Just because you have a website, it doesn’t automatically mean that people will visit, especially if they can’t find you. And the main way that people find you online is still via the search engines. Without a website, you don’t exist and without a search engine marketing strategy, you exist, but are invisible.
Google isn’t the main search engine. There are others such as Bing and Yahoo, but Google is the most well known. In fact it is so popular and well known, that it has become a verb. People no longer search for something, they ‘Google’ it.
How Google Works
Google is the worlds largest search engine. It does 2 things:
- It crawls the Internet looking for web pages, and indexes them in a vast catalogue. It is no longer necessary to manually submit websites to Google, it happens automatically. Google will find your pages via incoming links from websites that are already indexed. This is one reason why you want other sites to link to yours
- It decides which page is the best match for search query, and the ones that have the best rank. Getting your pages to rank highly is the harder part, and this is what search engine marketing will achieve for you.
The decision-making algorithm that decides which pages are the best is based on two things, relevance and authority. The relevance of a page to the search query is simply based on the keywords used to perform a search. But since there are likely to be hundreds of thousands of pages that match, Google then ranks them in order of authority, using its PageRank algorithm.
This algorithm is based on work done at Stanford University on how to measure the authority of academic papers. The simple answer is, citations. The more a paper is cited by other papers, the more authority it has. But not all citations are equal. A citation from a paper that itself has a lot of citations carries more weight than a citation from one that has few or none.
This is exactly how the Google PageRank algorithm works. The more links there are from other websites to your website, the more authority your website has. Not all incoming links are equal however. An incoming link from a website that itself has a lot of incoming links carries more weight than an incoming link from one that has few or none.
How Search Engine Marketing Works for Businesses Like Yours
Online marketing is all about making your content and product and services easy to find. Search engine marketing is about is specifically about making everything about you and your business easy to find on Google and the other search engines, by increasing the position of your placement on search engine results page (SERPS). This is done via three methods:
- Search engine optimisation (SEO), which basically makes your website more attractive to Google.
- Paid placements (using Google Adwords etc.)
- Attracting links from other established websites pointing back to your website.
The good news is that the first of these methods, SEO, is not only free but is also more effective. Research shows that 75 per cent of people using Google click on the natural search results, and 25 per cent click on the paid ads.
Google Adwords is still worth exploring, and doesn’t need to cost a fortune. Your paid-for listing becomes cheaper and more effective the more specific to your business the search terms you choose are. Search engine marketing is affordable even for small businesses and is more targeted than traditional methods of advertising.
In order to get incoming links from high authority sites, you need to create good content on your website, your blog and your social media. They will all have an effect on the position of your site in the search engines.
Many More Ways To Get More Customers From the Internet
If you are interested in discovering more fast, effective and future-proof online marketing strategies for your business and drive thousands of extra customers to your website then please feel free to contact us today as we have helped many business just like yours.
