Your business has a website and it looks great (or at least you think so). Customers say they like it as well. What is with this optimization thing? Why should I optimize my business website? It all starts with what you want your website to achieve. Local business websites generally fall into two categories:
The website that serves existing customers.
The first requires little or no optimization. Existng customers know the business, they probably already have the website address from a business card or email. Generally the lack of competition for the search phrase that is a business name means that a “search by name” will bring up the business website. A website that serves existing customers is both easy to maintain and unrewarding.
The website that serves existing customers and generates new customers.
This type of website is different. It takes understanding and consistent effort. To understand some of what it takes you can review the lesson content in our online marketing training. In January 2007 there 106,875,138 websites on the internet. In January 2011 there were 273,301,445 websites. That is 156% growth in just four years. This growth makes it more difficult than ever to get found online by people looking for your products or services. The need to optimize is greater than ever and optimization is getting more complex.
Optimizing your website is essential for driving new customers. When a search is conducted for anything online, it causes the search engine of choice to query the database of billions of web style documents. In truth it is similar to a standard database query just extremely more complex. From this query the search engines want to focus on three areas:
- Relevance
- Prominence
- Distance
The search engines use these matrix to return results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, The results are ranked in order of importance. It is all three components that the process of search engine optimization is designed to influence.
If you want to gain new customers search engine optimization is a critical component of any local business marketing plan.
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