Skip to content

The art of making friends with Google

Tegan Mathews

Every business wants to be on the first page of Google in their industry and everyone is always looking for the “magic pill” that will make it happen. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works! In fact, if someone promises you something that seems like an easy answer, run! Before you end up on Google’s blacklist because the only way to get to page one these days is by making friends with Google.

You see it’s Google’s job to ensure that the experience of the person who is searching for a topic, product, or service is the best it can be. So what you’re better off doing is making friends with Google by putting yourself in their shoes and seeing it from their customers point of view (who are ultimately your potential customers too).

Think about when you are looking for a particular service for example, and you get directed to a website that isn’t what you are looking for. Or it might be super outdated, or it could even be an illegitimate business. It’s not a nice experience is it? And it won’t have you feeling good about Googles service either.

Now think about a time when you were searching for something specific. You typed it into Google and straight away, within the first few websites listed on page one, you found exactly what you were looking for, at the price you wanted to pay, and from a legitimate company. Much better experience right! And one that would have you happily refer Google as your favourite search engine.

Google is just trying to provide a good user experience

That’s how it works. So, think of Google as a business that is just trying to provide the best possible service for it’s customers. That will make it a lot easier when it comes to making friends with Google because you’ll understand why they have the different algorithms and why they have to keep changing them. It’s not to make it more difficult for the honest business, it’s to make it harder for the dishonest ones, which then gives the person using their platform a good user experience.

How can I get closer to page one status?

So now you have a better understanding of why Google does what it does, let’s look at what you can do to get on the good side of Google. Here are three things you can do to that will get you closer to that ultimate page one listing:

1. Constantly be updating your website.

Google loves new, fresh content for two reasons. It shows that your business is still ‘in business’ and it gives new content for it’s customers (who again, are your potential customers). So, it’s up to you to find reasons to update your website. You can add a new blog, a new image, a before and after, an offer, maybe even a new page or a landing page for one of your products. It’s there are endless options.

It’s a new year so what better time to take a fresh look at your website and give it an overhaul. The easiest way you can do this is to update the main images on your homepage. But don’t stop there! Update images throughout your whole website if you can. Get a professional photo shoot done and add those to your site.

2. Check your website customer journey

What’s the customer journey like on your website? Is it easy to navigate your site or have you filled it up with too much information? What about your content, is it interesting? Current? Does it entice your potential customer to want to know more about you and delve deeper into the website? If you don’t like what you read then it’s time to update your content too.

We recently created a free download called the Ultimate Customer Journey Guide. If you haven’t downloaded it already you can get it by clicking here. Take the time to work through this six-page guide and apply it to your website. What does the customer journey have to do with making friends with Google? Because the easier your site is to navigate, the longer they will stay on your website and the more they will return. Both things that say to Google that you are a good business to refer people to.

3. Check all of the links throughout your website regularly.

It’s good practice when you write blog posts to link to outside sources and other (relevant) websites if you can. But, due to the rapid rate at which businesses and websites and blog posts come and go, some of those links or even to your own internal pages, may have changed. Google will penalise you for having broken links so get those fixed quick smart.

Schedule it into your calendar every month to just do a quick check of your website and it’s links. There’s even free software you can put your website URL address into and it will give you a report on your links such as the Atomseo Broken Links Checker which will save you even more time.

4. Fix the images on your site.

When you load an image into your website, even with the plugin Blue Dog Websites have on them to minimise the image automatically for you, you need to avoid loading up an image that is more than 200kb. Otherwise, this will slow down your website and Google doesn’t like slow loading sites because, well, no one likes to wait for anything these days (myself included).

Also, when you load an image into the media section of your website, use relevant keywords to describe what the image is about and place that into the Title, Alt Text, and Description areas. This helps Googles searching spiders to know what the image is because, these spiders aren’t like the eight-legged kind, they don’t have any eyes so you need to tell them what the image is.

So, by doing just these few things, it will grow your website ranking more organically than almost anything else and ensure you continue making friends with Google in years to come. If you would like to know more about Google and the possibility of getting your website onto the first page then book a coaching session with Kristie here.

Tegan Mathews

Tegan has over twenty years experience in sales & marketing both nationally and internationally and the founder of several businesses, her first at the age of 14.

Leave a Comment





Scroll To Top