section of homepage from Puroclean Columbus' website

Everyone wants their website to show up on page 1 of Google, but not every website is worthy of being in that position.

There's a lot to that process, and the more competitive your product or service is, the harder it is to get there.

But we managed to do that for Rick Gutridge's Puroclean franchise here in Columbus. He's now appearing on page one for a couple of his key search terms.

As you might imagine, our industry: Columbus Ohio web design folks, is competitive because so many of them know what they're doing. But we're constantly working on that process, and that is one of they keys: to constantly work on that process. We blog about web design and SEO, while using our critical keywords like Columbus Ohio web design, and Columbus Ohio website design.

Getting visitors to your site isn't enough.

One of the best ways to do that is to continually blog, post on social media, and send out e-newsletters that people want to read. The bottom line is to get visitors to your site, and once there, make it worth their while. Making your site worthy of your visitors' time, goes a long way to making your site worthy of ranking well on Google.

Even if you get people to your site, if they don't stay there for a few minutes, that works against you. Two of the big things Google looks at to determine if your site is worthy of being on page 1 is:

  • the number of people visiting your website
  • how long someone is on your site
  • how many pages they visited while there

But there's more.

To see more of what Google looks for to determine how good your site is, see this info graphic called Website Stress Test we put together here. When the image opens in the browser window, you can click it once more to enlarge it.

Another thing that isn't on the list of the info graphic, is the copy on your website.

Columbus Restoration Services is a franchise of the national company, Puroclean. Columbus Restoration Services picked up the text for the new site we did from the parent company's website. A seemingly reasonable thing to do, right?

Wrong.

Why?

Because Google doesn't like duplicate text on websites.

So if one (or more ) of the Columbus franchisees put their parent company's copy on their site, one can assume that same scenario has repeated itself hundreds of times around the county by other franchisees in dozens of other cities. Now, you have a hundred of websites with the same copy.

And when Google inevitably finds that out, it penalizes all but the original website.

Which is why you shouldn't copy content from any website, because you might not be the only one doing that. If you like someone else's content, reinterpret it in your own words, incorporating your own experiences, and make it your own.

If you do that, and do it well, you might even have people linking to your website because you have good content.

And that is what Content Marketing is all about. And it's what we just did in this sentence: linking to another website that has great content we want to share.

Yes, we could have put that website's content on our website, but we couldn't have said it better than they did. Plus, we wanted you to see there is actually an organization called "Content Marketing Institute" dedicated to this exact practice.

Now they have one more link back to their website from us. And if we do it, we can assume hundreds of other bloggers may well have done it, too. Which means hundreds more link backs to the Content Marketing Institute's website. Bonus points for them.

Want to apply this to your website?

Then lets start a conversation today. Email us here, and we'd be glad to share some of the secrets to getting your website moving up the ranks in Google.