You can find your website but can anybody else?
“Used wisely it can be priceless, used poorly and its a waste of time.”
Today most small and medium sized companies have a website. Some because they think they should, some because others have and some because they think it will positively contribute to their business. But many have a website and then just leave it expecting that it will start to provide benefits to their company.
Maybe it will generate business leads, maybe it will carry out online transactions or maybe its purpose is to get visitors to subscribe for a service. Unfortunately the most likely outcome is that it will provide none of these and the owner will become disappointed with the website and disillusioned with the internet.
The one fundamental fact that many some business owners don’t realise is that a website is not something you create and leave. It is something that is created and then it needs to develop as your business grows. You need to continually work at improving your website – it is a dynamic marketing tool that if used wisely can provide tremendous benefits to your business.
One of the main reasons for the disappointment is that, apart from you, very few people know it exists. Certainly your potential customers don’t know of its existence and yet this is precisely your targeted market that you’re trying to reach. If you don’t appear high up in the search engine rankings for the key phrases that describe your service or product then your potential customers aren’t going to find you. What’s worse is they are going to find your competitors.
In the search engine results the top 3 pages receive 90% of all enquiries for a particular search phrase. The top page with positions 1 to 10 receives almost 80% more enquiries that those in positions 11 – 30 receive.
So how do you gain visibility high up in the search engines?
Well, although competitive, it is something that can be achieved by most small and medium sized companies. You don’t have to be a multi-national company with a large marketing budget. You just need to spend your marketing budget wisely and if carried out professionally it can be a very cost-effective form of marketing with a large return on investment.
The traditional approach is search engine optimisation which is a technique to raise your profile in the search engine rankings for particular phrases that refer directly to the types of services and products that you provide. Google looks at over 100 factors when it works out how to rank each individual web page of a website. Each of these factors is weighted and some are inter-related with their weightings. The higher the score your page receives the higher up the rankings you appear.
Some companies assume they know the precise phrases to target by guessing whilst a professional will not only identify the precise phrases used to find your product or service but also which are the most competitive.
A company website is such a valuable marketing company asset if used wisely. Even more so currently, when some of your competitors aren’t aware of the opportunities they are missing. Just make sure that it’s not you who is missing the opportunity. Visit Website DNA’s search engine optimisation page.
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