Search engine optimisation
There is little point in having an all-singing all-dancing website if no one can find it. Search engine optimisation (SEO) will bring potential customers to you ahead of your rivals, writes Peter Wailes.
Given that around 71% of people use the internet to research goods and services, website optimisation has become an essential in the search engine marketing toolkit. Without it, your website has little chance of being picked up by a random search. And while your site might still be doing a good job of reinforcing your brand to existing customers, it will be providing little help in the search for new customers.
To ensure that the site is well positioned in the results of the top search engines for keywords and phrases relevant to your company and industry you trade in, the site should be organised according to best practice. Greater visibility and highly targeted visitors improve sales, which, in turn, improves the bottom line. One of the most important disciplines in this type of marketing is search engine optimisation (SEO).
Maximum visibility
SEO is the process of refining a website’s architecture, content, coding and link popularity to secure maximum search engine visibility in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Unlike many forms of online promotion, SEO is not done through paid-for advertising on websites. Instead, what you pay for is the expertise of the people who do it and for them to maintain your position in the top search engines.
In simple terms, optimisers analyse your website to see how ‘search engine friendly’ it is. They then streamline and enhance it so that key terms related to your services get picked up by search engines, thereby sending a website towards the top of relevant search results. So for example, if your website offered reviews of holidays and vacations, they would look to optimise for key terms such as ‘travel reviews’, ‘holiday reviews’, ‘hotel reviews’ and so on. Simply put, optimisation makes your website accessible to a wider group of people, whom may not know the company name.
What you get from good SEO is fairly simple, and impressive: measurable return on investment, brand promotion and an increase in relevant, targeted traffic to your website. Some 42% of all searchers click on the first result of the first page in the search results. The numbers then tail off fairly sharply from there, resulting in 75% of people not even going to the second page of search results.
Take London car supermarket Cargiant as an example. Cargiant’s website ranked poorly for key service related terms before it was optimised, but moved up to number three in a Google search under the term ‘car supermarket’ once its pages and code had been optimised. That’s third out of almost 700,000 other competing websites.
In internet search terms, getting onto the first page of search results is the ‘Holy Grail’. Due to a general lack of understanding as to how search engines work, people assume that sites that appear towards the top of a list of search results are highly authoritative. As such they will trust their content more, stay on them longer and be more likely to return again. According to e-Consultancy, an online marketing best practice site, some 36% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top brands in their field.
Multiple Media
The modern SEO expert or ‘search marketer’ must be able to write compelling copy, have a strong coding ability, understand site architecture, have a sound working knowledge of psychology and be able to work across multiple media, including audio, video and text. SEO professionals should understand how you can attract links to your site through the use of social sites like Digg, Reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon.
Search engine optimisation can be one of the most cost effective forms of marketing around, but if you’re going to use the services of a SEO specialist you will need to make sure that you are getting the right results. Always set out benchmarks to measure marketing successes.
Make sure that your SEO provider gives you detailed reports each month; not just summaries of how your website ranks in the search engines, but an analysis of where the traffic is coming from. Web analytics is becoming recognised as a key tool in terms of measuring the success of marketing techniques used both online and offline, with particular reference to search engine marketing, if set up correctly.
This is the process of analytics, and it is a vital measurement tool. Reports should include a breakdown of traffic levels, including numbers sent from each source, such as search engines, other websites, direct traffic and so on. You should also expect to get return on investment and key performance indicators, such as the number of leads generated by each source, recommendations for how to boost traffic and suggestions for improving conversion rates, from a good agency.
If your site isn’t optimised, your potential clients will visit your competitors’ websites before they visit yours. So, making sure your website ranks well in the search engines is equivalent to ensuring your sales team do their job and brings in the business for your company.
Key Search Marketing Terms
Link building The process of acquiring new links for the purposes of increasing traffic from other related industry sites and rankings for key phrases to pull users from search engines.
Analytics Software used to analyse website traffic, for the purpose of better understanding how visitors interact with the site, where these visitors are coming from and the measurement of ROI and KPIs.
Keywords - The words and phrases chosen to be the main focus of the optimisation techniques applied, based partly on the number of searches per month, and the level of relevance to the site and its content on each page.
Linkbait Content designed to be incredibly viral within a niche, to drive traffic, raise brand awareness and increase the number of links to a given website.
Social media Sites such as Facebook, Reddit and StumbleUpon which can be used to market to online communities, with the aim of increasing brand awareness, loyalty and word of mouth.
Rankings/listings Where a site can be seen in a search engine result page for a given keyword, notated either by page and depth, or simply overall depth. Very high levels of optimisation can produce indented or lists of rankings, which will produce vastly greater levels of traffic.
On the other hand...
‘Organic’ search engine optimisation will provide the perfect foundation for achieving top visibility for your website within the natural search engine results, ‘pay-per-click’ will open up opportunities to run targeted advertisements and campaigns for specific product or service pushes, with its extreme flexibility.
PPC enables your website to appear in the sponsored listings in the search results of the top engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo by bidding on keywords chosen to drive targeted visitors to your site, via targeted landing pages. The best part of pay-per-click marketing has to be that you pay nothing until someone actually clicks on your sponsored advertisement and if set up correctly, you can track this user’s path through the website; its level of measurability is virtually transparent.