subject: To my website, where oh where are you? [print this page] To my website, where oh where are you? To my website, where oh where are you?
Why Build a Website That No One Will Ever See?
Why Build a Website That No One Will Ever See? Unfortunately, most offline companies falsely assume that building a website is enough to get people to visit it. It's a little like building a store and then have it face into the alley.Studies show that 34% of prospective clients will search a new company out online. Most of those people are searching using Google and a smaller minority are using a combination of Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Altavista and Ask among others.
The chances are that your company probably ranks well for its own name but why would a new client search for the name of a company they don't yet know exists? The truth is that they can't. There is a whole new group of people searching already for businesses like yours and they may be passing you up. One of our clients is a mortgage lender. Around 5000 searches per month in our city are completed for mortgage plus our city name. Comparatively, less than 10 people per month search out the company name directly. Virtually all of those 10 searches represent clients they are already doing business with.
I want the search engines to find me. What do I do?
Ranking a website in a search engine is derived from 2 principle factors.
On page SEO
Many web designers call on page SEO as just SEO but it's almost never enough by itself to rank. If your site is a restaurant, search engine algorithms are quite capable of reading the text present on your page and determining that you are in fact a restaurant. That means, the chance of showing up in food related searches is much more probable than showing up for a search about legal firms. You'd be surprised how many businesses don't accurate describe what their actual business is about and therefore search engines cannot correctly classify it.
Off page SEO
Off page SEO refers to not just the information present on your own website but comparatively what other websites think about your site. For a map or place page listing, this will be highly dependent on reviews and mentions, or commonly referred to as citations, present on other sites. Getting other sites to link to you is what matters for your website.
I've already done my on page SEO or my web guy says so. What does it matter?
It matters because very few business ever rank just because their site has good on page SEO. While many website designers refer to the onsite SEO simply as SEO implying it is the whole picture, it is actually estimated to be only about 10% of the search engine ranking factor. Around 90% of search engine ranking factors are based on how other sites reference your own site. With the steady decline in all offline media and the continual increase of online searches, it is absolutely imperative for your business. Our firm at marketing Windsor gets a steady supply of business given to us daily via search engines.
Reverse the role with your customer
In the past, our advertising goals were to seek out new clients and effectively, market them with a quality sales pitch. Through search engine marketing, the changing paradigm is that the customer now seeks us out. In fact, by beginning with a related search, they've already presold themselves to a certain degree or they wouldn't have typed the search to begin with. It is no longer the company's job to identify who their potential customers are but instead in search engine marketing, it is the consumers who search for the right provider.
