Profile Problems

If you have a website, it’s a pretty safe bet that one of your major concerns will be getting it to feature higher in Google’s rankings. This is a complex and constantly evolving subject, known as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), which can be baffling to the newcomer, with its language of ‘meta tags,’ ‘long-tail keywords’ and other mysterious concepts. To really get to grips with this, you might require the services of a professional, but there’s one crucial aspect which you can easily sort out for yourself, because it requires no specialist knowledge whatsoever.

If you’re running a business, you’ve probably registered your details on a variety of online directories at various times, including Google My Business – if you’re not on this one, it should be top of your to-do list, but that’s a subject for another blog.

Now here’s the key point: if you’ve been signing up to different directories over a period of time, your contact details might well have changed since you started, and you might not have gone back and updated every entry. In that case, Google will see the inconsistencies, and consider you ‘untrustworthy,’ downgrading your ranking as a result!

It’s that simple – something as basic as an old phone number on an apparently insignificant local directory could be sabotaging your SEO. So if your site is failing to rank, despite your best efforts, this could be part (or all) of the problem. Time spent reviewing and updating your various online business profiles could prove massively beneficial.