Search Engine Optimisation
Producing winning, stand-out websites is one thing, getting a flow of targeted visitors is another - The Web Company does both. We have developed a proven technique integrating the world's top search engines to bring targeted traffic to your site.
What are search engines?
Search engines exist on the internet to help users find information they are looking for. They typically consist of two parts:
- A web spider or crawler - they move around the World Wide Web finding and indexing information available on websites
- Search facility. Allows you to search for information held on websites using the indexed information gathered by the spider
The most well known search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo.
What Does Search Engine Optimisation Do?
- Makes your website easier for your customers to find;
- Finds out what your (Web) customers want;
- Helps you understand the (Web) market for your products and services;
- Helps you understand how your site wins or loses customers once they've arrived at your website can help identify higher-demand, lower-supply business niches. In plain English, things people want that web businesses aren't selling
Search Engine Optimisation usually marks a large increase in visitors (and sales.)
Types of Search Engine Optimisation
- Mathematical Search Engine Optimisation. Because Google and other search engines are machines, they can be fooled more easily than human beings. You can design a poor-quality website, and arrange it so that Google still thinks it's a good place to send people. This produces very impressive short-term results, and has become a very sophisticated (and expensive) business model for some SEO companies. But it's bad for you, and bad for your customers, who want good-quality websites, goods and services.
- Organic Search Engine Optimization. Start with a good-quality, well-thought-out website. Plan slowly and carefully, talking in-depth to the web designers.
Be respectful of your visitors: go to the trouble of finding out what they really want. Grow your traffic organically by being what your visitors want you to be Organic SEO is harder work initially, but is the much better option long-term. It produces slower results, but your traffic will grow steadily, and go on growing for months and years to come.
At The Web Company we make sure your traffic grows organically, and we don't use mathematical SEO.
What Matters Most—Visitors
- With websites, the mantra is not "sell, sell, sell" but "visitors, visitors, visitors." You can't talk to people or smile at them on the web, so it’s important to replace these human things with something else that develops trust with your visitor before they are likely to buy.
- Visitors almost overwhelmingly start off just as visitors, with no intention to buy. Quickly presenting them with a dead-end sell is likely to turn them away. And turning away is all too easy on the Web: click Close, or click Back. And that's a customer gone, probably forever
- Research suggests most visitors to most websites don’t buy on average until they’ve visited a website 7 times
- Visitors to a website are valuable not just because they are potential customers, but because visitors beget more visitors, a proportion of whom will eventually buy
- The more visitors you receive, and the happier those visitors are, the higher you appear on search results, which means more buyers will be clicking on your website
- All your website visitors are valuable to your business, even those that don't buy
- "Advert-only" or “Sales” websites tend to lose out to interesting, informative sites that talk directly and personally to every visitor they receive. Put a lot of free information on your website if at all possible, and nudge visitors subtly and slowly towards sales pages
"Warm" Leads and Targeted Customers
The Web is how more and more of us find information and buy products and services.
Web marketing differs in some important ways from High Street Marketing.
A customer finds you on the High Street because they happen to be there, and you've got a colourful and attractive shop-front.
A customer finds you on the World Wide Web because they're looking for something specific (by typing a search phrase at Google.)
They see your business in the list of results, and click on it. There is no colourful shop-front at this point: it all goes on whether you've got what they want, in plain, hard text, and whether you're there on Google's list of recommendations.
This means that customers from Google are highly targeted. Experience shows that if you don't focus sharply on what they want they will either leave your website or not click on your business in the first place.
There are advantages to courting this kind of customer, and doing it well. One of the most obvious is willingness to buy—it costs far less to win a sale from a well-targeted, warm customer.
Why Hard Selling Doesn't Work on the World Wide Web
Actually, hard selling can work on the web, but only if you're a huge company with an enormous budget. Here are a couple of reasons why hard selling doesn't work for the rest of us:
- Your hard-selling "salesman" (in the form of your website) can be shaken off by simply pressing the Go Back One Page button. Pressing the Go Back One Page button is much easier than slamming the door in a salesman's face: you don't feel the need to be polite to a website.
- A website has little psychological grip on its customers: you don't know where they live, for example, so if they leave your site annoyed, they're gone forever.
- Visitors have a low concentration span on a website: you have less than 30 seconds to get them interested and keep them reading. They're there because they want to be. If you don't give them a reason to want to be there, they'll leave.
- It's easy to find alternatives (just type something else into the search engine, or go to the next website on the search results.)
- As already discussed, web customers are highly targeted people who have already narrowed their search. They may not know exactly what they want, but they're already in the right ball-park. It's too late to try to bend their will to yours.
- Fear. People are still frightened of buying online. Scare them or push them even slightly, and they'll leave.
Websites That Find Their Own Customers
A well-optimised website generates its own visitors by being high up the Internet search results for your type of product or service. In order to do this, you need to find out how your potential customers find you (i.e. what they actually type into Google to find products like yours) and then make sure your web pages match your customers' search language and needs. This could mean changing the language you use to describe your own products.