Search Engines – A Powerful Force
This is a very powerful marketing strategy that helps you tap into the incredible volume of free traffic that is on the internet.
Many people underestimate how powerful searching is now on the internet. As an example, in 2013 there were over 2.1 trillion searches done using Google and that is with just the biggest search engine. That works out to about 5.9 billion searches per day!
Another interesting illustration is to show you how much of that massive amount of the internet volume is done by just one search engine: Google. August 2013 there was a 40% drop in internet traffic when Google servers went down for that brief period. Think about it, that is just one web site. There are millions more sites out there including some very large ones like Amazon and all the major car dealers, and smart phone companies etc. but just one going down caused a huge drop in the total internet traffic – and it was a search engine.
Why are People Searching Online?
Millions of people are looking seriously for many things. People are searching for solutions to problems and needs. They are typing in a search for a book or pizza or shoes or … you get the point- they are buyers! These buyers are looking for your product and service, but unless the SEO work is done with your site to bring searches to you, like a magnet sucking in many nails, those searches will pass by your organization. This is the reality of how business is done in 2017.
The GOAL OF SEO
The goal of search engine optimization is to get good exposure to your organization through the search traffic on the internet and then to obtain a high conversion rate of these clicks to your website into whatever your organization needs. This involves then a combination of marketing and sales. Many online marketers emphasize the driving of traffic to your website but we believe you need to design your site to also bring in the sales. To achieve these two objectives is a complex process and involves a variety of methods including site layout, menu structure, quality content production (which needs to be relevant and optimized for keywords and keyword usage), hyperlinks, links from other sites and more. The effective use of videos is also very valuable in the process.
Search engine bots are used by the search engine companies like Google to crawl your site (that is why they are called spiders) to index your site and rank your site somewhere on their search results. Another key task of a skilled SEO person will be to eliminate the many items on a site that can hurt or even kill your rankings in the SERPs. Some of these seem so innocent to the untrained eye, but are critically important to be changed.
First Page is Key
Statistics vary depending on the type of search, and the geographical area in addition to other factors, but show that up to 90% of searches that turn into clicks to websites are on the first page of the search engines results pages (SERP). It is well over 50% of the searches in most cases. Therefore one of the fundamental goals is to get your website structured and operating to get it on the first page for results for the searches that are important to you. We use a variety of methods to do this but ones that provide long term stable results, not one night wonder results through fleeting unsavory tactics.
