There was a time when Yahoo was the best search site around. They were quickly eclipsed by Google. Google is now facing pressure not from what we traditionally think of as search engines but from large sites that incorporate their own search engine.
In 2007 Facebook had over 600 million internal searches per month. According to Comscore and others Facebook has doubled in unique visits from this time in 2009. Facebook is clearly a primary destination for many. How are you taking advantage of people that are searching on Facebook?
YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social sites also have their own search engines. Yes, some of the content from these sites can be found in the major search engines but do you want to rely on them to expose your content? What if a visitor never goes to the search engine but rather uses the internal search engines?
In real estate the sales adage is: location, location, location. This can also be applied to search marketing. You must be found where people are searching. You can’t tell some where to search. All you can do is ensure they find you wherever they search.
Rogers reports that 35% of its subscribers are using smart phones. Let’s assume that this is the same percentage across all providers. That’s 7.7 million smart phone subscribers, in Canada alone.
When was the last time you tried to view your corporate website on a smart phone?
At the very least you should make it easy for someone to find your contact information when they are using a hand-held device. Treat your webpages like letterhead, put your phone number on every page.
Any repository of information is an ideal target for search tools. LinkedIn is no exception. These present of search tools in places other than on search engines highlights the need for businesses to think about where their audience will find them and to be there to be found.
LinkedIn has a large audience of over 70,000 users. Your audience is probably looking for you there. It is also a great place for you to do basic background research on companies and individuals. Here are 5 tips to get your research going. LinkedIn provides free and paid services. The free services will meet most of your needs. The advanced service is for power users for people in sales, marketing and recruiting.
I’m pretty sure you know what a mechanical paper fastener is, we typically know it as a stapler. I thought I’d conduct a little experiment and see if I can get a web page to rank for the term mechanical paper fastener. I want to use the rank this page achieves in a future post about web page rankings. I’ll let you know how it goes.
UPDATE
It looks like I’ve successfully ranked my experimental site for mechanical paper fastener at #2 on Google within 30 days of launch. Now that the site ranks well what does that mean for traffic? It has translated into 6 visit in the last 30 days.
I set up this experiment to highlight the fact that ranking high isn’t in and of itself a goal of my search marketing efforts. My goal is to get you qualified traffic that will lead to a conversion.
Start With Why is the title of a book written by Simon Sinek. I recently purchased this book. I’m 4o pages in and I’m enjoying it so far. Why did I buy this book? I watched a video of the author presenting his thesis at a TEDx event. The video really got me thinking about how I present my services. I won’t go in to the thesis of the book, that’s what the video is for, but I will say that because of the idea espoused by the author I will be rethinking how I talk about what it is I do. I’m not sure how these changes will manifest themselves so stay tuned.
From an business perspective my experience is tangible proof that using social media is one way to broaden your reach. I follow a blog called Presentation Zen. I saw a link to the Start With Why video on that blog. I watched the video and bought that book. I have also signed up on the Start With Why blog to receive communications directly from the author, Simon Sinek. Ask yourself how can your business use this kind of approach to grow sales. Just remember to start with why.
