The ABC of SEO

Okay, you’ve just completed the development of your company’s cool new website. It looks great, it’s easy to navigate and you have populated the site with all the information you want you visitors to be able to find out about your company. You’ve set up your stall out in the worldwide market place.

Now you just kick back and happily brace yourself for the stampede of visitors to the site. But in the following weeks the phone doesn’t ring any more often.  There are no additional emails requesting more information about your goods or the services that you provide.  Even the number of customers that you sell to via your website has not dramatically increased.

So what gives?  Shouldn’t a more modern, a better looking, and in many cases much more expensive website bring in more customers?  A new website should bring in more customers because that is usually the main reason why most companies update their website. But a redesign of a website in itself will not increase traffic to your website in the short term.  What you need to do to increase traffic to your website, whether it is a new design or a design you have had in place for years, is to search engine optimize your website.

Here’s why. Let’s say your business is selling coffee mugs. The USP (unique selling point) is that the mugs have a photo of the purchaser printed on them. Your company is called MugShots.

Your potential customers go to Google (or other search engine). They type “coffee mugs” in the search bar, hit enter and up comes 30 million results! But wait, where is the MugShots listing?

You press the “next” button a few times. Ah, there it is …  on page 9.

But alas, the average browser will seldom stray beyond the first page before embarking on a new search if they don’t find what they want.  As you can likely relate to when you think of your own search habits, people will click through on the organic search results in a hierarchical manner with the first result getting the highest click through rate (CTR) and each subsequent position receiving a diminishing CTR.

According to a study by Optify, the first organic position in a Google search results page will receive an average click through rate of 37% and the top three positions will account for 60% of clicks. At the bottom end of the page, the tenth position, which shows the last result on the first page of search results, only averages 2% of clicks. If you get to the second page of search results the CTR gradually declines from 2.6% downward toward irrelevance.  This clearly highlights the importance of ranking position on search result pages in generating visitors to your website.

So now back to your brand new redesigned website.  If your new website is not showing on the first page of Google for the keywords that you most closely associate to your business then is was probably not an economical use of resources to only update the look of the website.  While having a great looking website is certainly not a bad thing to have, what is more important is that the website is functioning in its purpose to generate you more clients.

Some people still think of company websites as static pages that you put information about your company and you only get people going to the site when you have given them your URL address.  They see websites as colorful business cards and only have a website because they understand that nowadays it’s expected that every company have a website.

What every legitimate business needs to understand, no matter what business they are in, is that a company website, when optimized and administered properly, will be the most efficient and essential sales tool they can invest in.

The key to making your website rank higher on search engine result pages is a practice called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  This handy little acronym is the key to getting your site to shine like a beacon on the first page of Google results pages.

Search engine rankings don’t happen by accident. They are the result of feverish winnowing through the worldwide web by search engine “bots” for sites that have particular code and quality of content.  Google became the behemoth that it is because the complicated algorithms that it bases its coding on brings its customers the best search results.  If Google provided inaccurate search results that were not relevant, not current, and probably most importantly not reputable it would quickly find users moving to Bing, Yahoo or another search engine.

Google does not disclose the algorithms that it bases its search engine on.  However, industry experts do analyze each new software update that Google releases to determine what affects their changes will have on SEO.

Google, like the other search engines, are looking for search results that are relevant to the keywords being searched and are also reputable.  They want the websites that they list in the top of their search rankings to be providing the best content for their users.  Now Google does not actively read every website in the universe and assign a grade based upon how good the writing is or how accurate the statistics are, instead their algorithms deem what is quality content. The search engines determine how relevant a website is to keyword searches by conducting analysis on three main components:

• Quality content: for example blogs written about subjects relevant to your business. The more the better (as long as they are interesting, informative and well written).

• Key words and phrases: These are the descriptors that visitors use when searching for relevant sites that will meet their consumer needs. For example, someone searching for a new car might tap in “SUV dealers Orlando” or “auto sales Boston”. A customer looking for a better insurance package might key in “life insurance brokers”. And so on.

• Links: Having links from other websites pointing back to your own site can be the major factor in search engine ranking. And that counts double if the link is a high quality, credible website and pertains to subject matter relevant to your business.

So that’s what Search Engine Optimization is all about. The more SEO friendly your site is, the higher in the rankings it will be when a potential customer initiates a web search.

Bottom line: Blueprint Marketing uses cutting edge software to enrich your website. We analyze the content, links and keywords that will make your website SEO super friendly.