Why your competitors are beating you online

Photo credit: 

Milca Mulders

Are you lost because your website is not showing up on search engines as the Number 1 result?

There are lots of discussions and articles on how to fix websites. But let’s make it easy by narrowing it down to the few key measurements that search engines consider to be the most important this year.

Before looking at your site---- it is important to look at your competitor’s site that is now on top and ask yourself :

Does it load quickly?

Do you trust the company/website/person based on a landing page?

Can you find the competitor’s website link on another trusted site?

Are they running online ads?

Now go to your website:

Does it load as quickly?  

If not, you can test your site on Google’s speed test that provides suggestions on what needs to be fix: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

If you’re not sure what the Google test results mean, then your site probably has some backend technical issues that need to be address.

Now try to find something on your site that you customer might really need to know--- For example how to return an item?

Can you find it quickly or is it buried somewhere on the site?

If it is buried--- make plans with your web team to put it on the first page with a link to find more info.

Next-- Do you believe the text that describes your company, your mission, and products or are the words fluffy?

(An example of fluffy—“Our mission is to be the best and truly serve our customers.”)

This is lazy text that needs to be improved to build trust, because how much time did you really spend on that mission statement?

If your site is full of  fluffy content, find someone to help you rewrite the text and eliminate the fluff with real examples of what you can really do for your customer --- such as –-- “We will reply to your email request within an hour.”

Can you find your website link on other trusted sites?

If not, you really need to find ways to get them on other sites as quickly as possible. Any industry or association site that list companies that offer your services is a great place to start. Then move on to vendors/partners, other blogs or ecommerce sites.

Are you running ads?

If not, you should explore some options to help generate visits to your site.

If yes, re-evaluate the ads and revamp your efforts.

If you fix these few issues you should see improvement in your website search engine rankings fairly quickly. If you still experience trouble with your rankings, there are deeper issues and you should turn to a local search engine optimization expert to help fix them.