Online Traction

In the early days of business websites the trend was to convert the print brochure into a web page. Later, for some companies, came the flash movie ‘let’s impress the socks off our site visitors with a little showcase entertainment’ type marketing initiative.

In both cases it was an old model foisted upon the new medium in the absence of a good understanding of how people behave online. Real people are impatient, and fickle and have real search objectives such as ‘does company Y perform service X’ or ‘is company Z located near me’ or simply ‘why should I choose company A over company B’.

Because of the meteoric rise of search engines the new’ish paradigm is ‘how can we be certain that the people who are searching for my product or service can find my site, and how can I satisfy their selection criteria once they get to my site such that they will chose my company over my competition’.

A large share of my clients can be divided in two groupings. There are those that want to wait for their new site to be designed before considering site optimization and there are those who launched their site, saw no traffic or conversions and need to redevelop their site. It is almost always a waste of time and money to design first, market later. Here are a few solid reasons why you should have a good SEO or SEM onboard from the outset:

Content Management Systems - Done well can be a very efficient way to publish and maintain your site. Also, a good CMS can help cut costs by allowing non-technical people publish content on your site. However, if your CMS is not programmed to create standard search engine friendly html tags (e.g. meta, alt, title etc.) then your CMS may need to be redeveloped, at least in part.

Text and Images - Images alone are not persuasive. A compelling website should strike the right balance between visual impression, sales content and search friendly keywords. Keywords should be methodically researched based on real search demand data (several tools exist for this purpose), and deployed tactically throughout the visual and html content. ‘Call-to-action’ elements and marketing messages can be tested for their appropriateness and effectiveness.

Competition - A good SEO will tell you a lot about your competition: relative rankings for specific keywords, ‘onsite’ and ‘off-site’ optimization and conversion tactics. In order to compete, your site must aim to outperform your competitor’s sites in each of these areas. This information is produced by SEM’s to show the client just what they are up against if they want to compete and win in their niche.

Aside from these key areas an SEO will advise you on code optimization for speedy page delivery, budgeting for success, dynamic competitive strategies, positive feedback loops to reinforce your online strategy, and importantly, how to select the best website designers who will build a site that is search engine friendly from a technical point of view.

Online Marketing is just too important to most businesses now for these types of decisions and research to be secondary considerations in the website production process. Your website is an integral part of your marketing strategy, and as such is an ongoing process requiring ongoing intellectual and financial inputs. A lot of time, money and credibility can be saved by prioritizing your website’s production in this manner.