Being found by our customers is one of the main aims of any serious business. In the past getting your brand in front of people involved expensive advertising in newspapers or on TV, all of that changed with the advent of the internet.
The sea of information contained on the internet is truly vast, it was only a matter of time before we needed powerful vessels to help us traverse the depths of the digital ocean, the most widely used of these today is the Google search engine.
This three part series will give you an inside knowledge into the all important art of being found in Google, because after all what is the point of having an impressive website if nobody can find it?
Why is being found in Google so important? According to a 2011 study nearly 5 billion searches were performed daily using the Google search engine. A study by netmarketshare.com showed Google had 82.91% of the search engine market share as of April 2013. Definitely worth paying attention to.
This article has been written for people who appreciate the value of having a strong web presence and want to learn how to improve their current website.
If you would like more information about any of the things discussed please feel free to contact me.
Google's stated aim is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Google wants to deliver the most useful or relevant information to users. To do this they use sophisticated algorithms to determine what a user's intention is when they search for something.
Google uses a program called a bot (or a spider) to navigate the Internet documenting web pages and adding them to Google's database. Once your website is added to Google's database, Google can match the information it gains from your website to the search terms input by a user.
The key point here is that you need to understand the intentions of your target audience.
There are many factors that can affect a website's search engine ranking, but knowing your audience is arguably the most important.
Understanding the intentions of your target audience can make all the difference to them finding you in Google. Imagine a company called Jon's Guitars that sells custom hand-built guitars online. The company's first step should be to determine who their customers are, some things to look at would be...
Once this information has been collected Jon's Guitars would start to build a profile of their target customers.
Google provides a free keyword tool that allows you to see which terms are being searched for and how much competition there is for a particular keyword. The aim is to locate keywords related to your business that are gaining a substantial number of searches (and if possible have a lower amount of competition). Spend some time getting to know this useful tool and list potential keywords that will be applicable.
So, for Jon's Guitars, Google's Keyword Tool is showing "which guitar to buy" is gaining 33, 100 searches monthly (at the time of writing). So an idea could be to have a review section on the website comparing different guitars.
Some insight needs to be employed in this area, for example 4,090,000 users search for "guitar" in the UK monthly according to Google (at the time of writing). While this may seem an attractive number, bear in mind that these users could be looking for anything related to guitars from guitar lessons and acoustic guitars to bass guitars and guitar accessories. Users searching for more specific terms are more likely to have specific intentions that you can then anticipate and cater to.
In part two we will look at using the information collected from Google to create quality, keyword rich content for your website to make it appealing to your target audience and search engines. Read How to be found in Google - Part 2 of 3.
In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
