Moving up the Google search rankings

A moment of realisation

Over the past year we have been working on how we meet new companies and let them know about the latest trends and developments in IT that affects their business. We are passionate about IT in business and want to help as many companies as possible achieve their vision with the help of a fantastic technological foundation. However, how do you get people to know about you if your website is not moving up the Google search rankings?

This year we have been holding events for our customers and guests on a range of subjects. They have been well attended, however in promoting these events one thing became clear; our website is nowhere to be seen. Things came to a head this week when talking to a web developer, we typed the search term “IT Support Biggleswade” into Google. It was 5 pages before we featured! 5 PAGES!! We are an “IT Support Company in Biggleswade”, yet you had to scroll through 5 pages to find us, and we didn’t even feature on the map card. Not a good place to be. However, we were in the company of the fantastic Graham Childs of Childs Design.

The power of the expert

Graham is working with us on our new website, but following the revelation of our 5th page place he got to work on some basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Like many companies we use WordPress to manage our website. One of it’s great features are the plugins, which expand the capabilities of your website. He installed Yoast, which guides you to making your site SEO friendly. In five minutes we made some changes to our pages, included adding the phrase ‘IT Support Biggleswade’ into our keyword snippet, and applied them to our site.

The Result

30 minutes later we were on the front page of Google and ranked 6th for the search phrase ‘IT Support Biggleswade’. I was so impressed I shouted out WOW in the middle of the office, shocking the rest of the team and nearly causing Office Manager Jo to drop hot soup in her lap! They love it when I’m in the office.

Lessons Learnt

So what have I learnt from this experience:

• Working with an expert will save you time and bring you real results
• What seems like a dark art at first can be made simple by people who know what they are talking about
• Try things out; what’s the worst that can happen?

Now that we are moving up the Google search rankings we are feeling emboldened. More work was done on the SEO and performance of our site later that day, including working on our Google My Business and Pagespeed sites to improve things further. I will write a blog on them in the coming week as they are incredibly powerful.

What next?

Our SEO journey is just beginning and this is just one search result. There is a lot more work to be done and will require constant attention.

We are now writing the copy for our new website which will be coming soon. I can guarantee one thing though, the phrase ‘IT Support Biggleswade’ will definitely be featured. As well as that we are running more events to give our customers and business’ access to information and training about key IT services that can help them. You can find out more on our events page: www.node-it.com/events