How important is Google to the growth of your business? Well, in 2008, Google had a 63.5% share of the U.S. online search market, and 90% of the search growth.
News flash – Today it doesn’t matter what market you serve. If you are invisible on Google, you are missing your best shot at new business – by a country mile.
So many companies slap together a website, fail to update it on a regular basis, and then wonder why they never show up on Google searches. By taking a hands off, cross-your-fingers approach, there’s only a slim chance you’ll make the first two or three pages of Google for any meaningful search term. By meaningful search term, I mean a search term with decent search volume that’s relevant to your products or services.
However, by being proactive and doing some content optimization, you can seriously improve your position on Google and get in front of the people you want to sell to. Sometimes the results surprise even me.
Here’s a bit of work I’ve been doing for a client, where we selected a handful of fairly competitive to extremely competitive terms. We started pretty much from scratch in terms of Google visibility – none of the pages below was on the first 10 pages of Google. Here’s where we were only six weeks after starting our content optimization activities -
This is pretty amazing. Normally you’d expect results like this to kick in after several months. The client has already experienced a 25% increase in site traffic, and I would expect those numbers to go up dramatically over time. Can your firm get results like this? There are no guarantees – nobody on this side of the fence knows exactly how Google and other search engines determine page rankings. But with a good strategy, a sustained effort and by following best practices, it is very possible.
Certainly, factors beyond content optimization have an impact – inbound links, internal links (which I consider an aspect of content optimization), and the age of your domain, to name a few. But absent optimized content, a domain that dates back to 1992 and all the links in the world will only get you so far. It takes a lot of links, more than the average b2b or b2c can muster, to achieve a PageRank of even 5 or 6.
It pays to pay attention to content. How are you doing for your important search phrases?
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Brad,
This is very impressive, and in just matter of six weeks! Congrats in achieving this for your client.
I have been really focused on raising my search engine traffic, and so far so good!
Salwas last blog post..Why Would You Want to Give Something Away Free on your blog?
Salwa, Best of luck. If you stay with your SEO practices, it will work for you.
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Off to SOBCon09
Nice success story Brad. It is amazing to me how quickly Google reacts to appropriate content given how many folks are out trying to game the system. I have noticed my own personal searching behavior seems to be trending towards longer and longer search strings to try and narrow things down more quickly. Are you also taking into account how the various phrases have to work together in the search process or do the search engines naturally take that from context?
Fred H Schlegels last blog post..Physics and Ideation: Customer Entanglement
Hi Fred, Contextual search, or semantic search, is an evolving technology and a whole other animal. http://is.gd/wci9 For search as it exists today, it’s important to keep keyword phrases in close proximity. Long search strings (sometimes called long tail search terms) are definitely worth looking at in your search strategy – your searching behavior is probably typical.
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Off to SOBCon09
Brad,
I could not think of any reason why the old adage of ‘failing to plan equals planning to fail,’ would not apply as much toward the task of designing a web site to attract search engine traffic as it does in any area of life.
You simply cannot expect to just create and upload any old web site and expect visitors to just start flocking in just like that. After all, in the old world, you would not simply have just created any old advertisement and plonked it anywhere and expected to get results.
Instead, marketing in the online world requires a no less deliberate and purposeful approach as it does in the offline world.
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Hi Andrew, You’re right – people tend to abandon sound planning principles when they enter the world of web development. One reason for that is that they tend not to understand SEO, and when somebody attempts to explain it, their eyes glaze over. For many people in small and midsized firms, design is the fun part of web development, and content gets short shrift.
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Those are great results for such a short space of time, and results that are likely to be long lasting if the effort is sustained, one of the major benefits of organic search engine optimisation.
In times such as these, when everyone is harping on about the recession, any type of marketing strategy that is likely to boost profits by encouraging people to take a look at your products and services is well worth while.
To increase traffic to a site by 25% is absolutely brilliant!
Danielle, Thanks. As I’m sure you know, results like these can and usually do take much longer. But your point about long term sustainability is very important. SEO is definitely not a “here today, gone tomorrow” value proposition.
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