A lot of website owners are content to buy PPC ads, run affiliate programs, and buy banners ads as their sole forms of advertising. They completely shun search engine optimization because they think that it’s too hard to keep up with and that the returns aren’t predictable.
There’s a major flaw in that style of thinking. They’re missing out on large portion of potential customers by not being highly visible in the organic search engine listings.
I have a friend who uses Google everyday, he buys a lot of items, but he doesn’t respond well to advertising, especially PPC advertising. He’s never clicked on a pay per click ad in his life. He’s highly skeptical of marketing, and will ignore it.
While he’s probably the exception rather than the rule, there are a certain percentage of people who will ignore the ads no matter how good your ad copy is. You may be thinking that these people make bad customers anyway, but if we use my friend as an example, you’d be wrong. He’s always buying himself new gadgets and “toys.”
However, reaching him as a customer is a lot trickier because traditional advertising methods simply aren’t going to work.
This is where implementing search engine optimization as a strategy comes in. My friend can easily be reached by showing up on the first page of Google for whatever he typed in as long as you’re found in the regular listings, but if you’re not easy to find in the regular listings, you’re not going to get his business.
So what’s a business to do? While the finer details of search engine optimization could easily exceed 1000 pages, there are two basic things you need to rank well in the search engines – content and links.
You need enough content (articles, videos, pics, etc) on your website to thoroughly cover your topic. For example, a site about real estate that only has ten pages is woefully inadequate, but those ten pages would likely able to cover how to care for a golden retriever fairly well.
And once you have the content on your website taken care of, you need to get links to your website. In general, the more links you have, the better rankings you’ll get.
I’m not saying that SEO should be your only strategy for driving traffic to your website, but you should certainly give it a chance, and when you do, you’ll find that it will help you get new customers you weren’t able to get previously.
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