New Sites & Google - SEO Belfast
One thing to thought about when starting any site is "how long will this take to see on google?".
Well, it is important to understand how google handles new sites in order to answer this question.
When choosing a host the first thing you have to consider is where the hosting is located, for example if I was looking to host an e-commerce site to sell a product in Belfast, then having a host in California would be pointless as google will look at server location when considering where to rank you for certain regions, this will also impact a user who is trying to connect to the site from Belfast, which will add to the loading of the page, so google will inherently reduce the ranking in Belfast for the site as it takes too long to load and will prefer to show users a site that will load in a more reasonable time for them.
Hosting
Once you have your host in your ideal region you have to consider the layout of the site itself, if you are using a web designer it is important to make sure that the layout is ideal for SEO.
Ideally for SEO purposes you do not want any page reachable in over 2 clicks, google devalues a site has such depth. There is also a matter of content to consider, depending on your industry it is important to benchmark the length of your content against your competitors, a lot of web designers like to make a nice looking site, this is great but they tend to leave out the content aspect which means the site may look amazing but no one is going to be able to see it as Google looks to give it's users meaningful pages with content that will help answer their search query, so just because a page looks nice doesn't mean that it is optimised for Google.
Search Intent
Search intent is another thing to think about when trying to rank your site, for example, if you want to rank for the term "digital marketing blog Belfast" and when someone searches for it they are greeted by blog posts and articles but the page you are trying to rank is a services page, your page will have a very hard time gaining any ground for that term, in order to properly compete you will have to create a blog page/ article in order to properly rank for that term and making sure to fill that page out with meaningful content related to the topic will give your page a good push towards that number one spot.
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the determining factors for how well your site ranks, you can have the most optimised site in the world but with no links to your site you will not get very far, imagine a tap with the water being the traffic and spout being your site's optimization, the wider the spout, the more water that can be pushed out, the backlinks are the handle, the more backlinks you gain, the more the handle is pushed the more water comes out and the wider the spout the better the amount that comes out.
The point being that site optimisation and the backlinks to the site work together to produce traffic with the amount of optimisation being the factor in the volume of traffic that can be brought to you and the links being the reason it comes at all.
Blogs
Blogs are a great way to constantly improve your SEO as consistent fresh content helps to drive recurring traffic to your site with opportunities to give customers an insight in to how your business works and similar topics about your industry as a whole.
Google also prefers sites that are updated frequently as it shows that the site contains up to date information that may interest users searching for a particular topic. This goes hand in hand with ranking as well to drive backlinks to your site as people will naturally link to that variety of page containing quality content that they wish to share on their page.
Site Age
The age of your site also plays in to when Google decide to rank your site, usually it can take a number of months (up to 6 months) before your page is ready to start ranking although this can happen earlier, the preference on google is for sites with an older age with a kind of buffer period for new sites that may not last a long time with long periods between updates.
Summary
Once you have the fundamentals down on your site, it is important to keep consistent with fresh content on your site with either content updates or blog articles. The main problem being with the time before your site is old enough to start ranking for organic search results during this period, Search Engine Marketing is an ideal solution to drive immediate traffic to your site during the build up SEO.
Interested in SEO for your site? Get in touch with SEOwned, a digital marketing agency providing SEO in Belfast that aims to provide you and your business the best results possible through digital strategies tailored for you.