Ranking their websites well in search engines results is a continuing challenge for any business, particularly these days for suppliers of goods and services in the oil and gas sector – a lucrative and highly competitive marketplace.
Obtaining a contract to supply coal, oil, gas, and other mining and exploration companies can be worth millions of dollars to providers of equipment, manpower and maintenance to these industry sectors. If your website does not target them specifically with quality graphical and written content, then you a leaving money on the table.
Website Content and the Search Engines
Search engines, such as Google, index and rank web pages according to an algorithm or formula for measuring relevance, popularity and authority – and these algorithms constantly change. Various factors can lead to top rankings in search results but the ranking criteria is closely guarded by the search engines.
Google, however, has clearly identified some guidelines which can improve search rankings or search engine optimisation (SEO). The SEO guidelines mention technical elements that Google looks for in search results, such as technical website elements and website content qualities. And it is the latter that we will focus on here.
Understanding search engines
Google and other search engines strive to provide the most relevant search results and the best user site experience for their users. Thus, web pages that rank well must be fresh, unique and responsive to the search query.
Keywords and Semantics
Keyword usage is an important indicator of relevance as search engines ordinarily display web pages containing exact matches of words or phrases entered in the search query box. A web page must have the right keywords incorporated in the best places where search engines tend to crawl such as the title tag, headers, links and alt attributes of images.
Website pages and blog/news posts should also contain a keyword, but, importantly, should contain other relevant terms (the semantics) that a person might expect to find in relation to the industry being targeted.
For instance, if you sell generators or conveyors, and you are targeting mining companies, then you would not just talk about generators or conveyors in general: specifications, models etc. Rather, you would have terms like ‘generators for coal mines’ or ‘conveyors that have been used in iron ore loading facilities’, and ‘conveyors to speed up loading at port facilities’.
Quality content
With ongoing algorithm modifications that are programmed to demote rankings of web pages containing duplicate content and content farms, the first step for a small business website to compete online is through developing quality, original written content that is unique and useful to Internet users.
Experienced content writers will know how to weave targeted keywords and semantics into well researched and well-written articles. The more professional providers (like us!) go even further by checking for duplicate wordings that may result in poor SEO – ensuring the delivery of all-original content.
Written content is an ideal first step to ensuring that ongoing material is feeding your website, blogs and social sites with fresh, unique and relevant content. A great start is for a website to have at least one news-based or authority post published weekly, along with two nich-related shorter articles which may be leveraged further through social – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Website Reviews
If your business is attempting to land supply or service contracts to shipping, mining, oil or gas companies, then you really need to take a good hard look at your website. Does your website copy make it quite clear that you supply to these industries?
I’m happy to take a quick look at your site to see if this is so, and to point out if improvements are needed. Just fill in your details in the box to the right.
If you already know that your website does not meet these content requirements, then I can also provide a complete website site content review that will outline exactly the changes I think are needed – fully costed.
Good luck with landing one of those lucrative mining, oil or gas projects!
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