Location is key to online success
The Internet has expanded at such an exponential rate that there are now more web pages than there are people on this planet. While this amount of easily accessible information is undoubtedly a boon to everyone, how can people actually find your website in the mass of the World Wide Web? Ewen Angus of Trinity Heriot explains.
Search engines are the fastest way to navigate through the Internet to find the products you want. With over 80% of Net users using search engines to find the products and services they need, if your business can't be found then you may losing an important revenue stream. As the larger search engines have expanded the number of web pages indexed, (Google, for instance, has over 4 billion), being found is becoming harder and harder; with websites, it is not a case of 'build it and they will come'.
Having the best-looking or easiest-to-navigate site won't give your business any benefit if it can't be found in the first place. If your website isn't at or near the top of the search-engine rankings, then it is effectively useless - few surfers ever venture past the first listings.
Websites don't get to the initial page of search-engine rankings by accident; in general, they rely on search engine marketing or search-engine optimisation. Optimisation is the process of re-engineering and marketing a website to improve its ranking in sites such as Google, Lycos and Yahoo!. It is the fastest-growing online marketing technique because it delivers highly targeted visitors to your website, as the customer is actively looking for the product or service, rather than being exposed to a banner or print advertisement.
Search engines look at over 50 different factors on your website - including its structure, on-page content and behind-the-scenes coding - which collectively determine how highly the site will rank for a certain search term. The process takes some time and effort but if carried out properly it will lead to more visitors, more customers and more sales. As only 1% of people look beyond the first 30 results on a search engine, the top-placed companies are bringing in the vast majority of business from the Internet, which totalled £23bn in the UK in 2002, with a substantial increase expected for 2003 when the figures are released. Merely registering your website with the search engines won't give your pages a decent shot at page one of the results, unless it is backed up with a targeted search engine optimisation campaign.
I have been working on the Property Executive site to optimise their web pages with the key words potential customers would use when searching for the website on the major search engines. The process involved rewriting some of the content as well as redesigning the pages to be more search-engine-friendly, before submitting the site to major search engines and industry directories. The results have put Property Executive's website at the top of a great many search terms that are used by Scottish businesses looking for commercial property information and articles. As the website is targeted towards a specific industry and geographical area, most of the traffic is relevant and therefore generates customer enquires that ultimately convert to sales. Qualified traffic means less time is expended on those who are not interested in your product or service and it means your website becomes the customer- service or promotional tool that will boost your profitability.
At present, only a small percentage of businesses in Scotland have search engine marketing applied to their websites and those that have are now reaping the benefits of increased sales. Online success really is a case of location, location, location.
