Search Engine Optimization
With millions of webpages competing for the time and attention of millions of people carrying out millions of keyword searches every day – many of which are for the types of products and services your business sells – it is critical that you optimize your website for the search engines to make sure two things happen:
- Your listing is seen by searchers
- Your listing is clicked by searchers
Very simply, if your website does not appear early in the search engine results pages (SERPs), it doesn’t stand a chance of being seen; and if it’s not seen, it can’t be clicked. Moreover, even if your website does appear early in the SERPs, searchers may not click your listing if the content – the title and snippet – doesn’t grab their attention right away.
Either way, no clicks means no traffic. And considering that much of that traffic would either be conducting pre-purchase research or actively in the market to buy the types of products and services your business sells, search engine optimization (SEO) makes sense.
Optimize Your Website for Multiple Search Engines
Although many of the steps and actions you take to optimize your website for one search engine will, inevitably, impact on how well your website ranks with other search engines, each search engine employs its own unique methodology and algorithm (save for those that are powered by another search engine, as AOL is by Google) for ranking websites.
So even though Google’s share of the search market is greater than the next four major search engines combined, your SEO strategy must be designed to optimize your website for several key search engine categories:
- General search engines – such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and Ask
- Regional search engines – if you’re doing business beyond the borders of your own country
- Shopping search engines – if you’re selling products online
- Vertical search engines – can be a source of highly targeted – and therefore qualified – traffic to your website
By optimizing your website for more categories of search engines – and optimizing it for more individual search engines within each category – you will improve your ranking and increase the probability that more searchers will see – and, more importantly, click on – your listing.
Optimize Your Website for Multiple Search Types
In 2007, Google introduced a new version of search results that it called universal search results. Other search engines followed Google’s lead soon after.
Universal search results combine images, videos, maps (also known as local business), news, groups, and other content with traditional web search results on a search result page.
Very simply, if a search engine’s ranking algorithm decides that an image or a video or a news story is more relevant to a searcher’s query than other results, that image, video, or news story will be displayed on the SERP. And as businesses have become more creative at SEO, many are striving for a page one ranking for an image or a video or a news story. In fact, the most creative – and effective when it comes to driving traffic to their websites – strive for a page one placement for multiple results:
- A page from their website
- A video posted to their YouTube account
- A news release distributed through an online PR agency
Moreover, many businesses are striving for a top ranking within the local business search results (also known as maps) that are part of the universal search results with good reason: people who search for products and services locally buy products and services locally, as a Google-sponsored, comScore study on the influence of search on local/offline buying behaviour found:
- 25% of searchers purchased an item directly related to their query
- 37% of purchasers completed their purchase online
- 63% of purchasers completed their purchase offline following their search activity
The bottom line is that universal search gives you the opportunity to capture real estate early in the search engine results, so if you have been “locked out” of a page one ranking for a highly competitive keyword in the past – or you’re simply looking to expand your page one presence – optimizing your website for universal search results may be the answer for which you’ve been looking.
Ten Steps to SEO Success
Following are key steps you must take in order to achieve SEO success:
- Review your website’s performance – key performance indicators include: rank, traffic volume, referral sources, time on site, bounce rate, page views, conversion ratios, etc
- Ensure your website has been indexed by the search engines – identify and address anything that may be preventing the spiders from crawling your website
- Assess your competition – who ranks well for your target keywords and how secure – or vulnerable – is their position (a very simple two-step approach to “taking” another website’s position on the SERPs is to copy it’s keyword strategy and to run a link-building campaign to secure links from pages that link to the high-ranking page)
- Choose your target keywords – don’t think about satisfying the search engine; think, instead, about what terms a searcher would enter to find what you want him or her to find
- Optimize on-page factors for the search engines – some of the key ones include keywords in title tag; keyword prominence, proximity, and density; keywords in ALT text
- Optimize your content – not only will searchers reward you for good-quality, relevant (to the intent of searcher’s query) content by sticking to your site longer, returning to it more often, linking to it, referring others to it, search engines will also reward you for good-quality, relevant content by giving your ranking a boost
- Launch and manage link-building campaign – links are votes to your site, so the more links from quality sources (pages/sites with relevant and related content with many quality links/votes themselves) the more important search engines consider your site to be
- Embrace social media – not only can social media boost your link-building efforts, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media applications can drive traffic directly to any web destination you want
- Review your website’s performance – key website performance indicators include rank, traffic volume, referral sources, time on site, bounce rate, page views, conversion ratios, etc
- Take action on the results of your review – if you’re dissatisfied with any are of your website’s performance, get to the process-based cause by reviewing the foregoing areas, fixing what’s broken, and monitoring its performance to make sure the improvement paid off
Taking this kind of a measured, systematic approach to search engine optimization can produce a significant increase in traffic to your website as well as, more importantly, conversions to action, which should be the ultimate objective of your website in the first place.
Contact me for more information or for help with your SEO efforts.
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