Every few months on of our clients will inevitably receive an email which says something like,
Our guess is that they can also sell you some swamp land for a cheap price in Florida . . .
Often, business owners are lured by the sound of this advertising pitch.
It brings up the old fear of is my website getting enough traffic that many business owners have about their website presence. The problem with this pitch is search engine optimization needs to be as customized as your business cards.
A one-stop-fits-all approach doesn’t work and never will, but you could waste a lot of money going down this dead-end road.
We hate to be the bearer of some tough love here, but just because you build a website, it doesn’t mean that people will automatically come see it. It still goes back to Marketing 101 and your website is just one more piece of your marketing plan.
Basic Marketing First
The first thing we ask our clients when it comes to search engine love is
“who are the people you want to serve with your website?”
Is it existing clients, other businesses, new clients, prospects? Are they predominately male or female? Are they married, single, or divorced? Are they under the age of 18, over 55 years old? Where do they live? How much money do they make? Think about your best clients – because these types of clients are the ones that you want to bring more of into your business.
How did your best clients find you?
Keyword Research
If a business owner can tell us who their perfect client is, then we research what keyword phrases that client will use to find their business website.
Will they be looking for a particular business in a certain city location? Are they price driven? Do they want to only deal with a local business?
We also advise the business owner to ask their best clients how they heard of their business, and even ask them what search terms they might use to find their business. You might be surprised at what your clients tell you.
We take the above information plus other ideas we have, and we perform searches for these terms in Google, Bing, and Yahoo to test how a business site is ranking in search. If we are building a new website, then we use this search for testing to see if the competition shows up where you’d like your business website to be.
This is just a small sample of the work we do in making sure your website shows up when potential clients search for you. There are other important factors like writing your web content, page titles and section headings with your key words in mind. There’s also social search and how regular updates to your website can influence search results.
Local Search
Where business owners get lost on the search concept is when they want front page results for a generic keyword phrases like wedding consultant, a term that brings back 1.4 million results in Google. Can you really be a wedding consultant to the world, or is it better if your clients find you under the term Hawaii wedding consultants, or Hawaiian Island wedding planners or even more specific with Maui weddings?
With these last three search terms we take a search return from Google of 1.4 million choices down to under 320k. It’s easier to compete with the 320 thousand for front page placement than 1.4 million.
For arguments sake, let’s say you did end up on the front page for wedding consultants, would it do your business any good for 30,000 women in South America to hit your website when you cannot help them?
Why drive traffic to your business website for the sake of driving traffic?
All that does is use up bandwidth and slow your website down for those clients you want to find you.
What good is first page placement in Google for a term if it drives traffic you can’t use? You may as well just burn your money for all the good it will do.
And without knowing you, your business or anything about your clients, how is it exactly these companies can promise you page one search placement without meeting you?
Even Google offers its own search engine advise for free at Google Webmaster Central Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
So don’t buy what those search engine emails are selling, okay? Call us at 707-578-1390 if you aren’t getting the search results you’re looking for.
Our continued success to you,
