Who Gets To Decide What Your Customer’s Buy? (Hint: Think Google.)

Making the Most of Google Search

When your potential new customers search online do they know to search for your business? Do they know the name of your business? If the answer is “no” or “sometimes” then what is your back-up plan?

How can people find you, learn about you and buy from you even if they do not know that you exist?

The short answer to that question is relatively simple: Get high rankings for your website on Google. (Of course, the Yahoo and Bing search engines are also important). The longer answer is slightly more complex: Get high rankings on the search engines for words that indicate that a person is ready to buy from you NOW.

It can be done.

Basic SEO

As you may already know, the process of getting higher placement on the search engines is called, “search engine optimization” or SEO. The process of SEO involves optimizing “on page” aspects of your website such as the content (words) and website programming (title tags, heading tags etc.), as well as”off page” factors such as getting high-quality links from other websites.

Deeper SEO

But dig deeper into SEO and you will find the need to rank highly for profitable keywords. Keywords that are directly related to your business and to a person who will buy from you. Consider the example of a local pizza shop chain in the New York City area. This chain wants to expand it pizza delivery business.

Should the chain try to rank highly for the word “pizza”? If you do a search for pizza on google you will find that many listings are about pizza, but others are about pizza recipes, pizza games (?!) - there’s even a listing on the ACLU website for pizza -what’s that about? And many of the top pizza results are from national chains who deliver nationwide and in nearly all of the 50 states. It could be difficult to unseat a national chain.

You can see deciding where to put your SEO dollars is not an easy task. A top ranking for pizza may not be possible for this business and if it were, it could bring 1000’s of people to a website that would not bring in revenue. However, there are some options.

Targeted SEO - With a dash of PPC?

1) Targeted Keyword Rankings. Get a high rank for words that would bring in more targeted traffic, such as: New York Pizza, Pizza Delivery New York, New York Pizzeria.

If a person goes to google and types in “NY pizza delivery” you can bet that they are looking to order a pizza.

2) Create and maintain a local listing on Google Local. Google knows the general region that a person is conducting a search from and will show local listings, as you can see in the image below:

3) Add some pay-per-click to your SEO. You may want to consider a targeted online ad campaign, so that when a person in New York City searches for “Pizza” or “Pizza Deliver” they will see an ad that takes them directly to a page that gives them what they want:

There are pluses and minuses to all of the strategies above. However, the cost of doing nothing is 100% negative. Most businesses need targeted keywords to thrive. So get going now. As the hockey great, Wayne Gretsky once said, “You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.”