Search Engine Optimisation for Courier Websites

Search Engine Optimisation is a very dark art, and everyone who claims to be an expert in it will tell you that everything you’ve been told by another expert is complete rubbish.

Even so, it’s probably worth listing some of the things you can do to your own courier business website to help it get to the top of the search results on Google and other search engines.

Why bother? Because most people in business nowadays look for suppliers on Google. So being there for them on the first results page is worthwhile, as it mean more enquiries for your courier services.

Everything mentioned here is free to do, though a lot of it looks quite tedious if you’re not into websites. There are lots of people who will offer to do it all for you. If you want to pay a consultant for these SEO services, try to find someone who comes recommended by someone you trust.

Know your key searches phrases.

Success in SEO starts with knowing your business, and knowing what your potential customers are likely to enter in the search engine to try to find a business like yours. Start by making a list of all the things you’d like to be found under. eg “Couriers in Manchester”, “AOG parts courier” “Delivery Services in Runcorn” and so on. Do some searching, and see what you have to enter in Google to get your kind of company to the top of the results. It’s worth trying some phrases that are less obvious as well, as the obvious ones are usually quite crowded, with everyone trying to optimise their website for those phrases. Less obvious ones may be things like “Couriers near Cambourne Business Park”, if that’s near you, rather than just Cambourne or Cambridge.

Get your website content right.

Then write your index page content around those key phrases. ie rewrite the text on your website, deliberately including all those key phrases. If your website has headings (h1 and h2) these are worth turning into key phrases. You need to strike a balance between it sounding stilted when read by a real human being and it being good for Google to understand.

Get your meta tags right.

When you’ve done that, add a one-line description of your business to your meta-tags, which includes some of those phrases. And, although some SEO experts will tell you it’s pointless, add your key phrases to your meta-tag keywords.

Page Titles.

Change your page titles to your key phrases. Have a separate web page for every location you want to be found. eg Couriers in Manchester, Couriers in Oldham, etc. Try to find phrases which go a little bit beyond the norm, especially in big cities. “Couriers in Manchester” or “Couriers in London”, even on the best optimised site, will have quite a lot of competition for first page listing.

Alt Tags.

Add your key phrases to alt tags on your images, varying them between pages.

Inbound links.

Search engines like you to be popular, and that means having links in high traffic websites to your site, and lots of them. If you have fellow contacts in the industry, ask them to swap a link with you. Write articles on ‘expert’ sites, and put a link at the bottom of the article to your site. List yourself on as many free directories as you can find. It’s well worth the time it takes.

Submit yourself to search engines.

When you’ve done all of the above, submit your site to the top search engines (ie Google and Bing). To find out how to do this, just Google it!

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