In a time of mobile consumers and internet shoppers, making sure your company ranks well on Google searches is paramount. Customers need to be able to search for your services and find you instantly for your company to be in with a chance of beating the competition. Search Engine Optimisers can help manipulate your rankings through several clever tricks to ensure you are always top of the pile.

Here, Expert Market SEO guru Max Holloway shares his insight into how new businesses can optimise their online presence to climb higher in Google's sacred rankings.

Consolidate useful pages

Though creating lots of separate pages on every subcategory your business offers may seem like a good way to organise your site, it is not a good way to climb up the rankings. Google operates by "crawling" websites looking for relevant information that it can offer to people searching for content. By creating too many pages with a similar theme or keyword, you are essentially pulling Google in different directions – as a result, all pages will be marked down and achieve low rankings, because your pages are essentially in competition with each other.

Look through your website and mark pages that fall under one theme or question. Collate this content into one single, useful page with concise, relevant content that is carefully structured to answer your customers' most-asked queries. Any conflicting pages should be deleted, but ensure that you properly redirect pages to the new location using the HTTP 301 code. This tells Google that the content has been permanently moved to a new part of the site and ensures any click-throughs from a search come to the correct page.

Use useful online analytics tools

Getting the right links to your site is the single most important SEO activity you will engage in, because Google counts this to be one of its most important ranking factors.

You can think of links as the internet equivalent of a friend's recommendation. A recommendation from someone who is trustworthy and authoritative will be worth much more than one from one you don't know that well or one who has a bad reputation. The same is true for websites, so bear that in mind when approaching websites for links.

There are a whole host of powerful online tools – such as Moz OSE, ahrefs and Majestic – which will tell you where your competitors are getting their links from. If someone is linking to your competitors, they will probably link to you.

Once you have your list of websites to approach you can begin to formulate your strategy to get the most links.

Display data beautifully

When coming up with new content ideas onsite and for outreach, the most important thing to remember is not to get too bogged down in your product. Look at the wider sector in which your business operates and investigate the more newsworthy aspects to release interesting reports or comments about your sector to the media. The ultimate objective is to drive people to your site, so as long as the content relates to your brand, you can exercise as much creativity as you like.

Research interesting facts about your industry and try and present it in a new, quirky way. Studies have shown that the attention span of the average online user has been steadily decreasing, which means that brands have a matter of seconds to grab their audience's attention. Consider visualising your data or story into an infographic. Content that is beautifully designed and is easy to digest has high sharable potential. A high volume of shares means lots of mentions, which result in more people wanting to head to your site to learn more about your brand.

There are a number of alternative methods you can adopt to win links on online publications to get your brand name out there. Consider pitching an expert opinion piece to a business site or an instructive how-to guide.

Join us for next week's 60 second startup guide where we explore how to attract top talent to your small business.

Max Holloway is a Senior Marketing Manager from Expert Market's publishing team. For more information about how web developers can improve your new website head to www.expertmarket.com

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