You’ve spent a lot of time and money to get your company’s web site designed to represent your business in a way that potential customers can’t resist. So, after all of that, how come you’re not getting any business from it? Surely a decent percentage of people who visit your site will become customers. So where are they?
The sad truth is that they probably never get to your web site at all because they can’t find it. If you have a business-to-business or business-to-consumer web site, you can’t afford to ignore the impact search engines have on generating traffic to your site ... or to your competitors’ sites.
How Important Are Search Engines?
To become your customers, Internet users have to be able to find you on the web. They do this through a few avenues:
• Typing your site into their browser • Linking to you from hyperlinks on other web sites • Looking in national web directories like Yahoo, LookSmart and Open Directory, and local directories like NJOnline • Looking in search engines like Google, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, AOL Search and MSN Search Typing your site’s address is great if they have your business card or have been explicitly told about your business and your site.
Links from other web sites are a good source of visitors to your site, too, but a high proportion of them visit you more out of curiosity than from a motivation to patronize your business.
Web directories are confusing to many people, and are most conducive to a casual exploration of a topic, such as a hobby or local points of interest.
Search engines, on the other hand deliver targeted customers to your web site. Why? Because those visitors get to your site by actively searching for your product or service. They entered a search term like “Blue Widgets” or “Dyslexia Tutors in NJ”. They’re at your site because they looked not specifically for your business, but for what your business can do for them.
Studies have borne out the value of search engines for business web sites:
• Search engines create more awareness about web sites than all advertising combined including banner ads, newspapers, TV, and radio (source: www.IMTStrategies.com
• Users spend more time searching the internet and looking for product information than any other Internet activity besides email (source: www.sriresearch.com
• The most effective way to generate web site traffic is through search engines (source: www.webcmo.com
You may not realize that the reason you’re not getting business from your web site is simply because people can’t find it. After spending all that time and money creating an attractive web site, that’s a real shame! Let’s explore that a little.
How Does a Typical Customer Use a Search Engine?
Suppose someone is looking for a criminal defense attorney. If they search for “Attorneys”, Google returns 2½ million web sites! (As overwhelming as that seems, it’s better than the 3½ million hits returned if they had searched for “Lawyers”!) Either way, that’s too many to wade through, and it doesn’t take the user long to realize that. Not only that, but it’s chock full of lawyers from across the country and around the world, who would be too remote for this user’s needs.
Next, the user will probably narrow the search down geographically and search for “NJ attorneys”. That narrows the list down to “only” 135,000 sites. Still too many. And there are lots of divorce attorneys, real estate lawyers, patent attorneys, and business lawyers, all of which are no use to out hapless seeker.
Faced with this glut of useless results, the user is likely to narrow the search one step further and look for “criminal defense attorneys in NJ”. This reduces the list to about 15,000 hits, which is a much more manageable number. Now, if you’re a criminal defense attorney and your web site ranks #125 in this list, isn’t that great? You’re in the top 1% of the list!
Sorry! Close, but no cigar. Users generally quit after examining the first three pages, or about the top 30 sites in the list. Few have the patience or tenacity to keep drilling further down the list looking for your site. If you’re #125, most users stop looking before they get 1/4 of the way to your listing!
The trick is to configure your web site so that the search engines will rank you somewhere in the top 30 listings for your important keywords. A NJ criminal defense attorney for whom we’ve done search engine positioning currently ranks #3 on this list, which we consider a superb result.
Conduct A Simple Test Every business that has a web site should conduct a simple test to see how users find them on the Internet. Think like a customer who wants your most important or most profitable product or service but doesn’t know the name of your business. Go into any of the major search engines and try to look up your own web site just like that customer would.
Does your web site show up in the first 30 listings? Is it in the first three pages of results? If not, customers aren’t finding you. People don’t have the patience to scroll through page after page of listings to find your business.
For potential customers to find your site, you need to get it into the top 30 listings on most of your important keywords in most of the important search engines. And the way to do that is with search engine positioning.
How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?
Where you rank in the search engines is a function of basically two things: Relevance and Reputation.
Relevance has to do with on-page changes to your web site to ensure the search engines can tell it’s relevant for the keywords people use when searching for your products or services. There are many techniques that can be employed to improve your relevance, most of which involve changing the visible text on your page as well as invisible text on your site. It used to be that you could improve your ranking by entering all of the important keyword search terms in an invisible “meta tag” that search engines would read. So many web sites have abused that through “over-redundant” repetitions of words that most major search engines ignore the keyword meta tag and rely on the actual content of your site to determine what key words and phrases are important.
Reputation is measured by your “link popularity” – essentially the number and quality of other web sites that link to yours. An active effort to find suitable web sites that are related to your topics and getting them to link to you is essential to gaining high rankings for your site.
You Can Do it Yourself It’s possible to do your own search engine optimization. You’ll have some learning to do and you should be prepared to do continual research on the changing search engine algorithms. Each month, it seems, one or another of the major search engines changes the way it ranks sites and you need to watch for that to keep your site in the top rankings.
You’ll also need to work diligently to bring in new links from high quality web sites. While it takes time and effort to do an effective job, the payoff is undeniable. There are several books available that can help you optimize your own site. A search on Google or Amazon can find many.
If It Sounds Too Good To Be True . . .
If you decide to hire someone else to optimize your site, there are increasing numbers of organizations that will promise to bring targeted traffic to your web site. But examine their offers closely before you send them your money.
A client recently referred me to a web site he’d learned about from an email. Let’s examine their claims critically because you’ll see similar claims from many of these services.
Over 1500 Search Engines ... $49 – About 92% of all search engine activity occurs in the top three search engines (Gogle, Yahoo and MSN/Live). The rest are usually topic-specific or localized (like “Yahoo - France”). It probably doesn’t actually HURT you to be in 1500 search engines, but it really doesn’t help either. They only submit to 1500 so they can put a large number in their ads.
Traffic Boost: GUARANTEED appearance in the TOP Search Engines in 10 days or less! – There are a couple of things to note about this claim. First, they guarantee “appearance”. If your site ranks #14,500 out of 15,000 listings, you “appear” in the listing. Does it drive any traffic to your web site? Not at all.
Second they guarantee your appearance in 10 days or less. There may be some search engines where that’s the case, but most search engines take between 2 and 10 weeks before your optimized pages are reflected in their rankings.
Perhaps this company means they will submit your site to these search engines within ten days. But you will seldom see any results within ten days. That’s just reality.
Site is Re-indexed every 48 hrs for 12 months (for an extra fee) – They explain that this means any changes you make to your site will be sent to the search engines within two days. The term “re-indexed” is a misnomer, as the search engines re-index on their own schedules, and most re-index on a 2-4 week frequency. Further investigation reveals that this 48-hour "re-indexing" is really simply an automated resubmission of your site. Some search engines will spot this trend and consider it spamming. If they do, you're likely to be dropped from that search engine, which you definitely don’t want to happen.
This organization really does nothing more than provide automated submission to search engines for your site. There are many similar services out there and they are universally inadequate to drive focused traffic to your site.
What to Look For If You Want Someone Else to Do It For You If you decide to pay someone to market your web site, look for a number of features:
• Do they work with you to identify the important and powerful keyword phrases to target for your site?
• Do they report to you on how you rank on your important keywords in the different search engines before they suggest changes to your site?
• Do they optimize your site (or work with your webmaster to do it) so you rank highly on your important keywords in the important search engines?
• Do they submit your site carefully so you won’t get penalized for spamming?
• Do they bring in high quality links from relevant web sites?
• Do they submit effectively to directories like The Open Directory?
• After your site has been optimized and submitted to search engines, can they report on how you’re doing in terms of moving up or down and retaining your good positions over time?
• Can they keep your site in the top listings for your essential keywords?
Summary Effective web site marketing through search engine optimization can make a world of difference to your business. Results are not immediate, but we normally see dramatic differences within about three months. Search engine optimization is well worth the time and trouble if you do it properly. It translates into new customers and increased revenue for your business.
Make Your Web Site Pay Off - To learn more about this author, visit Bill Treloar's Website.
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