March 25, 2006. Written by Pre23 Web Development. Cleveland, Ohio.
If you have a business web site that you feel is not generating new customers, so often the problem is a lack of quality web site content. This article will help you identify and improve your business web site's content in order to improve your visibility in search engines.
The Hopes and Frustrations Of A Business Web Site
Business web sites often have multiple goals - that's what's so great
about them. They can provide existing customers with more information about
your business, they can serve to leverage existing marketing campaigns by directing
prospects to your site and they can can help bring your business new customers
and prospects through Internet Search, such as web traffic from Google™.
As web developers, a typical complaint we hear from clients is that they had a past business web site, spent lots of money on it, and it brought them zero new customers - ZERO. This kind of experience can leave a sour taste in one's mouth about the effectiveness of online marketing.
Identifying The Problem
So often when we look at web sites that perform poorly in search engines,
the number one problem is by far a lack of quality web content that matches
what people are searching for.
The Problem: Lack Of Targeting
Here's an example. A typical content approach with a business web sites is to
create a 'Services' web page and on that page describe all about the company's
services. This may sound like the right approach but if you only describe your
business services at the services page, you're making one of the worse mistakes
possible.
Why? It's all about the math!
An Example: The Wrong Way
To help show you why just using a typical 'Services' web page to help
you find customers is a bad idea, let's pretend that you have a home improvement
web site. So you create your 'Services' page and on it you describe your home
improvement services.
Now here's where the math comes in. If you searched in Google™ for the phrase, 'home improvement' you'll see in the top right part of the page the number of web pages returned. It's 384,000,000 web pages. This means that on the Internet right now Google™ has found over 384 million web pages that have those words on the page. Now look at the top ranked search results, you'll see the big players like Home Depot™, Lowe's™, the big DIY sites, etc.
That is who you're competing with in the search engine race to be found! So as you can see, you have to create web site content that is much more targeted. And you do that with location.
The irony is that your home improvement web site doesn't even need to be #1 in search engines for 'home improvement'. This is because web sites visitors realize that this search term is too broad to be a helpful search. Most likely, searches are using geographic terms combined with their keywords to help find service providers.
This is the secret! Stop describing your services in generic terms and start describing your services and past projects that includes geography. With this approach, you're not trying to create a single services web page. But countless past service description pages. It's hard work and takes time as you can see - but it works! Not only will it expand your search engine visibility, but you'll end up creating more and better web site content that will serve you well.
An Example: The Right Way
Here's an example to show you how to do this the right way.
To help demonstrate our skills and products, we have a fictitious
Home Improvement
Web Site demo. Everything about this site, except the phone numbers
to call us, is completely fake.
Now in the demo, we created a past project description where a home improvement service was performed in Strongsville, Ohio (that's where we're located). If you go to Google™ and search with the phrase, 'Strongsville Ohio Home Improvements' you'll see, at the time that we wrote this article, that the top #1 and #2 results are our demo! Look to the top right corner and you'll also see that only 58,000 pages were found which is quite small. With fewer search results the likelihood of competing and winning at the local search level are very good - and this is where your prospects are.
How can it be that we have a fictitious demo that out performs the competition? The answer is that our content is written in ways to perform well is search engines. It's not magic and it's not spammy tricks. The demo's content was real work to create but the payoff is tremendous.
The big picture here is that you need to start thinking of your web site as a summary of past project descriptions and not generic service descriptions limited to a single web page. When you describe your past projects, talk about the city, town, county, and/or state where the service was performed. Don't try to mention everything is a single project description. That's spammy and search engines don't like it. Instead, be truthful about your descriptions and help tell your story across multiple service descriptions.
Finally, write the service summary in real detail that adds uniqueness to each service description. Visitors will find your content interesting and helpful. Search engines will find your content unique and specific.
How To Identify Your Site Weaknesses: Things To Look For
At the beginning of this article, we promised we would show you how
to diagnose your own web site.
Here's what to look for:
How We Can Help
Our Pre23 Portfolio 2.0 product
is built to help guide you into creating the right kind of web site
content that helps you find new business. Please explore more about
it here. We're sure you have questions,
so we welcome any phone calls. Just call us to talk about your site
and to clarify our ideas. We love helping businesses make the change
from the wrong way to the right way.
Main Phone: 216.333.1581
Toll Free: 877.713.4294
Mobile: 216.409.6109