Sixty Minute Site Makeover to improve search engine ranking

This is a copy of a presentation I gave at a franchisee meeting. There has been growing interest in the use of the internet as a tool for attracting customers and generating income rather than being simply a static brochure. 12 months ago I started with one of the our standard templates and customized with my own franchise details. I noticed that I was getting some traffic but little business. At the start of this calendar year I started making changes to my site to increase the traffic flow and it also increased the amount of business I received purely from web searches. A full day course with a SEO enabled me to really improve the rankings of my site. Still to the untrained eye my site does not look that different from the standard template and the sum total of changes is minor (the major change is the number of pages in my site which is beyond the scope of this article). Currently, I believe only a fraction of small businesses are effectively using optimization techniques to maximize their rankings so that moving a site to a higher position is not that difficult.

Note that having a website that Google likes is only a small part of the overall strategy. As mentioned by many other sites you also need to get external links to your site. It is not unusual for sites high up in google rankings to have over 200 external links. Also of course the better the quality the better the return.

While the income generated will never mean that I can stop marketing in the more standard ways, it does provide a fairly consistent part of my total turnover and the cost per customer is extremely low if you learn to do it yourself. Which I think is possible for most people once your basic site has been created. Another advantage is that Google likes pages that constantly change so fiddle away.

Keywords and Long Tails

It may seem obvious but you need the keywords that potential customers are actually using not the ones that you would like them to use. For example, many technicians, for very good reasons, are only interested in business customers looking for managed services. However, from my local experience I have had nobody use search terms relating to business computing or managed services and a site based purely around this may never get any traffic. The trick is to set-up the site to use the terms that are used by customers and then sell them on these products once they are on your site. According to Word Tracker the two most common search phrases relating to us are “Computer Virus” and “Computer Repair”.

The most common terms that are used by people hitting my site are:

Note the low percentages. Over the last 6 months there have been over 570 different search phrases used to hit www.ctsnowra.com.au. This is what the long tail means. It shows how people are unique and though we will optimize for certain search terms it is important to have a site that is rich in text so that you can capture the full range of search possibilities.

End of Part 1

Search Engine Makeover part 2