Well, just when you think you have done all you can to optimise your site for search, along comes news of the renewed popularity of an album called “Mice & rats in the loft” by Jan Dukes de Grey in case you’re interested I hang my head in defeat wondering why artists cannot write songs about fluffy animals instead of pests!
It’s not just in work that I have this problem. Recently I was searching the big wide web on Florence (the city – and my honeymoon destination) when on the first page of Google there were results for Florence & the Machine (music band) – not what I was after. Do you get my point?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) becomes that much more difficult when search engines throw up results for pest associated terms that are actually nothing to do with pest control (e.g. The Rat Pack – mentioned in a previous blog post, Wasps Rugby Club, etc.), which means that:
a) we have greater competition to appear high up in the results and
b) it is more difficult for potential customers to find & visit our website and take advantage of our services.
The aim of SEO is to make your site as clear and as relevant as possible to what people are searching for when they want your products and services. This will help results of your site to appear higher up on a results page (ideally on page 1 – most people don’t tend to look further on) than other less relevant websites and thus hopefully encourage people to click through to your website.
Quick example about ants. When people search using the term ‘ants’ they could be a school student doing some research for homework or a fan of “Adam & the Ants” and either way, we (as Rentokil) cannot compete with the millions of results a term like ‘ants’ or ‘ant’ can produce on the internet. We have to be smarter than that!
We research what terms people actually use to find our site and tailor our relevant web page to those particular key terms/ phrases so there is a much higher probability that a Rentokil ad appears near the top of the search page. There are various tools to help us do this. We then ensure that we tailor our webpage to meet the demands of what people are looking for when they want a service like ours with this and other keywords identified.
Unfortunately this exercise will constantly need to be repeated and reviewed as people (and our competitors) get more search savvy and if we continue to have people, films, tv, music bands, etc. jumping on the (pest) band wagon – if you know what I mean.
And so, my SEO battle continues……
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