Session 2: Search & Find by Joost de Valk

More than 87% of people use Google to find websites online. 43% use search engines to find a site they’ve been to before. 88% of all e-commerce transactions start with a search, and some studies say that as many as 60% of all commerce transactions, both on and offline, start with someone searching for a product, service or company online. People now routinely do research for products and services online, even when they intend to buy something in the “real world”.

Understanding how your customers use search engines, and using them effectively yourself to find the information you need to understand customers and close sales, is absolutely critical to your business.

It means that for people to find you, you must be easy to find through search engines. And, to be brutally frank, people must be able to find you through Google because more than 90% of all searches begin there.

Given that customers will find you through Google, and you must be easy to find, it follows that you must understand exactly how your customers will search for you.

Generally they will look for:

• Your company name if they know it
• The names of your products and services if they know them
• The keywords that describe what they want

To be found by customers, and all the other important people who search for you including potential strategic partners and possible investors, you must ensure that Google ranks your business at the top of the first page for the terms they most commonly use to search for your company and businesses like it.

IMPORTANT: More than 40% of people click on the first non-ad link that comes up after they do a Google Search. So try to make sure you always come up first in search rankings.

How to insure your company is found when people search for you by company name:

• Incorporate your company name into your domain name. If your company is called Overstock because it sells overstocked products purchased from other businesses, Overstock.com is a great domain name.
• Make sure that your domain name is in the same country as your customers. If you are going to be solely targeting customers in the United Kingdom, a .co.uk domain would be ideal, but .org.uk domains are also known to rank well.
• Ensure that those who link to you do so by company name. The “anchor text” which is the text inside a link, matters. If the link to your bed sheet website is “I bought my bedsheets here”, instead of “Best Bed Sheets”, Google can get confused.
• Make sure you are listed in Linked in, and that you have links from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Those sites all have a very high page rank, which means Google indexes them frequently and values their links highly. So, having several of them list your company name and link to you makes your company much easier to find. Use www.knowem.com and www.namechk.com to ensure all the social media and related sites “see” your business.
• If your business caters to local customers, list your business in Google Places.

How to Make Sure People Can Find You by Product or Service Name

For most people, a product or service name is easily confused with a company name. Most people probably can’t tell you who makes Twinkies, so it’s a good thing they can look up www.twinkies.com to find out that Hostess makes them.

• Give your products and services unique names. Consider getting trademarks for the most important ones. You can trademark your products and services in the UK by going to www.ipo.gov.uk. Remember that you can’t trademark descriptive text or titles. Crispy Cream Donuts is impossible to trademark, but Krispy Kreme is easy.
• Create domains for each product or service and populate each with unique content for that product or service. Reviews and other frequently updated data are best.
• Make sure people link to products and services from other sites using the correct name of the product or service and the correct domain names. You can also have these domains just redirect people to the correct pages on your corporate site. For example www.itunes.com links to http://www.apple.com/itunes/ if people visit it from the United States.

How to Make Your Company Easy to Find by Keyword

88% of all e-commerce transactions start with a search, and approximately 40% of all clicks go to the first non-ad search result on the page. Virtually 100% of all clicks go to the first page of links Google displays after a search. This means that your company can benefit greatly from “owning” the top spot on the page displayed when people search for its keywords.

A couple of very important notes:

• Your keywords have to be relevant to your business, and your company has to show up optimally in the search listings in order for having the first spot on the search page to be financially rewarding. If someone searches for Ballons UK and sees Tommy’s Ballon Batallion: A rock opera for floating Scottish Terriers, the second guy on the list is going to get all the clicks. So make sure your customers think your keywords accurately describe your enterprise.
• Google shows everyone their own search pages. Google watches every click and keystroke it receives. It tailors its results based on where searcher and company are located, what the searcher looked for previously, what they’ve clicked on in the past and a hundred other factors. You will never be top of the search listing for everyone for all your keywords. Aim for being top of the list for those most likely to buy what you sell.

Several factors about your website help to determine how Google ranks it on the search page.

• Your domain name: If your domain name includes one of the search terms a customer has entered, your chance of appearing higher in the rankings goes up.
• Your company name: Google is now company aware. If someone enters your company name, even if it has nothing to do with your domain name, Google will try to put it at the top of the search index.
• Your website structure: When you name your pages, or blog posts, you should specify a title for each page. We strongly encourage (which means we would insist if we could) that you use a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla that does this for you. Most CMS tools let you create categories of posts. When Google scans your site, it looks at your domain name, the names of the categories of posts, the titles of your posts, the alternate text associated with your images, and a few hundred words on your page to try to determine what keywords it should be associated with. So make sure that you organise your site so your most important keywords appear in your category names, and the pages underneath them use some of those keywords and others that are closely related. Do not make your site wholly for images or use Flash to animate it. Google cannot scan your site unless you create it using standard text in categories, page titles, etc. Note that your pages can and should point to one another. This helps improve your position as well.
• What pages point to you: Not all sites on the Internet are created equal. Google “ranks” pages based on a series of factors. How many visitors they receive, how frequently people link to them, etc. The highest “Page Rank” is 10. Sites like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, CNN, BBC, etc have high page ranks. If they link to your website, your page rank increases. It is important that the site linking to you, or at least the page on the site linking to you, uses the keywords you want your company to be known for. Just any link from any page of any high value site won’t do. There is some belief that Google actually keyword indexes and ranks each page on the Internet. Since no one knows how they do what they do, it is hard to confirm this. What is true is that an accountancy firm that the BBC links to from its financial pages gets more of a bump in page rank than the same firm getting links from the celebrity pages.
• How many pages you have: Generally speaking, sites with more pages do better than sites with fewer pages. Sites with frequently updated pages also rank better.

These are the factors most commonly adjusted to improve your businesses page rank.

IMPORTANT: If you try to game Google using “black hat” techniques like buying links to your site from high page rank sites, or increasing the number of keywords on your page by copying text from others sites or by buying links, Google will usually catch you and it has been known to remove offending sites from it’s index entirely. It is easy enough to play by the rules that you don’t have to cheat the system. Truth be told, if Google doesn’t like your site, neither will your potential customers. They all want the same thing… lots of well organized, content rich, pages.

The Single Most Important Thing To Get Right Is . . .

You absolutely must get your keywords right. If you sell Toys but your website advertises Tanks and Guns, you are likely to draw entirely the wrong traffic. If your customers call the “holiday cottages” you sell “vacation homes” you should change what you call them.

To find out what keywords your business should be using in its promotion:

• Ask your best customers to describe your business. Look at the words they use to describe what you do.
• Ask them how they would search for you online.
• Find a way to watch customers searching for businesses like yours online. If go to a trade show and watch 30 people search for “glass blocks” you’ll stop calling your product “glass bricks”.

Make sure buyers search for your keywords. People who search for “Victorian Dolls” may be looking for pictures or doing research for a report. Those who search for “Buy Victorian Dolls” are usually looking to purchase one immediately. You must discover what your customers search for when they are ready to buy.

You can use the Google External Keyword Search tool to see how many people search for your keywords each month, and how much competition there is for those words online. It will also suggest alternate words for you to try.

Make sure you are ready to sell . . .

If you invite lots of people to your site using search engine marketing and search engine optimization techniques, have a way for their visit to benefit you. Have something for them to buy – a mailing list they can join, a Twitter account they can follow. There’s no good reason to draw traffic to a site if it won’t result in sales or direct contact information for potential customers so you can get back to them at will.

IMPORTANT:  You can use Google Adwords to put an ad for your business at the top of search pages for your keywords. This may, in fact, be the best way to ensure the keywords you have chosen are those that connect you to folks ready to buy rather than those just browsing. That said, paying £1-£20 per click from a possible customer is expensive. If you can ‘naturally’ rank at the top of the search page for your keywords, you will spend less and make more.

How to Search Engine Optimise Your Website Using Google Tools

Google provides several tools that can help you search engine optimise your site effectively and help you determine which pages on your website are most effectively converting clicks into sales.

The Google External Keyword Search Tool lets you determine which keywords people search for most often. It can also analyze your website and suggest keywords that would direct relevant traffic to it based on the content it finds there. To use this feature, just enter your domain name in the Google External Keyword Search Tool and look at the terms Google suggests.

Google Insights for Search lets you compare the relative traffic levels for multiple keywords. This lets you identify those that are most valuable in terms of the quantity of traffic they can drive to your site. The interface also lets you view traffic levels for keywords in a specific region. To use this tool, just go to the Google Insights for Search website, enter the keywords and choose Search.

The Google Wonder Wheel lets you see a graphical representation of related keywords. You will find this useful when you need to discover all the keywords related to a specific search term. This allows you to find alternatives you might not otherwise have thought of. To use this tool, go to www.google.com, click Instant Search next to the search button and turn it off. The Wonder Wheel is only available when Instant Search is disabled. Enter a search term, click Search, and then Wonder wheel. Click any term to see related terms.

Using Google Analytics you can see all the pages Google can find on your site and get a count of all the people who have visited them over a given period of time. You can determine which pages they viewed, how long they looked at each page on average, and which sites they came from. If they used Google to search for your pages, you can see a breakdown of which keywords they used. Using this data you can see which keywords and content your customers find interesting on your website. You can also determine the natural ebb and flow of customers on your website which is handy when you want to announce new blogs, products or services on high traffic days.

You can configure Google Analytics to track the pages that generate sales on your site. Use this feature to determine which pages sell best and which sell least. Replacing pages that sell poorly with ones that sell better is an easy way to quickly increase site revenues.

Dangerous Mistakes

Before you can effectively search engine optimize your site, you must know exactly what value you deliver to your customers. If you sell footballs, all the beauty supply traffic in the world won’t help your business.

Using the Google External Keyword Tool and Google Analytics to see your site as Google sees it won’t help you much if your site doesn’t effectively communicate how you deliver what your customers want.

Question: All that sounds like a lot of work.  Why do I have to do it again?

Answer: The web is a sea of customers. When people want to buy something they increasingly go online first. If you are looking for the largest, cheapest to contact, fastest to act market place for your products and services, you want to make yourself easy to find online.

Question: I am not technically competent enough to do all this. I don’t know WordPress or how to use the Google External Keyword Tool.

Answer: You can hire folks to do specific tasks for you quite cost effectively on sites like www.elance.com and www.guru.com. You can hire people to buy a domain name, create a WordPress site, write content, etc. You can pay very little and get quite a lot done if you know exactly what to ask for based on what you’ve learned from us.

Question: Both the Google External Keyword Tool and Google Analytics look really complicated to use. How can I learn what all my options are?

Answer: Google provide extensive documentation on both tools. Just log in to use them, and then click the Help button. You can also find tutorial videos for them on Youtube.