Online strategy: Get on the digital map

 

 

Start-ups know that playing in a big business world isn’t easy. How do you make an impact when you’re up against companies with enormous advertising power? In the next three issues of Anthill, we’re going to tell you. We’ll walk you through three processes that will bring more enquiries a-knocking.

 

First, we’ll tell you how to get better results from your website. Second, we’re going to tell you how to entice your customer. (Once they’ve found you, how do you grab attention?) And third, we’ll talk about surround-sound marketing. (Do people hear about your company wherever they go?) At the end of this three-part lesson, you’ll know more about how to find, target and capture your customer. Hey, you never know… you could be sipping margaritas around the pool in no time.

 

 

 

Online marketing is often billed as a complicated, “black box” process, but it doesn’t have to be. Your website needs to do more than just hold your place in cyber-space. It needs to attract customers and get your phone ringing with enquiries.

 

Initially we are going to focus on “organic traffic.” This is the holy grail of online enquiry generation because the listing and the traffic are free. This is in contrast to the paid-listings that appear on the right-hand side of a Google results page. These are paid for per click and can get expensive.

 

 

Did you know 1,700 search queries are entered into Google every second? However, there are over 2.5 billion web pages competing for that traffic with an additional 7.3 million pages being added daily. The upside is you only need a microscopic portion of all traffic to hit your website to improve your sales.

 

Fortunately, Google is happy to give you top listing whether you’re a backyard inventor or a global multi-national. Google uses over 200 criteria to judge the quality and value of a site. A reasonably high ranking is easily achievable if your intent is to build a valuable website rather than exploit the system. To keep updated on the latest from Google visit www.google.com/webmasters.

 

 

With 150 million searches each month in Google, you can afford to be picky. Identify the specific niche you want to attract. Think of your ideal customer. Who are they? Where are they? And most importantly, how do they use the web and what search terms do they enter?

 

Some customers will be using the internet to research products and services; others will want to make a purchase or connect with like-minded people. To gain traction, your website needs to fulfil a value-adding role for your target audience.

 

All of this can be determined by asking people who fit the profile you want to attract. The search terms they identify will become your niche terms to be used in search engine optimisation.

 

 

Now we’re going to put your niche terms to work. You need to update your website so these key terms appear in appropriate locations and are indexed by the search engines. This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). There are a lot of free SEO tips on the internet, so get reading.  

 

An important principle to remember is: Google cannot read images, it can only read text. It uses text to understand what your website is about and to index your site. If you have invested in expensive flash or other graphics, any words in those graphics are lost to Google. Ensure you update window titles, headings and internal links to include the search terms you want to focus on.

 

Finally, be patient, SEO doesn’t always bring immediate results. Google has over 2.5 billion pages to index and often needs to comb through a webpage many times before it starts appearing in search results. But once you start getting better results you’re well on the way to a continuous pipeline of new enquiries.