In a continent of around 350,000,000 * people and some 22 million businesses there will always be a need to differentiate what a corporation (no matter what its size) stands for and to make it easy for the buyer - whether consumer or commercial - to find what they are looking for.
Since its founding way back in the ‘dark ages’ of the Internet (September 1998) the search engine ‘Google’ has sought to bring finding what you want closer to home. Consider also that there are also around 20,000,000,000 web pages how on earth do you make your site stand out from the crowd? It makes no difference whether it’s a commercial trading site, an information site, a blog or even your résumé if you want to be chosen then you have to ‘shout’ louder than the rest.
When I was a fledgling marketer trying to understand the automotive sector the only tools I had at my disposal were paper-based directories such as ‘Kelly’s’ or ‘Yellow Pages’ or the government based statistics. Now it is vastly different - go to one of the search engine sites; ‘Google’, ‘Bing’ or ‘Yahoo’ type what you want to know in the search box and Robert is your father’s brother – up come a swathe of references to pages and off you go.
As a ‘searcher’ you need to understand the structure of the results page as it contains ads and sponsored links as well as references to sites whose pages seemingly offer what you want. (It is estimated that readers rarely get beyond page two of a search before losing the will to live)
There is a new mantra in web design - whether it be for web-sites, blogs or the burgeoning social media sector; Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short, but what on earth does it mean? As Dr. Watson is oft misquoted ‘Elementary dear Holmes’, it's all about keywords and phrases that can be picked up by search engines and their research tools and can be recognized against a search request. Type in the word ‘Logistics’ and Google came up with some 260,000,000 references in the UK alone and that in 0.28 seconds, type in the phrase “Consumer Logistics” and this statistic plummets to 66,000 – so the researcher is able to narrow their search considerably and try to find relevant providers.
And that, in a nutshell, is what SEO and Keywords do for the provider and researcher alike, they make it easier to find what they are both looking for – customers and companies.
If the problem were quite as simple as that then the world of commerce would be much easier but just consider how many companies are providing logistics and supply chain services across the USA, and are they all known as logistics – well the answer is self evidently ‘No!’ So, how does the business provider get to understand which keywords work and which are less than useful?
The answer is simple – find a business that specializes in creating the keywords that you need. Let us, for a moment, imagine that you are a corporation based in Cincinnati, Ohio and you are looking for an internet marketing company there – what could be simpler than typing that in to the search box as ‘internet marketing company’ and seeing what comes out (*** one such response is at the bottom of this article).
There may be many, many responses (in this case 192,000,000) so you need to narrow it down by adding the city, internet marketing company cincinnati and then your search begins in earnest. You could, of course take another approach and look at companies that specialize in making searches easy – perhaps the phrase search marketing cincinnati might elicit a more focused result.
What I am seeking to do here is to show the reader that directing potential customers to their web-site isn’t that difficult provided it's done properly – choosing the right keywords and phrases is where it begins, just having a website isn’t enough! You have to point people to it using keywords that are relevant to your offering and they want to buy.
Comments