One of the most crucial first steps in any new business is letting your potential customers know that you exist. In the very early stages this is often done by word of mouth, many businesses being set up to fulfill an existing need in a given marketplace. This is fine for the initial stages, and for some companies can be enough to sustain them in the short to medium term, but for most companies there comes a point where there is a need to expand the customer base, to bring new products and services to market, to reach out and engage with the wider community, and the way in which this is done can be crucial to how successful that business becomes. Historically businesses have had a couple of routes to market. Telesales has long been a favourite, but there are also postal campaigns, leaflet drops, word of mouth referrals, business networking and so on.
Over the last ten years or so there has been one marketing tool that has begun to take pre-eminence for many businesses and is set to become increasingly important as we move forward. That tool is the internet, and for many businesses it is a tool that you ignore at your peril. The internet can be a tremendous resource, and is rapidly becoming consumers first port of call when they are seeking out products and services, and these are not just Joe Public consumers but business customers as well. I know anecdotally from my circle of friends that if they are sourcing something, the first place they look is online, normally with a Google or Yahoo search, followed by a scan of the companies listed. Put pretty much any search term into one of these search engines and with the vast size of the internet you are almost sure to returns several hundred thousand or more results. Realistically no-one is ever going to scroll through page after page of results, and resaerch has shown that the majority of internet users seldom go past the first five pages. If they haven't found what they want by them they type in a different search.
So, it is clear that if you want your business to function online effectively you need to position it so that when people search for things that you do, you appear in the search engine ranking, and ideally that you feature as early in those rankings as possible. None of this is new information, but it is becoming more and more crucial because the search engine owners also know that people generally don't search beyond page five or so, and they are working hard to refine their search engines so that they can match websites more and more accurately with what people are looking for, thereby reducing the amount of inappropriate or less useful sites that appear on those first few pages. The stated Holy Grail of the search engines is to refine the process so that no matter what a user searches for, the results they get are ranked in accordance with what will be most useful to them.
A brief note at this point may be useful. When you, or I or anyone else types a search query into a search engine something quite magical happens. The search engines transforms your query into a mathematical formula using a search algorithm, and then uses that formula to rank websites according to their relevance. These algorithms are what are constantly being tweaked and modified to return ever more accurate and relevant results. It used to be the case that if you had a domain name that was relevant to your business, lets say www.carsales.com for a company selling cars, that would be enough to get you a high search engine rank. Technology moved on and the domain name became less relevant as it was seen as a barrier to market entry as the best domain names were snapped up, so it became necessary to but keywords into your website, so as well as having the domain name www.carsales.com your website would have titles and page names that referred to selling cars. Technology moved on again and the search engine algorithms began to scan the actual website content for relevance so there was a need for the website owner, along with their website developer to make sure that on page content was relevant and useful.
The process is becoming ever more complex, and yet at the same time, if you understand the process, more accessible. The trick is to understand the process, and what the search engines are looking for. It takes valuable time to do that, particularly for people who are not necessarily tech savvy, and for many businesses there is an increasing requirement to have a specialist look over a website to make sure that it will work with the search engines to achieve a valid and sustainable page rank. There are all sorts of companies out there who can offer these services. Some are better than others, some understand the process better than others. As with everything else in life making a cool and rational decision on what works best for you, and who you feel comfortable working with is vital to making the most from your online presence, no matter what your business aspirations are.....
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