Sunday, October 28, 2012

Using Search Engine Optimization for ROI Hungry Businesses

By Max Andersen


By ranking highly for keywords within your business niche, you are more likely to get the search engine user to click through onto your website. This is not just about driving visitors to your website though; more importantly is the type of visitor who will be clicking through to you. Because the users are inputting the keywords themselves, this is in turn a signal for what their intentions are.

Let's take an example here: if you type in "Ford Dealers in St Louis MO" , then we can discern several things from this search. First off, the searcher is looking at Ford's, which narrows down the field for car buyers and sellers. The second major thing we can discern is that the searcher has specified a location, 'St Louis MO' which means they are now actively looking for a dealer where they can transact the business. This would be a good quality keyword to go after for a Ford dealer in St Louis looking for qualified web visitors to come to their website.

This helps to make it clear why you have to be so meticulous with your keyword research. You are not just looking to rank for some keywords, but in fact your keyword selection is creating a net for the potential prospects looking to buy from you. The important thing to bear in mind here is that you have to try to get into the mindset of your prospective visitors. By thinking about what they are going to actually type into a search engine, you stand a much better chance of actually capturing their interest and more than this, of uncovering new and lucrative keyword terms to gun for.

After keyword selection, you need to evaluate them to see if you will be able to actually rank for them in fact. This means looking at the state of the competition online to see if you can go up against those websites which are currently ranking for the keyword terms you are interested in. This involves performing a cost-benefit analysis to figure out where your marketing budget is better spent.

It is vital you exercise considerable discipline at this stage: you may have found some great keywords, but if the competition has been dominating those rankings for years with old websites and a big budget, this means that first you have to match what they have done, and then to get the ranking slots, you must exceed them. It is typically far better to go for the low hanging fruit in your keywords and generate the easy ROI first.

Your next step is to perform on-site optimization of the website, and this means making changes to the site so it is more likely to be viewed favorably by the search engines. Typically, this involves ensuring you have good content on the site, and content which is not only engaging and useful to human readers but also contains sufficient keyword weight to persuade the search engines that you really are a relevant website for these terms.

The final stage is to perform offsite optimization of offsite SEO: a primary work task here is to build backlinks which point at your website. By increasing the number and quality for the links coming into your website, you are increasing the chance that search engines will rank you even more highly for those terms. While onsite SEO is concerned with designing the race car, offsite SEO and link-building is about putting the gas into the tank to fuel it.

What is the result of all this effort? Simple - high rankings bring you reduced costs for generating leads, typically at a fraction of the costs of your other channels and activities. In addition, leads are already pre-qualified because the searcher is telling the search engine what they want - why else would a searcher click through to come to your website unless they were already interested in what you are selling! All of this equates to a higher ROI for those who invest in search engine optimization.




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