Search engine marketing has certainly changed over the years. I began my first website in 1997, only a year after Amazon came online. Websites were so archaic then but to make matters worse, connections were so slow that it made the experience of surfing a less than positive one.
Even still, our desire to gather information from other people’s hard drives drove us forward to improve the internet. If you have an hour or so to kill, check out a site called the waybackmachine. They keep ongoing copies of sites as they evolve. Taking a look at Google or Yahoo search engines when they were in their infancy is quite comical but it also gives you a very good idea of how quickly they have evolved…or have they?
As much as we’d like to think that the algorithms for Google and Yahoo (these 2 make up 75% of search so we forget the others), are perfectly brilliant, they just aren’t. How many times have you searched for something very specific and received every result but the one you needed, causing you to endlessly try other search phrases.
Even worse, how many times have you received results that have absolutely nothing to do with your search? Somehow they magically appeared on page one (the only page that really matters). Let’s go further. How many times do you think you have the right listing then you click on it only to find a maze of links? These sites try to hog the search engines somehow thinking that you’re going to give up and buy something from them just because you’re there. OR they get their money by signing up businesses then bundling them in their core site. The end result is the user has to dig deep to find what they really wanted when it should have only been one click away.
For me, if it’s not one click away, I’m not doing it neither are your potential customers.
So what do you do? There are thousands of companies offering this funny thing called search engine optimization or seo. They will promise you the world and charge you a fortune for it. Most will promise listings in the top 20 for your search terms.
Do you really know how your customers will search for you? You probably don’t and if you did what will 3 specific words or phrases bring you? What if your customers use different words, will they still find you? What if they’re not customers but rather, they’re looking for complimentary businesses, do they find you then? Do you go to a shopping mall with the intent of buying one item or do you look around to see what interests you?
The bottom line is that getting found on search engines is not terribly complicated and it doesn’t take long either. A 48 hour turnaround to get listed in the top 10 (that’s page one) is pretty typical. We have some really ridiculous listings where we have 6-7 of the top 10 listings, the record is 7, which was for an attorney service. On average 1-2 in the top 10 is standard, listings 11-20 are not relevant as far as we’re concerned.
Although it doesn’t take long to get listed, it does take time to craft the listing so it shows. It’s an art in itself because the goal is not only to get listed in the top 10 but also to get the searcher to click on the listing THEN, actually read the content and contact the advertising company. So, the job is hardly complete when a top 10 listing is achieved.
One must understand the business of the advertising entity. This understanding will lead to well crafted and relevant content that the reader actually will enjoy reading. How’s that for a change? The searcher will actually only be one click away from finding what they really wanted, what a concept!
We’ve done this for a while, in fact, Google did a case study on our contextual advertising efforts in 2004 prior to their IPO. They were so happy with us helping them in this case study that they sent a very nice, large Google beach towel! WOW!
If you’d like to read more on this case study or you have questions on getting your business found i.e. seo, search engine optimization send us an email.
We don’t publish our ideas and will only disclose fully what we can do for a business in person or by telephone.
For search engine marketing in Southern California, more specifically Rancho Cucamonga and surrounding areas
email: consultants.west@gmail.com
