A lot of the things we've discussed in this book come under a subject known as search engine optimization, or SEO. This is the process of optimizing your site to improve your rankings in the search engines. Some of this involves things you can do on your site, such as using the "keywords" that your potential customers are using to find your site within the content of your pages.
There are tools that will help you determine exactly what those keywords are, such as the Google Keyword Tool. This tool is designed for Google Adwords advertisers, to help them figure out what keywords to bid on for their ads. But it works just as well for figuring out exactly what people are searching for. Because the things that people actually search for might not be what you would expect.
Let’s look at a quick example. This screenshot shows a search for “bellingham plumbers” (Bellingham is a city in Washington with a population of about 80,000 and 200,000 in the metro area).
This is just a few of the keywords that the tool returns, but you can see what people are searching for and roughly how many times each keyword gets searched every month.
You can see the keyword phrase “bellingham plumber” (the one we searched for here) gets 590 local monthly searches. That’s 590 potential customers who are searching for that term every month, on average.
“Plumbers in seattle” isn’t directly related, since Seattle is about a two hour drive from Bellingham. But because it’s relatively close, Google still shows it in the results.
You can see several other variations on the main keyword we searched for:
- Bellingham plumbers
- Plumber bellingham
- Plumbers bellingham
- Plumbers in bellingham wa
If you owned a plumbing business in Bellingham, you would want to work these variations into the content on your website to help improve your SEO and get ranked higher in the results when people are searching for those terms.
The other part of Search Engine Optimization involves things you post on other sites, like press releases, videos, images and various other types of content. The links that point back to your website from these places will help your site's ranking improve.
And the more sites that have links pointing back to your site, the better. Part of the calculation that Google and other search engines use to rank your website is the number of links, and the “power” of the websites they’re on.
For example, if you had a link pointing to your website from a site like CNN.com it would be considerably more valuable to your ranking than a link from BobsWebsite.com.
There are various ways you can generate these links to your website. We’ve already discussed some of them, when we looked at media distribution. Articles, videos and various other types of media can include links to your website, so as you distribute them to more and more places you will generate more and more links back to your site.
You can also buy links on other websites. This is essentially a form of advertising, but instead of paying for another site to display your banner or paying for clicks on Google or Facebook, you’re paying another site to link back to yours with the goal being better rankings.
Getting involved with some of sites we’ve already discussed elsewhere in this report can also help generate more links to your site. If you’re active on Facebook and Twitter, you can use those sites to link to your website. Review sites like Yelp.com will also have links back to your website.
You can even set up multiple websites of your own, each with a very narrow focus. All of them can link back to your main site, helping to push its rankings up. For example, you might set up “minisites” for different product lines that you sell, or different services that you offer – each with a very specific focus. And these sites won’t just be useful for linking back to your main website, they can also generate even more visitors and new customers as people find them in the search engines and various other places.
As you can see, many of these strategies work in tandem with one another. Media distribution doesn’t just get your name out there, it helps with SEO. Being active on Facebook and Twitter doesn’t just give your customers another way to contact you, it also helps your website rank better.
The more you market your business online, the more everything will compound to give you better and better results.
But keep in mind that SEO is not a one-time thing. You can ease back on the amount of content that you are distributing to various places once you've made an initial push to get your site ranked, but to maintain those rankings you'll need to do a certain amount of this on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, if your competitors are also improving their SEO, they could knock your site down and replace it in the rankings.
Tracking Your Results
Something that is fairly unique to the internet, compared to many other advertising methods, is how much information you can track about where your customers are coming from and which sources are the most (and least) profitable for you.
The nature of the internet lets you track the source of every visitor to your website, so you can tell how many potential customers are arriving from Google, Facebook, videos on YouTube and any other place you post your content.
You can even track these sources down to specific messages or media. For example, if you post a video on YouTube, you can code a special tracking link into it so you know exactly how many people end up visiting your website as a result of that specific video.
If you do any other advertising, like flyer or Yellow Pages, do you know how many visitors those sources are sending you? Probably not - there's really no way to track them with any accuracy, beyond asking every customer where they heard about you.
There are many tracking services available to you, ranging from free solutions to hundreds, or even thousands of dollars per month. One of the most effective is actually free to use – Google Analytics.
Google Analytics will track visitors coming to your website, where they’re coming from and many other things. It will even tell you what keywords people searched for when they found your website in the search results.
This data can be invaluable to you because over time you can analyze it and work it back into your website to get even better results.
For example, using our Bellingham plumber example again, when you analyze your site’s data you might find that you’re getting traffic from Google for the phrase “bellingham plumbing and heating” – a phrase you didn’t do any optimization for.
Seeing that, you could hop over to Google and see just where your site ranks for that term. Let’s say you find it towards the bottom of the page, maybe spot 7 or 8 (there are normally ten results shown on each page).
From this research, you now know two important things – people are already finding your site using that phrase and you could quite likely improve your ranking by doing a little bit of SEO for that phrase.
You might write a new article to add to your website that uses the phrase “bellingham plumbing and heating” or you might just add it to a page or two that are already on the site.
Simply by doing this little bit of work, you would most likely start getting more visitors who are searching for that term because your site would move higher in the rankings.
Google Analytics doesn’t just track your visitors, however – it can also track the actions those visitors take once they arrive at your website.
For example, if you have a lead capture form on your site to get people’s name and email address so you can follow up with them in the future, you can track the people who actually sign up for your email list. With Google Analytics, you could track all the way from the click on one of your ads through to someone signing up to receive your emails.
And from there, you could use tracking codes to identify those people when they come into your place of business or contact you for more information. This lets you track the exact cost per customer by calculating your advertising cost versus the number of people who wind up doing business with you.
You’ll know which advertising sources are most profitable, which ones are not working very well at all, and which ones are generating the most new leads. This is the type of detail that is extremely difficult, if not impossible to track through traditional advertising mediums like Yellow Page and newspaper ads.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line here is that the internet give you far better results than most traditional advertising methods. And it’s not going anywhere, it’s just going to become more and more important to local businesses as time goes on. If you aren't taking advantage of all the opportunities it offers, you have two choices - start taking advantage of them or fall behind when your competition does.
And believe me, your competitors are hearing all these same things. Take a look at this slide, which shows the results of a McKinsey quarterly survey of business executive:
Notice that this survey was done in 2008. These results will be accelerating, not tapering off, as more time passes.
We've covered quite a bit of ground so it's quite likely that you've got a bunch of ideas swimming around in your head, wondering where to start. But let's face it - is this the kind of stuff you want to be doing?
You could probably figure all this technical stuff out for yourself, but is that really the best use of your time? We believe it's important for any business to work on their strengths.