Search Marketing

You already know that just having a website doesn’t mean that your target audiences will find it or become your customers if they do. The goal of search marketing is to make your business website more visible on search engine results pages.

Search marketing includes search engine optimization (SEO) — but search marketing is a whole lot more than SEO. Search marketing means creating authoritative content for your business website — better, more reliable information than your competitors have.

Search marketing involves a long-term commitment to:

• updating your existing content every quarter.
• adding new useful information to your site every month or two.
• updating your competition research at least every quarter.
• analyzing the traffic on your site at least once a month.
• a linking strategy — getting relevant sites to link to yours.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a way of editing a website to position it for success with Google and the other search engines. To take just one example — you should target no more than five search terms for your homepage or other landing page on your site — and then use each of those targeted search terms three or more times on that page.

Some people used to think of SEO as a set of tricks that could outsmart the search engines, but that kind of “black hat marketing” will eventually hurt you.

The Importance of Content

Your content is much more important than your site’s graphic design. If your site is easy to navigate and visually clean, you’ve taken care of the most important design issues. But if your content is deficient, a great design won’t help you.

Your graphic design is not a factor in the placement of your site on search engine results pages. Few visitors to your site will make a decision to stay-and-buy (or hit the “Back” button) based on your graphic design — unless it’s distracting or confusing. Most first-time visitors to your site just want to see who you are and find out if you offer what they are looking for.

Many of our Internet marketing clients don't really need a completely new design. If you want to keep the basics of your current graphic design, Allied Internet will help you evaluate it as a marketing tool, and suggest adjustments that may be to your advantage.

Search Engines Evaluate Your Content

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search are primarily in the information cataloging business, and that they reward sites that have good information.

Many of us now use the search engines instead of the Yellow Pages, but it’s important to understand that the search engines are not in the directory business. Let's say it again: they are in the information cataloging business. Google says that their mission is to organize the world’s information; their mathematicians write algorithms that notice and reward sites with regularly-updated information.

Our most important advice if your goal is long-term success with the search engines: make your site an information source that is clearly better than what your competitors are offering.

Because your site has reliable information that is regularly updated, the search engines will eventually reward your efforts. Visitors to your site will bookmark it because your information is so good — and so up-to-date — that it's worth a return visit from time to time.

As long as it’s all (1) reliable, (2) well-organized, and (3) pertinent to your products and services, the more information on your site the better. Each of those three adjectives is critically important; call us and we'll explain more.

Your Content Can Make You Competitive

If you have competitors who are serious about their websites, you compete with them by making a long-term commitment to content development. A successful business website is not a casual or one-time thing.

To be competitive, your site has to grow by the regular addition of reliable and helpful new information. You also want to update older information on your site. A file that hasn’t been updated in ninety days is already starting to get stale.

What this means for you: freshen up the existing content on your site at least once a quarter, and add new content to your site every month or two.

Many of our clients depend on us for cost-effective content development — research, writing, and/or editing. Call us now at 1-800-935-1820 to discuss how we can help, or contact us using this form.