Marketing: It's Time for Search Engine Optimization

 

Do you have any idea how many visitors your website is getting each day? If you search Google for your company name is your company the top listing, or even on the first page - or is one of your competitors?

 

Think that can't happen? Try it. Later.

Let's keep going. How much did you spend on trade shows last year? How much will you spend on sales travel, marketing brochures, promotional items?

Now, how much are you spending on keeping your website up to date? How much on Google Adwords? How much on search engine optimization? If you answered the last three along the lines of "don't know", "adwords?" and "search engine optimization?".....your business is about to take off!

A couple of years ago I discovered something stunning. Our website was delivering more qualified leads than our sales organization and more than all of our other marketing campaigns combined. In total it was costing us $100/month on Google Adwords and a couple of hours/week tweaking keywords, content and site format.

What were we doing really well? Making sure our website was highly visible to searchers using the major search engines, particularly Google. What is highly visible? Think about it - how often do you ever go beyond the first or second page of search results? How about   - NEVER?

Through search engine optimization - tailoring the content of our website to the interests of those in our industry - not in our company - we were attracting qualified potential buyers to us. Instead of shotgunning our marketing dollars all over the place to unqualified, non-buyers we were focusing directly on those with the direct for need for what we were selling.

When thinking about how to get the most from your website, I've found some of these to be helpful:

• there is no 'front door' to a website - via search engines, visitors will be attracted to individual pages on your site - you need to make sure all of your pages deliver the appropriate buying experience
• learn to think the way your customers think (hmm, isn't that marketing??) - provide content that matches the language searchers use to find your content
• get a great web site statistics package to monitor visitors to your site - that way you'll know who's coming to your site, why they're coming to your site, why they're leaving your site and what they're doing when they're on your site - then you can make your site experience even better
• web site designers design web sites - unfortunately, very few of them are great at optimizing websites for the search engines -  get a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant and don't let your designer interfere with what your expert is recommending, even if your site isn't quite as beautiful as your designer would like

While optimizing a company's website for the search engines is hardly a new science, it has surprisingly little penetration beyond a few successful and forward thinking companies. Now is a good time to start.

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