A shop can have the most elegant premises and an enticing window but if it is placed somewhere with scarce passing trade, it will struggle to become a profitable business. Likewise, you can have the most beautiful and user friendly website with great products and services on offer but if the website struggles to get visitors, it can really hit your bottom line. Paid search can help to drive visitors to your website but you will be paying Google for every click through that your website receives. There is also evidence that internet users have developed an ‘ad blindness’ to the paid search advertising and skip straight to the organic search results.
Getting to the top of the organic search results can make a tremendous difference to the number of visitors your site receives and therefore the amount of orders you get. Google alone sees 200 million searches worldwide each day, which is 200 million potential customers for your business. The holy grail of SEO is getting onto the first page of the Google search results for terms relevant to your business; but it is a tricky task in a competitive industry that requires some real expertise.
A good SEO expert is a vital ingredient to successful online marketing. It can take several months of work and a large investment of time and expertise to get to the top of the rankings and most businesses do not have the time or knowledge in-house.
An SEO expert will first complete some market research to understand what your customers are searching for online and how visitors are currently arriving at your website. They will identify the most popular keywords that customers are using to arrive at similar websites in your industry.
If you have one or more physical stores, your customers may search for ‘Menswear Bournemouth’ or ‘Solicitors Birmingham’. The SEO professional will have the expertise to ensure that when a potential customer is looking for a product or service that is relevant to your business and in the area in which you are based, that you are listed as high as possible on the search results. If you provide a nationwide service, your SEO expert can help to ensure that you have high rankings for the major towns and cities by targeting specific keywords.
Next, the expert will optimise your website to generate vital free organic traffic throughput. They will create ‘metadata’ and ‘metatags’ in the coding of the website to increase its web presence. Also, developing unique, high quality written content for your website is vital to keep your website high in the search results. It needs to include some of your most vital keywords to have the biggest effect. This content should be refreshed regularly to maintain your Google standings too.
Google and other major search engines place great emphasis on the ‘Page Rank’ of a website, which is greatly aided by the number of other websites that link to it. At the final link building stage, the SEO professional will ensure that you have some high quality links coming through to the site to further help the search rankings. This can also be helped by included your website URL on any other online marketing that you do, such as online advertising, online PR, marketing emails and more.
The visitors you receive through organic search are ‘pre-qualified’, already looking for the products and services that your company provides, which gives you excellent conversion rates and a very profitable income from your website.