For new storage facility websites, being found online is a high priority. You’ve put the work in to make your site look good, easy to navigate, and worthwhile for new customers to read, but you still aren’t being found online. Fortunately for you, the fix for this is often free and relatively easy to put together. All it takes is adding a sitemap to your website.
At its core, a sitemap is a list of all visible pages that readers and search engines can access on your website. A sitemap has two versions that you will want to create: HTML and XML.
To help customers view a simplified list of your entire website, you will use the HTML sitemap. This gives site visitors the ability to get to pages quickly instead of having to jump around to find what they need. To help search engines, you will need to create the XML sitemap. While it does give search engines the ability to find all of the pages on your website, it also shows them all of the pages that need to be indexed.
What “indexing” means is that major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! can crawl your website without difficulty in order to find relevant information for search terms. By using an XML sitemap, the chances of your content or a webpage being found for specific keywords will increase, which improves online visibility.
Additionally, a sitemap can work as a guide for website developers putting your website together, allowing you to define what pages you want showing up first and what pages you want within (sub-pages). Websites like MindMeister and Slickplan are easy to use and can help you build collaborative guidelines to keep the website construction process moving along.
Improved viewing, better site indexing, and streamlined web development all give your website better user experience, which keeps customers coming back to your website day after day.
