As a business executive, you have years of experience in the brick and mortar business world. The same is probably not true for ecommerce and the potential of SEO for your business.
First things first – SEO stands for search engine optimization. It refers to the process of getting the pages on your site ranked in the top 5 for particular keyword phrases. The keyword phrases are determined by research what your customer base is search for in relation to your product or service line. Top rankings produce a stream of visitors to your site day after day. Known as “traffic”, these visitors are the lifeline to sales and revenues.
The best way to parse SEO in relation to your brick and mortar business is probably to think of a retail store. A good bit of time and planning is put into the layout of the store. Obviously, there are multiple departments within the store. These departments are placed in a strategic manner with the best selling products often in the back of the store to force customers to walk through other departments where they might buy additional items. The downside to this approach is that prospects may not realize your store actually sells the particular products they need. SEO deals with this problem in a unique way.
What if you could take your niche store and divide it into individual retail locations for each department? What if you could essentially fill every location in a mall with the department stores? This is one approach to SEO. So, how does it work?
Most businesses new to the web focus solely on their home page when it comes to marketing. This is a mistake. The home page is obviously important, but you should think about bringing in prospects through the internal pages of the site. The goal should be to identify the particulars people are searching for in your niche and have a page or product ranked for the phrase they are using. Taking this approach can double or triple your traffic and do the same for sales.
You might sell beauty products on your site. While the home page should be optimized to obtain rankings under the keyword phrase “beauty products”, you shouldn’t stop there. Let’s assume you also offer sun care products such as sunscreen, after sun lotion and so on. These section of products is really a sub-site within your site. The entire section should be optimized to get rankings under the relevant phrases that turn up through keyword research. Such phrases might include “natural sunscreen”, “sun protection products”, “treatment for dry skin” and whatever else turns up in research.
There is another simple area where SEO can really make a difference in the number of sales through your site. If you have a strong presence in the brick and mortar world, getting ranked under your brand or business name can blow up sales. People that would otherwise by through your stores or retailers carrying your products now will come to the site. More importantly, they will come back to your site again and again producing repeat sales. As any SEO professional can tell you, getting ranked number 1 on Google, Yahoo and MSN under your business name is a very simple task.
Ultimately, SEO is something every business transitioning to the web should incorporate in their marketing plan. When done correctly, the revenues and profit can be staggering.
Halstatt Pires provides
search engine optimization service packages through MarketingTitan.com.
