A very powerful free tool for your business is your Google My Business listing. Being right at the heart of Google itself, it is an essential ranking signal for local SEO and when you gain some of those magical 5* reviews, it will help attract new clients to your business.   

What is Google My Business?

A free resource that allows you to manage your online presence throughout Google Local results in a comprehensive manner. This presence includes your business details within search and on Google Maps. You can add a myriad of details to your listing including opening hours, images and videos and contact details. You can interact with your customers by responding to their reviews, you can add content to share, information about your products and use your listing to launch adverts.

Choosing high quality directories to list your website on is an important first step to raising your visibility online.  Google uses this in their algorithms to help rank your website and of course this will also help direct more people to your business.  There are several things that you need to consider:

The speed of your website became an important ranking factor with Google a few years ago, but increasingly evidence shows that Google have made it an important part of their ranking algorithm. Here as long ago as 2010 it was discussed on the Google webmaster blog:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

And it is not only Google which takes page load speed into account – so do your users. Research shows that the longer a user has to wait for a page to load, the lower the number of users that will wait for it to load, and then stay on that page. Repeated slow page loads will soon push them away from your website, and they won’t be buying from you.