Most people use search engines to find new products and services. If you can get your website to rank highly for keyphrases related to your service, you have a good chance of finding new customers.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) also known as organic listings

Before you learn how to achieve good rankings in search engines, there are a few things you need to know:

1. Your competitors are also competing to achieve top rankings.
2. Search engines use mathematical calculations to decide who goes at the top. Mathematics can’t tell whose website is the nicest looking, or who provides the best service.
3. Search engines fight a constant battle against hundreds of thousands of spammers who are very good at figuring out how to get a bad website to the top of the listings.

What factors do search engines look at when deciding who goes at the top of the list?

1. Links to your website from websites you don’t own (most important)
   If other websites link to yours, this is an indication that your website is important. If these websites are relevant to your products and services, even better.
   1. If you sell minced chicken, a link from a technology website isn’t that relevant, but is better than nothing
   2. Linking to other peoples websites from yours doesn’t help
   3. Swapping links with other websites has some value, but one way links are better
   4. Links that contain the words you want to rank for are very valuable
   5. Links from reputable sites (Government, Educational, BBC etc) are incredibly useful but hard to obtain
2. What’s on your website
   Does the text on your website (frequently and prominently) contain the words you want to rank highly for?
   1. The text that you can see / read is most important
   2. The text that you can’t see (meta tags, alt tags) is also important
   3. Don’t over-egg the cake
   4. Don’t try and hide text (i.e. white text on a white background)
3. The age of your domain
   This is very important in the early days as search engines try to figure out if you are a spammer and if people find your website relevant / offensive etc.
4. Domain name / page names
   An indication about the content of your website, but not overly important for popular or competitive search terms.
   1. A domain name that contains your favourite keyphrase is useful for providing context when people link to your site
   2. Don’t get too obsessed with this however, as long messy domain names are poor from a branding perspective
5. How frequently your site is updated
   If you don’t care about your website, why should a search engine?
6. Where your domain is hosted
   Do you share a server with pornographers and scammers?

Last thing to know:

There are two types of keyphrase

Competitive

These tend to be 1, 2 or 3 words in length, and are the first ones that spring to mind in relation to your industry. Competitive keyphrases tend to have very high volumes of traffic (lots of visitors) but relatively low conversion (visitors converting to sales/enquiries) because they are generic. If you sell cars, then “cars” or “cheap cars” or “cars for sale” would be competitive keyphrases.

Long Tail (less competitive)

These tend to be 3 words or more in length and are usually more descriptive. These keyphrases will not individually generate as many visitors, but can be better for converting visitors to customers.  If you sell cars, then “cars in Warwick” or “green ford Capri 2.0 mk II” or “best website to buy a used vintage car” would be long tail keyphrases and (hopefully) very relevant to your service.

Up to half of all searches on Google every day are unique (i.e. only searched for once that day)! This means that ‘long tail’ keyphrases are also VERY IMPORTANT.

What actions should I take to achieve good rankings for relevant keyphrases in search engines?

• Check the text on your website
  Make sure it mentions your keyphrases frequently. If it doesn’t, update it. Try to remember that ultimately your website is for humans, so don’t get too spammy.
• Get some easy links!
  • Are there any website owners amongst your contacts, friends or family that might be willing to link to your website? Take advantage.
  • Sign up to any local or industry directories, some are free. (e.g. somebody involved in car sales in warwick might type “warwick directory” or “car sales directory” into Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. to find a list of directories they may appear in.
  • Get the people who built your website to write a blog post about you or link to your website in their portfolio.
• Make sure your website is optimised
  • Your web designers should have put your relevant keyphrases into your page titles, images and description tags. They can even do this with your page names if it is relevant and not too spammy.
• Start producing regular content
  • The more often the better, but just do as much as you can. You can add content in the form of news, blog, and articles. Your web design team will be able to provide you with a platform for adding content yourself to keep the ongoing cost down.
• Start producing AMAZING content!
  • The more interesting the better! If you write information that is interesting (to a specific audience) they will link to your content, refer people to your site and all the time you are demonstrating your knowledge to potential customers.
• Write content for other people
  • Why not write an interesting piece for a local or industry relevant website? If they publish it, they will almost always include a bio of the author with a LINK back to your website.
• Fire up the PR machine
  • Lots of small companies use PR to get their name in the paper by doing (or saying) amazing (or interesting) things. The same tactics work online, and most newspapers (even local) have websites too.
• Participate in blogs, forums and social media
  • However niche your industry, there is bound to be a community of people that love to talk about related stuff! Find them and engage with them. You’ll build a personal brand as part of the process and you may even get a few cheap and easy links back to your website (i.e. in your signature or in topics relevant to content on your website).

Being number 1 in a search engine implies you are the best. If you want to be the best, then you must prove it to the search engines.

Pay Per Click – instant gratification

If the principal way to acquire visitors from search engines is to achieve good rankings through link building and content strategy, then a very close second is Pay Per Click (PPC). Search engines make nearly all of their money selling PPC advertising to website owners.

Here’s how it works

• You sign up for a PPC account with each (or any) of the search engines.
• You create a list of keyphrases closely related to your product / service (start with 20-50 but you can expand that list to thousands of keyphrases).
• You group your keyphrases and create small text adverts that will appear in relation to those keyphrases.
• You set a maximum price against your keyphrases (either one price for all or individual prices for each keyphrase).
• Once approved, the search engines will start displaying your ads each time one of your keyphrases is searched for.
• Each time your advert gets clicked on and your site gets visited, your account is deducted an amount of money up to your maximum price.
• You can set daily or monthly spend limits, and set up your account to show your ads gradually or as often as possible. You can even set them to run only at certain times of the day or days of the week.
• Your ads will be displayed until your budget is depleted.
• How high your ad appears in the list depends on how high your maximum price is, and how popular your ad / site are when displayed and clicked.
• Over time you figure out which keyphrases lead to business and which ones are a waste of money.

Myths

• Nobody clicks on those ads
  Total rubbish, many companies make a fortune simply advertising on Pay Per Click. People have become conditioned to finding commercial services on the ‘right had side of the page’.
• It’s not worth doing because competitors will click all the time
  You do have to accept a certain amount of click fraud or wastage (people trying to sell you stuff) as part of the process, but search engines are VERY good at spotting people clicking on ads multiple times and won’t punish you if they identify a spammer.
• I can’t afford it
  You set your own budgets, either daily or monthly and can fix the amount you put into your account. It’s best to start small and pick just a few keyphrases with low maximum prices until you are confident you are getting good value.

Benefits

• Your new website can start working for you very quickly (within an hour!).
• You can quickly find out which keyphrases you should be targeting in the main search listings, which can take months to achieve with no other guarantee of success.
• You can switch off your advertising when you are busy, and turn it on when you need to bring in more business.

Negatives

• You can spend a lot of money very quickly if you do not set budgets and monitor regularly.
• You will always have to pay for the visitors you acquire through PPC, and therefore this strategy should be offset by an investment (time or money) in achieving good rankings in the natural listings.
• If you have a business model that takes time for enquiries to turn into hard cash, you may have to wait a while for results or fund a lot of advertising before your costs are recouped.

PPC is a very important part of most good online strategies and can provide answers and get your business moving quickly.

Other things you should be doing

• Make sure you have a stats package enabled on your website so you can see how many visitors you get, and where they come from (Google Analytics is excellent and free).
• Make sure you refer to your website in all of your printed material including your business cards, vehicle livery, newspaper ads, invoices, signage and anything else you can think of!
• Remember your website is also a tool to support, reassure and assist your existing customers. A website is a given essential for most serious businesses, and isn’t just a tool for finding new customers.

Things you should not be doing

• Buying thousands of links in one go or for an unfeasibly low price
  Search engines will spot this a mile off, and may penalise you forever.
• Spamming other people’s websites
  Participating in forums and blogs is a good way to build brand reputation (and to a certain extent some free links), but remember these people are intelligent human beings too and they won’t appreciate you trying to hawk your snake oil without putting something in first.
• Stuffing your site text full of keyphrases
  Partly because it’s not that effective, but mostly because real people will not do business with you if your website is just weird.
• Avoiding the shady operators
  The SEO industry is unregulated and has a deservedly mixed reputation. Any industry that is confusing to its customers will inevitably breed operators willing to capitalise on that confusion. Top rankings for popular keyphrases can be worth vast sums of money, and are not likely to be achieved with a small investment of money and no intellectual input from the website owner.

The internet is awesome!

For those who are willing to work on their online presence, there is a limitless opportunity to grow a business.

A website is just the beginning of an engaging, exciting and rewarding journey, and as always the first step is the most important. A good web design company can help you take that first step and show you which way to go. It’s how much walking you do after that will determine how far you go.