Improve Website Ranking: Ensure Customers Find You in Google
With 72% of total searches, Google continues to dominate the search engine market. According to the January Search Engine Report from Experian Hitwise, Yahoo received just under 15% of total searches, Bing almost 9%, and Ask about 2.5%. The numbers indicate that Google continues to grow, expanding its market share significantly over its competitors. With numbers like that it is well worth investing in competitive search engine optimization and website conversion enhancements so you can capture the business opportunities present within the ever-growing Google search engine marketplace.
Many of you may feel that it is just too far reaching to consider investing in search engine optimization for the chance to appear on page one of Google for the keywords and phrases that would reach your target purchasing professionals. With Americans alone conducting more than 14 billion searches per month, and, according to comScore's December 2009 search engine ranking report, almost 10 billion of those associated with Google sites, it just makes sense to do what is necessary to help your potential customers find you in the very places they are searching.
Still not convinced? Consider this: the US economy has grown steadily for the past nine consecutive months. The manufacturing sector, according to the January 2010 Manufacturing ISM Report on Business, has experienced consistent growth for the past six consecutive months. That means production continues to increase and services and supplies are needed – your services and supplies are needed!
There is virtually no chance of attracting business from Google search if your website's pages are buried deep within it. More and more sourcing professionals are turning to Google and industrial search engines to uncover companies that can provide them with what they need. So it is markedly advantageous to ensure your web pages are "searchable" and easily found in both.
Budgeting for Competitive Search Engine Optimization
Take a serious look at where you are spending your marketing dollars. Uncover where you can temporarily re-allocate funds to your competitive search engine optimization campaign. Remember, appearing on page one of Google for the key terms important to your business has significant long-term lead generating value. As with any marketing or advertising initiative, there are no guarantees; however, high rankings in Google offer strong potential for a positive return on investment because, greater than any other single marketing channel, Google search enables you to reach the largest number of your potential customers on any given day of the week and at any time of day.
Do the math: Google reports well over 235 million searches in its engine per day. Just for fun trivia, twitter recently hit 50 million tweets per day. That said, if only 1/100th of 1% of all of the searches per day is related to your industry, that's 23,500 prospective clients searching for a solution to their need using a keyword phrase related to your industry. Let's assume for the purposes of this example, that only 1% of that 1/100 of 1% is a qualified prospective buyer of your product or service. That translates to 235 prospective buyers searching Google per day. If today you find you may close one in every 10 perspective buyers who contact your business, theoretically you have a potential to land 23 accounts on any given day. Though we know full well that this math does not work out perfectly, the point is that the sheer volume of prospective buyers leveraging the major search engines to source a solution demands that a business take search engine optimization and ranking of their website very seriously if they want to increase their business.
What Needs to Be Done
Among the many items that need to be addressed in a competitive search engine marketing campaign, here are six principle areas to consider:
Keywords:
Short, concise list that includes long phrases too; this list must accurately representthe language used by your target audience groups to search for what you offer
Website Content:
Highly focused web pages, each one clearly about the keyword/phrase for which it is being optimized, are essential to the success of your competitive search engine optimization campaign. The more pages you have the better because of the internal linking and inbound linking value (see 'Links' below), not to mention the pure marketing value of having more ways for your potential customers to find you and get to you. Additionally, web pages must be strategically designed for conversion, including code, type of information, layout, ease of use, and calls to action that seamlessly guide the user through the conversion process.
Meta Description:
Often used by Google to accompany the page title in the listing, the meta description should be compelling, informative and contain the keyword/phrase for which the page is being optimized.
Links:
Inbound links refer to links coming from other, highly regarded websites/pages that are relevant to your content. Internal linking refers to the way in which your pages link to one another. Both types of links are critical to the success of your competitive search engine optimization campaign. To be most effective, the keyword/phrase of the webpage the link is pointing to should be contained within the link. There is even a specific strategy involved with linking pages internally so as not to dilute the effectiveness of your optimization efforts.
Page Title Tag:
Google uses the page title in the listing as the link. It must be compelling, relevant and contain the keyword/phrase for which the page is being optimized.
URLS:
Web pages that contain the keyword/phrase in the url, or domain address, typically rank above those that do not contain the term. Strategically re-naming the url strings to contain the keyword/phrase for which the page is being optimized supports all of the other efforts to focus the page and make it easy for Google to index and rank.
Figure 1: MarketingSherpa 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide
Conclusion
According to the 2009 MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, companies that performed their search engine optimization in-house experienced a 38% SEO lift after six months versus professional agencies whose clients experienced an average lift of 110% after six months. (see Fig. 1).
These statistics clearly indicate that search engine optimization professionals who are in the business to stay current with up-to-date best practices and accurate information are positioned to yield the best possible results.
If you have a marketing budget at all then competitive search engine optimization is a viable marketing initiative that offers you the greatest potential for lead generation over the long-run. It is definitely worth your serious consideration.
Contact us to learn how to prepare your website to attract, convert and track leads.
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