It’s an exciting time with the internet changing and so many businesses moving online – the way we do things has been adapting and evolving so quickly – it is almost by the minute!
Just before lockdown commenced, we started a new hospitality website for a local business. They have a great location – BANG in the middle of Griffith’s main street. When the city isn’t locked down, this location is popular with locals of all age groups, for all kinds of events and get-togethers. But then the local lockdown happened; the catalyst that started the race to get this business online!
One of the first hurdles we had to jump over was how we could ensure the website was propagated (searchable) on Google ASAP. Usually, the time frame is anywhere from 4-6 weeks… But luckily, we knew a few tricks of the trade and leapt over this obstacle.
What did we do?
We employed a decade of webmaster knowledge of the internet of course!
First, we set up the domain and took it live with a generic holding page of “Coming soon”. As mentioned above, Google can take some time to propagate the domain – so we set up the Title Tag and Meta Descriptions, linked the social media feeds and turned the site live. This allowed Google to index the website while it was in development and the links to the social media showed credibility online as Facebook and Google are considered “news” (yeah, go figure!)
Secondly, we set up and claimed the Google My Business Listings – Google LOVES marketers who utilise their tools and send Google data. GMB allows you to submit all the public information about a business and set up a profile on their systems. This then integrates into a myriad of their platforms which allows them to be the superior search tool they are. The authorisation card can take 5-14 days to come, so we just needed to wait for it to arrive. Then boom – Google Maps, Reviews, Google Search and Webmaster tools have all had an influx of data.
Then what does Google do? It’s like getting a gold star sticker at school… you travel UP the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
And thirdly, a sitemap MUST be submitted to Google. This piece of information was hidden for many years inside the Google Webmaster tools and was an after-thought for many. But we lodge them EVERYTIME we do a content refresh. Why? Submitting a sitemap feeds the machine and TA DA – your site gets indexed higher in the SERPs because their little web crawlers identify that the code matches the content.
We had a lot of fun creating a quick video with this local on how their website message service works – see it below.
And a quick question too – we want to know if you think faster content is more engaging?
None of this content is authorised by Google. This is 10 years of working in the digital space and learning like a human-machine on live projects.
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