Trinity Heriot

A Trinity Heriot magazine article on search engine marketing online in Property Executive magazine, Scotland & North England, in February 06.

GET THE SEARCH ENGINES WORKING FOR YOU

Google is the world’s most used search engine with billion's of searches every day. If you can have your website at the top of the rankings you’ll gain a significant increase in traffic and online business. Ewen Angus, at Trinity Heriot, explains how marketing your website can bring good business from Google’s millions of searchers…

Search engines have revolutionised the way we work and play online by making every possible product, service or interest only a simple search away. Whether you’re looking for a supplier for your business or a pink iPod for your daughter, a search engine can help track down thousands of websites in less than a second. Seven years ago, few people outside of Silicon Valley had heard of Google. Now it has gone beyond being an internet company to become a recognised verb — “to Google”, to run a quick fact check. The site now processes around a billion searches a day, up from 150 million three years ago. The opportunities for businesses to take advantage are limitless.

With over 80% of Net-surfers using search engines, your business’s website should be easily located or you could lose a vital revenue stream. As the larger search engines have expanded the number of web pages indexed, (Google, for example, currently has over eight billion), being found is becoming harder and harder. If your website isn’t near the top of the search engine rankings, then it is effectively useless – few surfers ever venture past the first listings.

So, how can you ensure your website is highly ranked?

Websites don’t get to the first page of search-engine rankings by accident; in general, they rely on search engine optimisation, a complex but effective form of search engine marketing. Optimisation is the process of re-engineering and marketing a website to improve its ranking in sites like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. 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.

Search engines look at over 100 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. 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.

It is the UK’s fastest-growing 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 passively exposed to a banner or print advertisement. At present fewer than 10% of business websites have been optimised to the search engines and those that have are reaping the advantages over their competition.

Having high rankings on the search engines for the terms your customers use will improve your sales and profits as well as boosting your overall internet presence.

Online marketing of Property Executive’s website

Property Executive’s website, www.propertyexecutive.co.uk, features content from both magazines ( Scotland and the North of England ), information about the Property Executive awards and news which is updated several times a week. Trinity Heriot has been optimising the website for Google and the other major search engines to ensure Property Executive is highly ranked for relevant industry searches. In January 2006 the website had over 3,000 unique visitors to the website, a figure which has grown significantly over the last year.