You have to be seen to sell

Creating a search engine-friendly website is vital for any firm that wants to increase its visibility.

Understanding and following the principles of search engine optimisation (SEO) will help your company make its website as visible as possible to its target audience.

SEO is the practice of making a website search engine-friendly so it has the best possible opportunity of getting a high ranking in the free listings on Google, Yahoo!, Live Search and other search engines.

Very simply, this can be achieved by having good, relevant content; by ensuring that the typical search terms that people are using to find your products and services are reflected on your website and by getting other, relevant sites to link to your own.

“It is very important because the No 1 reason people go online is to search for things,” says Martin Murray, CEO of search-engine marketing firm Interactive Return. “When people do a search, we know there is a great branding benefit associated with being top of the free or organic listings.

People consider the organisations at the top of those listings to be top in that sector.”
Cathy McGovern, director of online marketing consultancy Inspiration, says companies that get the first listing in the organic results can expect up to 40pc of the people who carried out the search to open their links. “There are 10 search results listed on each page. If you are not on it, to a large extent you do not exist.” she says.

Top tips for best search-engine results
So, how exactly does a company or a website improve its chance of appearing near the top of the free listings?

According to Murray, it’s all about developing a search-friendly website with content being top of the list of priorities. “Basically, if you want to be found when somebody does a search on ‘Hotel Dublin’, you have to talk about ‘hotel’, ‘Dublin’ and related terms in the text on your website,” he points out.

“People tend not to search on individual words - it’s more likely to be a phrase,” says McGovern. “We can measure actual search traffic on any relevant term. Sometimes, we will look at what competitors are targeting as well because even if you have a lot of search traffic on a particular term, you’re never going to perform if everybody is trying to optimise on it. Sometimes, you are better off to go for secondary terms that very few people are optimising on.”

“The amount of content on your site and the number of pages indexed is really important,“adds Murray. “The more content, the higher your ranking by Google, for example. The other thing to consider is having fresh content. Sites that are updated periodically will have the potential to have a higher ranking than sites where the content never changes.

Linking up
Also important for search ranking are the links to the website from other relevant sites. “You achieve that by mostly having good-quality content, features and functionality on your website that people will choose to link to. ‘Relevancy’ is absolutely the key and by that I mean connected in terms of the types of content on those sites, the audience visiting those sites relative to the audience visiting your site, and so on,” says Murray.

Companies can find out how well their own and other sites rate with the various search engines thanks to the availability of a range of non-technical tools, says McGovern. These include three tools from Market Leap (www.marketleap.com), which enable checks for link popularity, keyword verification and search-engine saturation. Another is PageRank, which is enabled from the Google Toolbar. “If you download this, it allows you to see the page ranking for any site that you are on,” she explains.

SEO can be carried out by specialists or in-house. “If you are prepared to put quite a bit of time into studying the subject - as with most things online, the information is all there. It is possible for people to become quite informed about it,” says Murray. “Alternatively, there are short training courses available on the subject of SEO, so you could, at a low cost, become competent yourself.”

How to be ‘found’ online

• Ensure your site content reflects the keywords people will use to look for your products.
• Increase traffic and sales with Google AdWords.
• The more content on your site the higher your ranking.
• Fresh, new and regular content will ensure a captive audience.
• Link to other relevant sites to enhance the chance of potential buyers arriving on your site.

Self-catered success
Since introducing a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy four years ago, online-generated sales at Wexford-based accommodation booking business Self Catering Ireland have increased from 1pc to 80pc.

Mary Power, founder and managing director of the company, says that reaching a wider audience than would be possible through offline advertising was vital for the future of the business. “That’s why we opted for SEO,” she explains. “We knew that online was the way of the future - you can’t sustain a self-catering business offline. It was really a way of getting across to the world very cheaply.”

She says that part of the strategy involved increasing the keywords used in content on the site to take account of possible searches for holidays in Ireland. So, instead of just focusing on ‘self-catering’, the site now includes descriptions such as ‘holiday homes Ireland’, ‘Irish holiday homes’, ‘villa rentals’, and so on.

According to Power, the company uses a mixture of organic, viral and pay-per-click. “We used pay-per-click initially to make Google more aware of us,” she says. “Also, with a generic term like self-catering, we were in a situation where we could be fourth, or eighth or tenth on a page. So, we used pay-per-click initially as a way of getting the spiders [used to feed pages to search engines] and getting Google to recognise us instantly. Now, we’ve halved our spending on that.”

Employing SEO has hugely increased traffic and sales on the site, she says. “Eighty per cent of our business now comes directly from online.”

Reproduced by kind permission of Owner Manager magazine - www.businessandleadership.com

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