No money with search engines?

Posted on | June 29, 2007 |

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Yahoo reported earnings last night and the numbers continue to climb - revenue of $1.58 BILLION in the second quarter of this year. A 26% increase from one year ago. Yahoo’s shares rose 40 cents overnight. Tomorrow Google reports and I am sure we will see more of the same. WHY you ask - because Internet marketing continues to work - at least when implemented properly.

I ran across a site today that was offering to do an optimization analysis for your site at $1000. I have seen too many of these kinds of offers. The catch is that you supply them with the keywords. As SEO professionals we need to stop this approach. If the clients knew the proper keywords they would not need us. A major part of what the SEO professionals add to the equation is the ability to pick through the possible keywords and figure out the best ones.

Here is where it gets tricky. It is not about driving traffic to the website. Two things come to mind:

It is about driving the most targeted traffic to the website

More importantly it is about driving traffic that takes the appropriate action when they get to your site. What do you expect out of their visit? I had someone tell me the other day that they measure success for their site based on the number of PDF downloads that gets done. Well that is one approach, but very subtle. Give your visitors reasons to do business with you and make it easy for them to do that.

If your product or service is difficult to buy over the Internet there are still many opportunities you have for the use of yor website. Establish your expertise, give them information they cannot easily get elsewhere, email contact, phone contact, sign up for a very important newsletter you have. Whatever the reason you want them to initiate more action than downloading a PDF.

It has been said that over the next few years one of the most valuable assets you may have will be your database. Have your prospects add themselves to your database.
The key - give them a really good reason to do that and continue to make it worthwhile for them to continue dialoge with you.

You want to sell somehting to them - give them a reason to buy from you.