Search Engine Marketing and Optimization on a Budget
Regardless of your company size and history, a lot of your traffic is going to come from visitors who found your site from a search engine. Most startups don’t have a large budget to dedicated to a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) expert, but the good news is you can achieve decent results without draining your funds by following a few basic principles of SEO and SEM.
1. Setup a Google Adwords Account
With AdWords you can have ads placed in Google’s listings based upon location and keywords. It is a pretty simple system, but you have to spend time really deciding what you are targeting. If you are a local business your ads should be targeted to a very specific location (city, county or region) rather than nationally. Also consider the context of the searches: if you are an auto parts store do your customers search for “auto parts” or do they search more specifically for “honda civic auto parts”. The Google Keywords Tool can help you find out who is searching for what, and how popular it is (the key is to find popular searches with low competition). You get a surprising amount of traffic from this so budget for a good amount each month, and increase it as you bring in more revenue.
2. Create Keyword Rich Content
Adding relevant content to your site can really help you out with search listings. You want this content to be very rich in the keywords you selected from #1 above. So if you are targeting “maryland widget repair” (for example) a page on the site with a title “Maryland Widget Repair” that talks about some key clients you’ve had, or current projects it will really help you out. Write your content and be sure to include those words, “Maryland widget repair”, multiple times in the content while making sure the content is still reader-friendly. Just putting a bunch of keywords in the content over and over nonsensically can actually can hurt you. The basic concept is that Google sees these key phrases mentioned over and over in your site and determines it is relevant to the user’s search. Over time (weeks, months, years) more people click on your site after searching for those phrases, and Google gives you an even higher rank because of it’s popularity.
3. Pay Attention to Page Titles
Page titles are extremely important for search engine optimization so use clear titles with keywords from item #2. Instead of a page titled “About Us”, it can be more effective to have a title such as (for an auto parts store as an example) “Honda Civic Parts Distributor - Exhaust, Suspension, Transmission | Acme Auto Parts, Inc.”. That title doesn’t have too much thought put into it (it is only an example) but you get the point - put your keywords in the title and make it count. Every page on your site should have a different title relevant to the content. So take the most common keywords from your page content and make sure they also appear in your title.
4. Social Marketing
Marketing through social networks is a relatively new tactic and for the most part does not return a lot of traffic directly. From our experience the best returns through social marketing are in combination with another marketing effort, and using social marketing to get people talking about that campaign. Think of how much Old Spice’s recent advertisements have blown up simply from people talking about the videos and sharing the links through various networks. The campaign is not based solely on social networking (i.e. the advertisements are not only available on Facebook), rather Facebook and other sites are used as an outlet for those marketing initiatives.
5. Continue to Grow
A website is never finished. If you haven’t looked at your site’s statistics, revamped your advertising, or added new content in a few weeks then you are falling behind. Make it a habit to continue to add relevant content to your site, tweak your ads based on what is most effective and to align with other marketing tactics, and keep track of any problem areas. Find any pages that visitors most commonly exit the site from and determine why those pages may cause them to decide to leave. Keep track of possible usability problems - is your navigation hidden or overly complex? Are visitors having trouble finding the content they are looking for because it is so buried in the site? If you are using your website as a primary source of marketing leads then you have to be prepared to dedicate a large portion of your time to improving it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be considered a science and there are many people out there that make a “killing” on helping people tweak their Web sites to battle for prime search engine positioning. To me it comes down to common sense…having relevant text and content on your Web page.
