How to use google search to help grow your business

Make the best of Google’s search features to expand your business’s reach

Key highlights:

• Ranking on page 1 of Google search is the key to getting traffic to your website

• Great content has the potential to rank higher on Google

• Take advantage of the My Business Account feature to be visible to nearby customers

If you are thinking of expanding your steel business and want to acquire new customers digitally, a website is the first place to start. But how do you get prospective customers to discover your website and visit it? The answer is simple: optimise Google search.

Billions of people use Google every day to research a variety of products and services. For example, if you manufacture steel bearings, you would want to be visible to customers searching for ‘steel bearing manufacturers’ on Google search, wouldn’t you? Here’s how you can make that happen.

How Google search works: 101

Google innumerable documents in its search index. When a user searches for ‘steel bearing manufacturers’, it retrieves relevant content (websites, web pages, videos, ads, businesses etc) and shows it to you as search results. The search results are ranked in order of relevance, automated by a complex algorithm. 

Most users don’t look beyond the first page of results, which is a listing of the 10 most relevant web pages matching a query. Now, if you don’t rank among these 10 results, the likelihood of you getting a lot of traffic from the search term ‘steel bearing manufacturers’ is minuscule. 

So, the objective is always to try and rank in the top 10 results of Google search for queries that are relevant to you.

How to improve your ranking on Google search?

How does Google rank a website or a web page in relation to a user query? One of the most important factors (but not the only one, mind you) is the content of your website. This could be in the form of blogs, articles, videos, etc...

Do you have content that is relevant to the query ‘steel bearing manufacturers’ or any other, applicable key terms? Is that content unique? Is it better in quality than other websites that already rank in the top 10? Is the content updated regularly? These are a few points to keep in mind when improving your search-ability. 

While there are many steps that you can take to improve your ranking, building great content should be the first. 

Starting your content journey

Where should you start your content journey? While there are several good third-party tools, we would recommend that you start with the Google Keyword Planner. You can access this by creating a free Google Adwords account with any Gmail ID. The planner will help you narrow down on the kind of terms that users type into Google. For example, ‘steel bearing manufacturer’ has lower than 10 global searches a month, while ‘steel bearings’ and ‘steel ball bearings’ have anywhere between 100 and 1000 searches per month. The planner also gives you other keyword suggestions related to your business: ‘stainless steel bearings’, ‘metal ball bearings’ etc. 

Once you have a list of keywords, type them into Google and look at the sites or pages that rank for those search terms. You can take cues from those sites and create better or more valuable content than them. Intelligently written and regularly updated content will translate into more traffic and, eventually, more customers.

More ways to grow with Google

Beyond Google Search, there are many other aspects that customers may consider before making a decision to reach out. Therefore it is necessary to cover all your bases, so that customers believe in the legitimacy of your business. The first step is to list your business on Google.