Your corporate website is part of your company’s overall marketing activity.  As with companies, large and small, it has taken on increasing strategic and financial importance.  Beyond the original focus on brand awareness and audience development, it may now assist with customer service and retention.  The business goals that drive your site strategies and systems are increasingly the achievement of greater market share, cost reduction, revenue, and profit.

Just as with a brick-and-mortar store, to achieve these goals you need traffic: lots of visitors and the right visitors to your site.  Use of search engines is the most popular activity after the use of email on the Internet.  Search engines are used to help people find what they’re interested in or looking for.  Search engines are the ideal means to help people find your site.  According to Jupiter Media Matrix over 55% of all Internet purchases begin with a search engine.  Of these consumers, 93% do not look past the first two pages of their search results.  If you are not listed in the first two pages of the search results, you are “invisible” to these potential customers.

Where on those first two pages also matters.  The upper left has been identified at the “Golden Triangle” because on Google 80% of the clicks comes from these results and 70% on Yahoo.  To improve the chances of a searcher clicking to go to your site or page, it needs to be ranked high by the search engine.  Through its algorithms, the search engine has to deem your page editorially important to be listed.  The more important, via these algorithms, the higher it is ranked.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), also called organic or natural search engine optimization, is a specialized process of designing or modifying a website or page so that it ranks high in organic or spider-based searches.  While websites are normally designed to be informative, that does not mean they will necessarily rank high in searches initiated by Internet users.

Internet users start their search by entering a word or phrase into the search engine’s search box.  This keyword or keyword phrase is what they think will help them find what they’re looking for and generates the results or listing from which they will choose what sites to visit.  That’s 55% of all Internet purchases!  The first task in search engine optimization is to uncover the keywords or phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your website.

While simple on the surface, identifying the right keywords for your business is complex.  Beyond market and customer analyses, review of competitor and related non-competitors, a detailed history of keyword performance is needed.  How often is it used in searches?  What are the demographics of those that use it in searchers?  Does its use change seasonally?  What is its closure performance, that is, what sales history can be associated with the specific keyword or phrase?  Even the largest firms, with skilled staff, have difficulty monitoring all these variables and keeping up accordingly.  The associated investment is also high which reduces the return on investment.

It is not enough to build a content-rich site geared to specific searches, add META tags, create link popularity, and submit to every index and directory.  Hundreds of variables must be optimized and incorporated into the site to be robust, maintainable, and highly ranked.  Search engines change their algorithms, competitors react, and your customer base is always evolving.  24x7 monitoring and excellent analytics are needed for maintenance and continuous improvement.  With such a system in place you can also determine actual rates of lead generation and conversion allowing you to calculate your ROI.  To find out how ClearLead can do this for you, please contact us.