When you have a website it is like having a really big advertisement for your service or products. But unless you get it right, this website may never be found by the people who could become your customers. There are millions of websites on the Internet and a good portion of them are likely to be offering the same things as you. Not all of them can show up on the first page of the search engines.
The problem is that most people who are searching for something on the Internet do not look past the first page of results that come up for their keyword. So your website may never be seen – unless you do some simple SEO marketing.
Here are three ways such marketing can help your business: –
- Firstly, the right SEO techniques can make your website show up on the first page of Google so it does not remain invisible. What are the ‘right’ SEO techniques? There are many ways to make your website show up, from the actual design of the website through to the content on it, the keywords used in the text, the value the text gives to your visitors, the images and/or videos used and the inbound and outbound links – and where they lead to. You may think that design has no bearing on the matter, but what if you were looking for hiking boots and came across a website that featured ballerinas or dancing shoes in its header image? Would you click on that one, or one that showed say, mountains along with hiking boots?
- When your page shows up high in the rankings you will get more traffic. It is well-known that most searchers on the Internet don’t like leafing through numerous pages to find what they want. They will nearly always pick one of the websites featured on the first page of the search engine results that show up for their specific keywords. In fact, they often pick one of the first three websites because they seem to have the most appropriate information on them. That is why appropriate information that offers value to the customer is important.
- More traffic means more potential customers, which equals success for your business. Here again, design plays an important part. There are many different aspects to design. Making sure your website is easy to navigate will ensure that your customers find what they want quickly and easily. Giving the customers a good experience means that they should be able to navigate right through to the shopping cart checkout quickly and easily. Or if you offer a service, they should be able to find your contact details without any trouble.
Inbound and outbound links are also an important part of SEO marketing because if you link to quality, authority websites, the search engines will consider your site to be similar. However, these website should be about similar things as yours. It’s no use linking to a cat food website if your website is about hiking boots.
Before you ask other websites to link to yours, you must have quality content that will add value to them and their customers, without being in direct competition to what they sell or offer, otherwise they won’t be interested. SEO marketing is really all about common sense and giving value to your customers.