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People only do 3 things on the Internet...
- They send and receive email
- They go to a small handful of their favourite sites for news and hobby related stuff
- They use search engines
So if you're going to reach consumers you have to:
- Have their email addresses (and permission to mail to them), or
- Be on one of the sites they visit regularly, or... and this is the surest way to reach them...
- Come up high on the search engine rankings when they're searching for what you have to offer.
And that's it. There are no other options.
Becoming search engine savvy is not just an option. It's a necessity.
So, having gone to all the effort of designing a website, how do you get people to view it? What does it take to appear on the first page of search results?
Typical search engines only index 16% of all websites. Even Google, the king of search engines, only indexes 40% of the Web. So if you want people to find it, submitting your site is critical.
Approximately 10,000 sites refer to themselves as search engines, though only a dozen or so rate attention since they drive 97% of search traffic. For optimal results, Evolve manually tailors submissions to the varying requirements of each of these major search engine companies.
But submitting alone is not enough. If you don't appear near the top of search results for keywords that apply to your business, nobody will find you - so optimising your site for higher positioning advantage is crucial.
This requires more than simply adding a Meta tag to your website. But if you know the science to gaining top rankings, you can still bring in that promised floodgate of free, highly targeted traffic.
A 2004 MarketingSherpa survey of 3,007 marketers found that their site traffic from organic clicks increased an average of 73% in the six months after optimisation.
Getting listed AND properly positioned gives you better search referrals, exposing you to more customers - which requires different skills than merely designing web pages.
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Evolve: 99% of all websites are built with little thought to search engine optimisation, thus dooming their owners to search engine oblivion before the site even goes live.
"If your site is optimized, you average 73% more traffic. Yeah, I've got hard data on that."
- Anne Holland, editor, Marketing Sherpa.
MarketingSherpa survey: Organic site traffic increased 73% in the 6 months after optimisation.
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CLIENT: Spa International
DESCRIPTION: 80% of traffic to the Plug 'n Spa site now comes from Google. We optimised it for generic keyword phrases such as spa pool, spa pools, spa pools auckland, spa pool nz, etc, with pleasing results...
#1 - Google NZ
(Updated 11 September 2007)
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