1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
While a lot of businesses have cut back their spending, not everyone has. There are still lots of businesses that are spending. In fact, some are spending more as they see this as a time to spend less money (as businesses discount their services) to get more coverage to generate more leads and, hopefully, more business and more cash.
One of the ways to do this is to make sure your business appears in Internet searches in the most appropriate place.
If you build custom widgets but only service the Malaga area, it’s much harder to show up on page 1 in Google when someone searches for “custom widgets”.
But if you’re the only custom widget company north of the river, then you should be looking for page 1 exposure for “custom widgets malaga”, “custom widgets joondalup” (Joondalup’s north, right?), “custom widgets perth” and “custom widgets western australia”.
Depending on the size of your market and the number of competitors will determine exactly how you configure your keywords to achieve page 1 ranking.
What could you do to help your search engine placement?
2. Keyword Density
When the search engines “spider” your website and record it in their databases, they also inspect your webpages to make sure that your search keywords match the content in your webpages.
In the old days, some devious people would put the “search terms du jour” into their keywords so their sites would appear and the poor user would end up far away from those Pokemon Trading cards they were looking for.
To fix this, the search engines now check your page content against your search terms. If they match, they give you an electronic tick and your search terms are honoured. If not, they can do anything from dropping the search terms that they didn’t find to ignoring your site altogether.
So it’s important to have content that matches the search terms, and that measure is called Keyword Density.
With a sufficiently high keyword density, Google et al will consider that your page is a suitable candidate to display whenever someone searches for, say, Pokemon Trading Cards and so your chances at a page 1 placement are considerably higher.
A word of warning though: flagrant littering of your webpage with “pokemon” repeated hundreds of times is considered “search spam” and will also be ignored, so we need to find that happy medium.
3. Test and Measure
As anyone who has ever engaged in any form of business development and coaching knows, one of the golden rules is test and measure. And the same is true of websites.
Our favourite measuring tool is Google Analytics which is a piece of JavaScript code that goes into your website and tells Google who has been visiting, where they came from, what they searched for, what they looked at, and when they left – and even where they went to, if you have it set up correctly.
Best of all, is that Google Analytics can directly compare last weeks web traffic with this weeks – a very useful comparison if you have web-based promotions. For example, whenever we send out this newsletter we see a marked spike in our web traffic as everyone checks out what we’ve been up to.
So there’s 3 ideas you can implement through your website to help generate more leads and hopefully more business.
