Dallas Internet Marketing

What is Search Engine Optimization and What are Your Business’s Opportunities?

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This is part seven of the Business Owner’s Guide to Internet Marketing. The other posts in the series are:

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful.
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business? (This post)
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

To put it simply, search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of developing a website’s content, structure and relationships with other websites in order to increase the flow of quality traffic a website receives from search engines.

It is similar to a political campaign, carve out the issues you want to address, develop your method for presenting them and connect with potential voters.

When I was in high school, my friends and I took great pride in finding the most obscure, out of the way, hole-in-the-wall restaurants to eat lunch at. We wanted to eat at some place that could be found in a newspaper write up, on a radio ad or TV commercial, or one that other people had referred us to. We wanted to find places that no one knew about, but that served incredible food. One place we liked to frequent required us to park in a nondescript parking lot and make our way down a back alley to get to find the front door.

SEO is like taking that whole-in-the-wall restuarant that no one knows about and helping it change locations from the back alleyway where no one can find it, to a busy shopping center where thousands of lunch-hungry customers go everyday looking for some good food.

In a practical sense, search engines are trying to organize the internet. They have made known what types of criteria they are looking for in their process of ordering sites. Search engine optimization takes the criteria that search engines have said they are looking for (page titles, content, links etc.) and makes sure your website is strong and well developed in those areas.

If your website has been developed incorrectly, or in a haphazard manner in respect to what the search engines are looking for, then you risk missing out on all the potential customers search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing could send you.

Search Results Basics

Just to make sure it is clear what I am referring to, lets look at this image of the search results for the search “Dallas hotels”

The results shaded in light blue are part of Google’s local business listings, a group of businesses Google has identified as being hotels in Dallas, and ordered them according to the local business algorithm.

The results in green are part of Google’s organic results, the web pages Google feels like best answer the query “Dallas hotels”

The results in yellow are paid search advertisements, also know as PPC or Adwords, and these are companies that are paying Google for the opportunity to be listed when the query “Dallas hotels” is searched.

As we talk about SEO opportunities, we are only going to focus on the left hand side of the page, the organic side, where websites are ranked according to their relevance.

Position Matters

It’s plain to see that where you company shows up in the search results makes a huge impact on the amount of visitors you will have from that one search query.

To make this very practical, lets look at the Dallas homebuilder industry.  A quick glance at the Dallas Homebuilder Association’s website, looks like it lists about 780 home builders in Dallas. Of those 780 only only about 14 show up on the first page of Google for a search “Dallas home builders” (10 in the local listings and only 4 actual homebuilders in organic results). They have put themselves in prime position to attract potential customers.

Let’s Do a Little Math to Show the Power of Rankings

Google estimates that there are 540 searches each month, even in our current economy, for the term “Dallas homebuilders.”

A phrase like Dallas home builders should actually convert pretty well for a website, because most people who would search “Dallas home builders” are looking for someone to actually build them a home. So lets say that 54 of those searchers actually turned into customers (this seems a pretty safe bet because the number of new home starts in quarter 1 of 2009 in Dallas?Fort Worth was 2394). So our conversion rate is about 10% between the number of visitors a website has with this query and the number of those visitors that become customers. Let us also assume that each home builder makes $15,000 in profit per home they build.

Here is what the difference in ranking position in the search results would look like:
Now, that is a huge difference based on where a company shows up in the search results!

What Is Typically Included in an SEO Marketing Campaign?

All of this can vary from site to site, but typically SEO campaigns focus on a few common items:

1. Website URL: Obviously for both the customer and the search engine, www.danielhomebuilders.com gives a much clearer idea of what the website is about than www.daniel-i-build-it-now.biz. Most SEO campaigns will look at your current website URL and see if it is ideal for your goals. There does remain the tension between a descriptive URL (like dallasinternetmarketing.org) vs. a more branded approach (wikipedia or facebook), and the pros and cons of that must be looked at on a case by case basis.
2. Site Structure: Simply put, are your website’s pages ordered in such a way that the most important pages get the most attention? Do your page titles match your goal for that page? Is your content readable to a search engine spider? Is there anything that would be a hindrance to a search engine spider from navigating through your website (do you use flash, javascript, redirects, iframes etc.)
3. Content Targeting: Does the content of your website target potential opportunities your website has? For example if you are a Dallas homebuilder, does your content target important phrases for your business like “new homes in Dallas” or “custom Dallas homebuilder” so that you could potentially rank well for those phrases in the search results?
4. Keyword Research: What types of searches are customers in your niche using to find products and services like yours? Do they search more for “Dallas asbestos removal” or “asbestos removers in Dallas Texas.” By knowing the ways in which your customers are searching, you can better position your site to be found in those lucrative search results.
5. Relationship with Other Websites (AKA Link Building): We discussed in the last posts how search engines view links as votes, so we are going to need a plan to get some votes from other websites. No politician   in their right mind would simply say, “I think I would do a good job as a congressman from Texas,” and assume that was going to secure them a victory in the elections. No, they put together a strategy of how they are going to communicate and develop relationships in order to get votes. With a website it is much the same way. You can’t expect to succeed in increasing your business through search engine traffic without a plan as to how your website will develop relationships with other websites in order to get links.

What Are Your Business’s Opportunities?

Your opportunities will vary by market, your current company season and what your goals are. But it seems clear from the numbers, the companies that invest in search engine marketing can open up a world of opportunities for company growth and profit.

In the next post we will focus on Pay Per Click marketing campaigns.

Image Credit: eCitizen Tchao