A lot of businesses out there think that getting a nice colorful website will get their business out there online and start generating business for them. Unfortunately getting a good website is just 10% of the job done. Driving traffic to a website is another task altogether. Let’s start with an example, getting a website for your business is like setting up a nice storefront. However, where your store is located would play a big role in how much revenue you can generate. If it is in a busy street and you have great visibility then you will do brisk business. Unfortunately in the online world, you are competing with millions of websites like yours unlike just your local area in brick and mortar setup. People search for problems they have and they find answers on search engines like Google or Bing etc.
Let me help you understand a bit more.
First Page is Everything
When your potential customers search online, they search for a product they are looking for or a solution to their problem. It could be like, ‘flooring shops around me’, or ‘rental property’ etc. When people search, they might look at the top few results. Usually, Google and Bing show the top 10 results on a page. And, these are organic results, which means non paid results. Search engines might also show a few paid adverts. Your business success then comes down to being listed on the first page of these search results. The process to get listed on the first page or the top result is called Search Engine Optimization. This SEO is an ongoing process and has a lot of ingredients. Primarily because the search engines keep updating their algorithms, making them more efficient to return the most relevant results.
What if you don’t invest in SEO
Well if one does not invest in SEO then your website might show up on page one for your business name searches. This means your website will only show up to people who already know your business. In some cases, your website might not show up even for searches with your business name because there is another business with a similar sounding name, etc. We have seen this happen far too often.
Shouldn’t just building a website ensure that you show up on searches?
Well, definitely not. There are a lot of ingredients that go into getting indexed for searches. Search engines run bots (small crawler scripts) which reads through pages and then go ahead and index them into their databases. This crawling and indexing need two basic things. First a sitemap, which needs to be submitted to the search engine via their webmaster tools. This helps the search engines discover your pages soon and index them. If you don’t submit your sitemap then you might get index, probably in 2 months, 6 months or even more. Its an ocean of websites out there and you need to tell the search engine that you even exist.
Secondly, your website needs to have the keywords or search terms. These keywords are what people search for. You might be surprised that the keyword you think might be the one people search for might be completely different from what the world searches for. You would want to target the majority of the searches.
These keywords need to be discovered via tools, and then your page content needs to be optimized. There are also a few basic ingredients to the SEO algorithms and they need a few HTML tags called meta tags.
Are keywords and meta tags all that is needed?
Well updating meta tags, updating content with keywords, and submitting to the webmaster is one part of the process. No Doubt it is a very important part. However, please understand that these are called as ON-Page SEO optimizations and these could be pretty much done by all businesses. There is an investment, but all businesses could implement this. It’s a different thing that not all businesses do this.
The other part of solving this jigsaw puzzle is what we call as OFF-Page SEO. OFF-Page SEO is a black hole with many things included in it like back links, Local SEO, Map listings, and many more and could take months of effort.
If you are someone who is just starting to look at getting traffic to your site then starting with ON-Page SEO should be a decent start. And if you are looking for some professional help then please feel free to reach out to us, Sites Computer Resources Inc. in Burlington North Carolina for SEO help. Our experts have years of experience in helping businesses in the North Carolina area.