Getting your equestrian business found online can be hard. Particularly getting your equestrian website onto the first page of Google. Search engines are businesses too, and they want to provide their ‘customers’ with the best experience. They will rank websites that have more users, more site links and more content, higher than those that don’t as this is more likely to answer their ‘customer’s needs.

However, there are some things you can do to improve your visibility online. We call it search marketing and there are two types; organic, and paid search results.

Organic

Your organic or free search results are built through SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is the process of optimising your equestrian website to increase the quantity and quality of your website traffic and thus making your equestrian website appear in a high position in search results. The rankings of these search results are determined by Googles algorithm. Google determines your rankings in two categories. On-page factors and off-page factors.

Making sure your equestrian business can be found on google
On-Page
  • Site speed – Make your equestrian website fast. Google scores down slow websites. You can check your site speed through your Goggle Analytics
  • The structure of your site. Is your horse website easy to follow and read?
  • Page optimisation.
  • Research the keywords you want to rank for and use those.
  • Google likes sites that can be read and navigated on all devices.
Off-Page
  • Social media. An active social media linking to your website can boost your SEO.
  • Directory links. Google will register that you have a legitimate business by the number of high-quality links to your website.
  • Featured articles. If you can get yourself featured in an online magazine. Most online magazines love free content. Offer to write them an article. For example, if you are a stud farm offer to write an article on horse breeding tips. Always ask them to link back to your website.
  • External blogs

Top Tip – Use Google my business if you do not already! It’s a free tool to manage your business and is a great way for Google to confirm you’re a business.

Paid

Your paid search results are those that come from Google Ads, formally known as Google Adwords. These are great to get initial interest in your website but are usually unsustainable unless you have a million-dollar budget.

Benefits of using Google Ads :

  • Top of Google search results
  • Very targeted
  • Attract new customers
  • Only pay per click
  • Fast results

New Websites

When a new horse website goes live on the internet, it can take some time for the website to be recognised by search engines. Unfortunately, nobody can say how long this might take, be it days, weeks or longer. This is because your horse website has no history and search engines do not know how reliable or accurate your new website’s content is to the original search. Therefore, when a new website goes live it needs some help proving to search engines algorithms that it is credible.

There are a few things you can do to speed up the visibility of your website on search engines in comparison to leaving them to appear organically.

  • Set up and run Google Ads for the first few months
  • Create business listings to trusted websites like YellowPages and Yelp
  • Install Yoast and optimise your website
  • Set up Google Analytics to review your progress

If you would like us to help improve your visibility on Google, please contact us here.