Finability

Most often when clients talk about SEO, they really are talking about the whole issue of being “findable”.
There are three ways that people find your site.

• Search – they find you in a search engine listing.
• Referals – they find a link to you on another site.
• Direct – they have your address in an email, in print or in their memory.

All three of these funnels are cruicial for market penetration. Leaning too heavily on any one will yield poor results.

Referrals

This is particularly important because search engines notice referrals and give your site credit for them. So get your link out there. List your business in directories and portals and have your web address included. Post your address on Facebook and twitter and pinterest and instagram.

Direct Traffic

Direct Traffic is most often the result of your other marketing arms. When people see your advertisement in a magazine or hold your brochure in their hand, more and more of them will go next to your web site to investigate further. Make sure that absolutely all of your print advertising includes your web address – even your letter heads. Even give readers an incentive to go to the web site to get a coupon code and etc.

Direct traffic also includes email marketing because when people click a link in their email, they are not being sent from another site, but come ‘directly’ to your site. Email marketing, with all of it’s pitfalls, is still an excellent  and cheap way to keep sales flowing. Don’t neglect it. We use a specific server-based application to help you make the most of email marketing. Ask for more information in this regard.

Now this is not all bad. There are certain aspects of SEO that must be given attention and there are aspects that certainly should not. Here’s a general rule of thumb to help in working out which is which:

Even though Google doesn’t send a person to assess your site, they are still wanting to know what people will think of it when they arrive.

Why? Because this is what Google does. It helps people find the best sites – the sites they are glad they found. This is Google’s one and only mantra – “relevance”. This means that the better your site is for people, the more credit you will get for it in the end from Google (and other search engines). Every other strategy is Google’s enemy in the long run.

So the recent push among serious SEOers of late is ‘good quality fresh content is king’. This means your site needs to say a lot about the subject and it needs to be updated regularly. It’s just like your facebook page. If it isn’t fresh, it’s a waste of time – or worse. When you have fresh quality content on your site, it becomes genuinely useful to people. Those people will post a link to you on Facebook or Google Plus or Twitter or Pinterest or Instagram and then the traffic growth is exponential.

Meanwhile, as your developer, we will make sure that the coding and tags are up to date so that Google ‘reads’ it all. We even have a script that automatically updates your sitemap and your robots.txt file to help spiders find their way around.