By Frank Barnett, MABS
Emerson once famously said, “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” and many a business owner has followed that advice to a spectacularly quick demise. The simple fact is that it doesn’t matter how good your mousetrap is if nobody knows you’ve got one for sale.
Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, “being visible” meant taking out an ad in the newspaper or buying space in the local yellow pages. But this is 2009, and as you may have heard, times are not great for salesmen selling a ¼ page ad in either of those mediums. Whether you’re a veterinarian, retailer, a lawyer, a doctor, or even a church, you probably understand that the people you need to reach are looking for you online.
Unfortunately, that’s where most businesses stop. They hire someone to put up what amounts to an online yellow pages ad and wait for the phone to ring. Others, recognizing that there are billions of websites out there, will spend the extra money to make their site look good. In both cases, though, the business owner isn’t considering how to make sure their site gets seen.
So how do you make sure that website gets seen? If, as numerous statistics show, virtually all searchers give up after the first 2-3 pages of search results, how do you make sure your site is part of that top-ranking group?
The first step in answering that is to properly define what your website is and what it is not. First, your website is not a yellow pages ad. Your website is an outside salesperson. Their job is to get in front of potential clients or customers and convince them to do business with you.
There are three ways to get your website in front of potential clients and customers: SEO, SEM, and PPC. We’ll define each and explain the benefits of each.
SEO is primarily concerned with the code and architecture of your site, so that the search engines see that your site offers a relevant answer to your potential customers’ online searches. Without question, every site needs proper optimization when the site is built, and then ongoing efforts to keep your site in top performing condition. Your SEM efforts will deliver “link juice” to the site. If your site doesn’t distribute this in an optimal manner, even the best SEM efforts can have only a limited effect.
SEM overlaps with SEO, in that it’s concerned with building your site’s online reputation, through off-page marketing efforts and link-building campaigns – which the search engines do take into account when considering how highly to rank your site. In fact, over the past few years, the most accurate predictor of a site’s rank has been the number and diversity of off-page, inbound links.
Pay-per-Click marketing (PPC) is the third tool to get your site seen. Because Google has a market share of more than 80% of searches, this typically means their Adwords program, although Yahoo and MSN both have PPC programs, as well. PPC has many benefits, most importantly, of the three, it’s without question the fastest and most precisely measurable way to get customers and clients to your site. As a marketing initiative, the cost per conversion is dramatically less than virtually any other medium, including email, direct mail or newsletters. Its strengths are best leveraged for a two types of sites: sites that need highly targeted traffic, and sites that have a measurable conversion metric, such as a sale, a lead generation, or a registration. Sites without a measurable success point should probably avoid PPC marketing. Similar to a billboard, PPC will deliver “eyeballs,” but compared with longer-term strategies like SEO and SEM, that traffic is expensive.
While mastering these three tools can be pretty complex, there are a few basic steps anyone can do to help their websites rank. We’ve listed a few here to get you started:
SEO (On-Page Improvements):
- Do you know what keywords your customers are searching under?
- Do those keywords appear in your Title Tags (the title tag is what shows up on the very top of the browser when you’re looking at a website)?
- Do they also appear in your description tags (the page description often is what shows up on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) underneath your page title)?
- Do you use those keywords in the text on your homepage? How about on sub-pages?
- Do you use those keywords in the links on your page?
SEM (Off-Page Improvements):
- Do other sites link to you?
- Have you published any articles to popular article directories that link back to your site?
- Do you regularly participate in meaningful, substantive discussions relevant to your site’s main theme on message boards, with links back to your site?
- Do you comment on other blogs when they discuss topics relevant to your site’s main theme?
PPC:
- Do you know what keywords your customers are searching under?
- Avoid using “broad match” keywords. Instead, use phrase match, or – where possible – exact match keywords, as these are much more precise (and measurable) and typically much cheaper.
- Use negative keywords to eliminate irrelevant searches. For example, if advertizing computer keyboards, you’d want to eliminate musical keyboards or electric pianos.
- Constantly split test your ads in order to maximize not only click through rate, but also conversion rate.
- Above all, make sure your landing page has targeted content to deliver on the promises your advertisement is making.
These steps should get you started, and even a little time invested in internet marketing will get you ahead of much of your competition. However, if you’d like to really see what your site can do, you should look at what a professional can do. The search engines change their algorithms all the time and without notice – which can have a dramatic effect on your rankings and your PPC prices. It’s often well worth the investment to hire someone who spends their days working to optimize and promote sites and monitoring the latest search engine updates.
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