Right now, people are looking for auctions like yours – but they can’t find you.

Let’s do an experiment. Open up an ‘incognito window’ in your browser. Do a Google search for an auction business that is similar to your own. Type “farm equipment auction North Dakota,” or “estate sales Atlanta, Georgia,” or maybe “industrial machinery auction Cincinnati, Ohio.” Just type whatever it is that briefly describes what you do, and where you’re located. Did your website come up? Are you at the top of the list? Are you perhaps buried on the fourth page of search results? If you’re not showing up, you’re missing out on potential buyers and sellers and your business is paying the price.

Well, now that our experiment is done, I am going to introduce you to the most important acronym in the website development world today: SEO. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, refers to strategies used to enhance the presence of a website in search results. By using the right words and phrases, and putting them in the right places, you can get yourself on page one of search results (if not the very top)!

Here are some basic tips for making your website competitive:

Metadata

This is information that is not publicly visible on your website, but it is still crucial. For example, if your site is built on WordPress, they allow for you to enter up to 270 characters that are pertinent to the specific page you are creating. They then automatically assign those characters to meta-tags. These are used by search engines (e.g., Google), to identify what kind of content is on the given page.

Keywords/phrases

These are pretty self explanatory. These are words and phrases that describe what you do, where you are located, your specialties, etc. For a report of which phrases are working for you, utilize online tools like WooRank. These tools rate the effectiveness of your phrases. Additionally, you can see what’s working for your competitors. That way, you can adjust your phrases in order to rank at the same level as them in search results.

New Content

This is critical to maintaining your status in search results. Search engines will take into consideration how old the content is on any given website. The engines will them rate it accordingly. The logic behind this is that they don’t want to offer up old, stale sites as they are likely not applicable to a given search. Keeping your upcoming auctions current, or including a simple blog are easy ways of maintaining the health of your site.

Mobile Responsiveness

Mobile responsiveness has become a necessity in today’s age. As you know, everyone these days is searching the web on their phones and/or tablets. If your site cannot adapt its content to properly display on different screen sizes, it is a more difficult user experience. Even more importantly, the algorithm used by search engines is designed to weed out non-responsive sites and rank them below more responsive sites. These days, all website development supports responsivity for these exact reasons.

Conclusion

I know, this may sound complex. However, I urge you not to get scared off. Speak to your website developer or tech guru. Ask them what they’re doing in the above categories to help your SEO. Or better yet, ask them to show you how you can manage your site by yourself. Or better still (cue the shameless plug), enlist a professional website development company such as Auction Services to build and manage an SEO enhanced website for you. Whatever you do, protect the future of your business by taking responsibility for the health of your website.