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It’s fascinating that even after all these years involved with search engine and internet marketing, there are still those who believe that being in the top 10 results on a search engine is the only result that matters when promoting a business online. And, more interestingly, that many company executives believe that typing in the company name (or, worse, the URL) into the search engine and ranking number one, proves that the budget spent on internet marketing is justified.
Let us consider the problems with the above misunderstanding, particularly for SMEs.
Firstly, if the only budget you are spending to market your business online is on search engine optimisation, you are missing a huge audience. Whilst many companies may not feel that there is the necessary time and resource to handle multiple social media accounts, this is a) where agencies come in and b) a misunderstanding of how social media operates – you do not need a vast social media presence to benefit.
Obviously, the search engines are a logical and essential place for you to have an online presence. However, it is vital to understand how people use the search engines before making the (wrong) assumption that all searchers looking for your company, products and services will type in your company name. Or your URL. If a potential customer knows your URL, and are a savvy Internet user, they are just as likely to type this directly into the location browser of the browser and bypass the search engines entirely.
What is far more likely is that the person looking for your products does not actually know you exist as a company, is unaware of your URL or company name, and therefore will only find your website if it is optimised for the specific terms being searched upon.
If you sell a product, particularly one that is in a competitive market, there is a strong possibility that your website visitors and sales come from word of mouth recommendations from the potential buyer’s social network, from comparison sites, or from links and reviews on other, well-trafficked websites.
Returning to the search engine optimisation issue, many websites do not actually rank for the terms that the average searcher is likely to use to find your product. Many websites are built by website designers, rather than by designers with search engine optimists’ assistance. Whilst Management may love the look of your website, if it does not work for either the search engines or your potential visitors, it will not work for you either.
Therefore, it is important to check that your site includes the terms most likely to be searched for, that these terms occur in all the places required by the search engines, and that the site is competitively optimised in order to rank above others selling similar products.
If the last is not feasible because you are a small fish in a big pond, then it is even more imperative that you use many of the other tools in the internet marketing toolbox to attract attention. eg social media.
To see how well your website is doing on Google, type your main product into the search box and check your ranking. Check your analytics to see how many visitors you are getting from the terms you had expected to be those bringing in most traffic. Think long and hard about where else you are marketing and whether it is driving the necessary traffic to your website. Perhaps 2012 may be the time for a change of tactics?
Today, Google announced a new service to help speed up the delivery speed of web pages, which as we know is one of the criteria applied in the SEO algorithm for SERPs. The Page Speed Service works by “applying web best practices” to your pages. Other services such as CloudFlare also offer similar solutions to speed up page downloads.
In order to use the Google Page Speed Service, you are required to point your DNS to Google so that they can grab your content, apply the best practice formula to your site, and serve it up more quickly.
This raises an issue, or three, about security, privacy and Google’s access to your company’s data, and that of users who visit your site. The previous mod_pagespeed which was an Apache module which could be applied to your site by you and helped to optimise code for faster speeds. It did not, however, hold on to your data or serve it from a Google server. Whilst Google servers very rarely fall over and are unlikely to, just the issue of having your data under Google’s data centre roof must be a cause for concern for businesses.
Optimising pages so that they load more quickly is important not just for search engine results, but also to avoid upsetting your site visitors whose time is precious. You have at most 7 seconds to capture their attention and if even 50% of that is wasted on page load, you are unnecessarily losing potential customers.
One simple action that can be taken with static sites (i.e. those not dynamically created from databases etc) is to strip out all of the spaces in the code before uploading the page to the server. Many years ago we created a tool to do just this and could make savings in download speed anywhere from 15-80% by doing so. Another method for optimising your pages for download is to limit javascripts, and simplify the CSS so that the code is sleek rather than bloated.
Pictures should be rendered for the web not for print, and third party scripts can slow things down if their server is slow to respond, so use these judiciously. The Google +1 button has just been speeded up for precisely this reason, because Google was having to advise putting it at the bottom of pages rather than the top to speed up page load times.
You should also check that your hosting company has the optimal set-up as far as connectivity to the internet so that their servers can respond as quickly as possible to requests for your content.
So, there are simple ways to optimise your pages for download time. Handing the keys to your website to Google? Hmmm….
The influence of the new verb in the English language – “to google” – is clearly showing in the latest statistics from hitwise about Google’s popularity.
Other major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Ask) are failing to gain ground, with 87% of UK searches being conducted through Google in May ‘08.
Additionally, major industries are now seeing Google as an important source of traffic. For instance: travel, entertainment, social networking, business, online video and sports.
Understanding Google’s algorithms, and optimising your website for that particular engine, seems to be ever more important. Whether this ‘monopoly’ is a good thing is a matter of heated discussion in both the business and internet marketing worlds, but however the argument turns out, SEO for Google is a must do.
