines use software robots - sometimes called 'spiders' or 'crawlers' - to assess the words, links and visitor activity on your site. This information is used to determine how relevant your site is to people searching for certain words, and prioritise it in search results accordingly. Here's what you can do:

• Create a website that is informative, relevant and easy to use - Show search engines that your website is valuable for their users by writing high-quality copy for every page, using relevant keywords within the text, including useful navigational links and adding social media buttons so that visitors can share your content.

Encourage others to promote your website

Search engine crawlers also look to see how many people, and which people, are adding links to your site on their own pages. If they see that a lot of reputable people are linking back to your site, they will increase your rankings for certain relevant terms. To get people linking back to your site, you can:

• Create shareable content that people will want to pass on to their friends and followers. This can be informative advice or entertaining stories.
• Consider adding a blog to your website, so that you can regularly add new shareable content. Otherwise, you only have your web pages to place content on.
• Develop genuine relationships with bloggers who write about your sector, or who have an audience similar to yours. Offer to write a guest post for their blog and include relevant links back to your site, so some of their readers will visit your website.

^† Please note that these are just examples of the types of analytics and keyword tools available and Lloyds Banking Group does not endorse the services they provide.

For further information about improving search engine ranking, you can visit pages listed below.

Clicking on these links will take you to pages on other websites.

Search engines:
www.enterpriseitguide.com/e-commerce/search-engines/  

Website linking:
www.enterpriseitguide.com/e-commerce/website-linking/  

Promoting your business using blogs:
www.enterpriseitguide.com/social-media/promoting-your-business-using-blogs/  

Get certified by Google at The Digital Garage with free online courses:
https://digitalgarage.withgoogle.com/certification.

Make the most of free online analytics tools:
http://www.google.com/analytics.