Many business people know that the internet is a very important part of an effective online marketing strategy simply because everyone uses it every day. Did you know that the Internet just reached two billion users in early 2011?
Obviously, had we predicted this several years ago we’d all be rich. Only in the last five years though, has it become a really powerful marketing tool. The reason why it is such an effective online marketing strategy is that, not only is everyone using the Internet, but a very good marketing practice is to go where the people are, to create your own audience.
What we need to do more of is get online and then help the people who are already there find our website.
But, you have to be careful, because getting found is just the first part of the equation. What happens when they do find you? How do you communicate with them? Of course, we can talk about good enrolling and engaging headlines, but there are many other ways that we could capture the attention of a visitor to our site or blog.
How do we use search engines as an effective online marketing strategy?
This tends to be the number one reason why people come to our courses. Why? Because, search engine optimization is still for many people a very grey area. They have heard from other people that it is a good thing, maybe even learned some strategies of how to do it. But, I have seen in my courses that most businesses are still unaware of how effective it is and how it works.
Let us start from the basic premise that says this: There are 2,000,000,000 internet users and 70% of all searches are done on Google. That is a very big number! The number two search engine is actually YouTube, and way down the list is all others such as Bing, Ask.com, or Yahoo!.
Therefore, I focus my efforts on Google. I ask myself, “How I can be found on Google?” Google has branded itself so well and because of that many people have Google as their home page when they open up their internet browsers.
To start off with, there is no mysterious force in the universe that causes random search results. No matter how much people would like to believe that, being found on Google is a science.
Google does not publish in detail what you should do to be found. They give you some guidelines, called Google Webmaster Guidelines, which are very vague and not very specific.
Why don’t they just spell it out for us? Because, if Google told everybody how to be found and how to make an effective online marketing strategy, then everybody would understand the playing field and the Internet would be crowded with a whole bunch of people that knew exactly the same thing. So, Google likes to keep things a little secret and rank websites based on quality content and certain contextual criteria.
Its algorithm is very powerful, and there is absolutely no human intervention in the ranking process. Google basically trolls the internet, lands on websites, take a snapshot of all the content, and stores the snapshot in its database; including all the text, pictures, and videos. That is basically how it works.
For a more detailed account of how Google factors into your online marketing strategy and how you can capitalize on this information please see the next blog in this series.