Web terms SME operators need to understand #7: Search Engine Optimisation

While many smaller business operators continue to bemoan the problems the internet has presented them with, those with a more optimistic outlook are cashing in on the three big and unprecedented promotional opportunities the medium provides.

They are of course (in no particular order):

1. Email Marketing

2. Social Networking

3. Search Engine Optimisation

The difference between these and other promotional techniques brought about by new technology is the extraordinarily low cost and barriers to entry.

Tapping into low and no cost leads

To the best of my knowledge, prior to the internet, the only two “free” forms of promotion were word-of-mouth and publicity.

With the addition of these three online techniques, organisations large and small can tap into a significant stream of new business without necessarily spending a cent.

And leads brought about by search engines are among the most valuable.

Search engines have not only become the first port of call for those looking for suppliers (formerly the sole domain of Yellow Pages for smaller B2C business), but have the added and significant benefit of providing information earlier in the purchase process.

Whereas Yellow Pages was mainly useful once you knew which product and service you wanted, search engines allow you to determine what it is you actually want.

You had me at “attention“

To take the old “AIDA” (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) mantra of advertising, print directories were useful once a buyer decided to take action on their desire for a product or service.

But as you can see in the diagram below, search engines are used much earlier in the process.

For example, an issue (like the one we are covering in this piece) may grab your attention and interest you enough to create a desire to do something about it. If the various links surrounding the article don’t lead you to a potential provider then another quick search will.

So very seamlessly, the web is able to take you all the way from attention to action.

With all due respect to Yellow Pages and its ilk, that very factor means that many online buyers are completely bypassing it.

Therefore, the new goal for businesses, is to be as prominent in the online AIDA process as possible.

While this can be quite challenging at the attention, interest and desire stages, it’s the action stage that they have some control over and should prioritise.

Search engines the new rivers of gold

Whereas pre-internet this goal was achieved by purchasing as big an ad in Yellow Pages and local papers as you could, these days its all about being prominent in the all important search engine results pages.

This in turn is achieved via search engine optimisation – a range of activities that a business operator or its provider conduct in order to achieve a prominent search result for their business.

Achieving this goal is no place for the faint hearted. Wikipedia reports that Google uses more than 200 criteria to ascertain keyword relevance in its famous ranking algorithm.

In other words, the more your webpage is seen by Google to be relevant to the keyword or phrase queried, the more prominent it will turn up in results.

How many votes does your website attract?

It’s a bit like judging the best player in a football match. A player’s performance is based on how many goals, marks, possessions, hit outs and so on that they accumulate over the course of a game.  But there is a big difference between a kick that turns a game versus an ineffective kick to an opposition player.  And the more of these valuable kicks the player gets, the greater his/her value to the team.

Search engines work in a similar way.  A mention of a keyword in an obscure and unimportant hobbyist website will carry far less weight than the same keyword mentioned in the website of a daily metropolitan newspaper.

Therefore the newspaper website will earn more “votes” for that keyword than the hobbyist site and be ranked accordingly.

For business this means not only including relevant keywords in its web pages, but emphasising them in a range of ways including formatting, inclusion in “meta” areas (areas important to search engines) and achieving quality inbound links to your website.

The details of which are far too numerous to go into here, suffice to say that it’s the role of the business operator and its marketing professionals to ensure that its website is as well search engine “optimised” as possible, to give itself the best chance of directing these qualified and valuable leads your way.

In addition to being a leading eBusiness educator to the smaller business sector, Craig Reardon is the founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which was established to address the special website and web marketing needs of SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.