Your website is much more than a shop window to a huge and vibrant global marketplace. A well designed and implemented website can do a lot more than that!It’s a place where you can interact with your customers, a virtual meeting place where you can do a real business, with real people in a real time. The commercial potential is quite simply unparalleled.But, in order to realise even just a fraction of this potential, you need to make sure people can easily find it!Even in the age of social media, recommendation and reviews- still the majority of people, when searching for anything online, use their favourite search engine and type in the sought after key-term or phrase. There is no such a thing as a passing trade on the internet. The likelihood of a potential customer stumbling across your site by chance whilst browsing the internet is really low.This means your visitors need to learn about your website from elsewhere:
- Word-of-mouth recommendation (both on and off line)
- Through conventional advertising and branding channels
- By following a link from another website
- By clicking on the link in the search engine results page (SERP)
Think about yourself- where do you go when you need to find out information, product or services online? If you want to brainstorm the idea with friends you probably try Facebook or Twitter but if you are after specifics, my guess is you would be asking good old Google...Google’s incredible growth and the rise of search in general are testament to the appeal of online search, both to a constantly growing number of online users and as a marketing vehicle for businesses.To the user, search engines are a convenient way to sift through millions of pages and find relevant information they are interested in. For marketers on the contrary, search engines offer a unique opportunity to get their products and services in front of the prospect customers at the exact moment they are looking for them.The fact that online industry is still relatively young, makes the whole area of SEO and paid search incredibly exciting and challenging at the same time. Because things are changing constantly, you are always shooting at the moving target and have to tweak your aim accordingly.That said, there are a number of widely used strategies and if implemented properly and consistently, will help your website to get a better position in the search engine results page. Equally, there are a lot of myths out there too. Those won’t help your search ranking but will waste your valuable time.It needn’t to be a poisoned chalice so as long as you:
- Stick to your mission- what is the aim of your website?
- Make your site easy to navigate
- SEO search terms, keywords and long/short tail words are easy to find
- Keep ahead of competitors
- Content is king- keep it up to date!
Look out for our next blog to learn more about SEO and paid search. Meanwhile, if you would like to discuss your digital needs, please contact us for a non-obligatory consultation. Umbrella Marketing TEAM happy to help.
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