Potential customers and clients are searching for YOUR services on Google and in the other search engines right now. A good search engine optimisation strategy get’s you found and let’s you tap into a huge market of buyers.
Search Engine Optimisation is usually just called SEO. It refers to the things done to and for your website to help it achieve higher places in the main ( often called Organic ) search results.
The Strategy
Generating more exposure in search results requires …
- terms that have a good or high volume of searches,
- terms where commercial intention has been demonstrated,
- beating the competing websites to get onto page one.
Unless a term has a huge number of searches, there’s little value in being beneath page 1. The top 3 positions in the Organic results get over 60% of the clicks. The first result on page 2, at position #11 gets 0.6% of the clicks.
Google says they measure over 200 factors when working out search result ranking. The 3 main things needed to rank well for keywords in the Organic results are …
- Content on the website that’s relevant, and good website structure.
- Inbound links from other websites that are as good quality and similar quantity to the competition’s.
- Activity on the website, indicating that people are visiting and that its keeping up-to-date.
- In competitive markets the domain name has a significant bearing too and sites with older, more valuable domain names have a distinct advantage and are hard to rank above.
People often underestimate the scale of effort required to achieve high search engine positions and don’t invest enough in it, or persist. Both these things are needed; search engine optimisation is a longer-term business activity and the promotional value can result in a very good return on investment.