The Five Keys to Being Visible On the Internet

Question: What strategies do you recommend to your clients to be more visible on the Internet?

When considering recommendations for a new client there are five key areas that we look to improve; content relevancy, site architecture, user experience, call to action, and link popularity.

1. Content Relevancy: The content within the website must be relevant to what the target audience is seeking.
2. Website Architecture: The website structure and server configuration must be technically optimized to allow search engine spiders to index its pages.
3. User Experience and Call to Action: If you’re doing all this work to get people into the website, it’s imperative that qualified visitors can find what they’re looking for. Visitors should be compelled to engage and take some sort of measurable action that will further the relationship (in other words, make contact either making a purchase, downloading a demo, subscribing and filling out a contact form).
4. Link Popularity: If 1,2, 3 and 4 are done well then the next step is to foster backlinks. Backlinks are links into the site from other websites and blogs. These inbound links akin to votes in the eyes of search engines and they help to boost organic SERPs for competitive keywords.
5. Tracking: The sands are always moving so you need to watch your click : conversion rates for each term and how users link and interact with your website. See the next post about website traffic and position analysis.
   

Many of our clients are marketers from mid sized companies. Usually they have a website that’s either old and in need of a redesign, newly upgraded, or in the planning phase. Either way, they are looking to increase the quality and volume of leads flowing through their website.

One of the best ways to get traffic from the web is by being listed in the top search engine results pages (SERPs). There are essentially two ways to be listed on a SERP, a company can pay for a sponsored listing also referred to as a Pay Per Click (PPC) or they can appear in the organic / natural listings.

Top Organic results are considered to be better for a few reasons. First, studies have shown that these listings are clicked about 70% of the time. Sponsored listings can cost $0.50 to $5.00 per click. These charges can ad up quickly if your looking for popular searches terms. That’s too much for some businesses to sustain.

Our search engine marketing strategy utilizes both organic and sponsored listings. We use sponsored to give our client an immediate traffic boost. Click through data from sponsored listings also helps in the keyword research process.

Generally, we recommend a strategy that begins with extensive keyword and competition research. This research helps us hone in on the areas that will be most valuable in terms of the clients marketing objectives.

The preceding blog is an answer to a series of interview questions about search engine marketing practices. Click here to start from the main table of contents page for this interview.