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I had a client email me this question today: “We are digging into how a customer can find us on the web if they don’t know us. Can you shed some quick light on what we should start thinking about?” Here is my quick reply: - In general you need to think about Google search as a “person”, not a crawler/indexing program. The days of meta tagging are dead. You can’t tell Google who you are - it reads your web site and decides this it’s self. Google reads each one of your pages and grades it on relevancy for a specific subject. Google also looks for how many inbound links you have to your site and compares that to your competition. So you need to have strong content and as many inbound links as you can to your site to raise in the search engines. Keep your web site fresh and current always. Doing a few press releases a year with web links is a great way to rise in Google search. - Google and 90% of all search engines index the pages to learn what your site is all about. So having a page dedicated to each key word is very important. For instance have a round table discussion internally and pick the top 5 keywords you want to rank for. Then created pages dedicated to these terms and add it to the site. You need to have a 5% keyword density for the keyword. Use it in the title tag exclusively, start each paragraph with it, etc. - Most people are online for an extended time so people are using Google (they have 70% of the market) instead of trade magazines, newspaper ads, radio, TV and phone books. What does this mean? Online ads work because they are seeing so many of them…. So buying your way to the top or a search engine results page, for any key word you don’t rank for, is a great investment. All online advertising is measurable. This means that if you purchase Google keyword searches you will be able to track which ones result in forms/quote requests being filled out and calls generated. So you are never paying for any advertising long term that does not have a measurable customer acquisition cost. With Google you will know that for every $1000 you spend you are getting XX amount of leads and track them to sales. If something does not work - you simply cut it off. Google Adwords = sales. - Organic, or free listings, will never stay at the top of the search result page long term. Google does not want people to see the same search results over and over again. Swank Martini has been lucky to rank #1 for “martini glasses” for over 2 years. I know it will not be that way for ever and we will be buying keywords searches (a.k.a Adwords) again soon. So having a 2 prong approach is best. Always strive for free search listings, but using Google ads should be a part of your marketing/advertising budget. - Google Analytics are very important to detailed stat tracking. It is free and easy to install. The whole market is gone this way for reporting. Google purchased Urchin a few years back and made it their stats package. We can install in 2-3 hours if you need us to. Google Analytics tell you where your traffic is coming from, what part of the country and world, when etc. It is the tool that we use to track what keywords people use to find your site, what pages they visit and which keywords bring you sales, form requests and calls to your sales staff. We go very deep with this technology - it allows us to measure what marketing efforts work and which do not. If you have any question email ian@toledo.com. |
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