In most business environments there is a high level of competition for your buyer’s attention. And it’s the same on the Internet, too. Most people venturing into their first website have a somewhat misguided version of how the Internet will help their business.

There seems to be a belief that the oft-quoted line from Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams movie, “If you build it, they will come” applies to websites.

It’s as if you build a website and suddenly hundreds of new customers will appear. That just because you’ve built a website the search engines will suddenly give you a page 1 ranking.

The reality is that if you consider how many websites there are competing for the search engine’s attention, and then consider that the search engines rank pages, not sites, you get some idea of the degree of difficulty.

Aggregator sites

In the trade service environment, you also have to take into account what are called ‘aggregator’, or ‘portal’ sites. These are the sites that sell advertising along with the promise that you will get more business by advertising. Did you ever take the time to look into the site to see how easy / difficult it is to find what you want? (Try it sometime; you may be surprised at the degree of difficulty.)

These sites attract the search engines because they have both content and relevance. Content means a significant number of pages and relevance means the information is relevant to the search topic.

So even if you advertise on an aggregator site, there’s no guarantee you’re going to be found if someone searches for ‘electrician newcastle’

How do you compete with these sites?

Maybe you’ve heard of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? This is the phrase used when you try to engineer your site to increase its relevance and attractiveness to the search engines to get a better result.

This is a very interesting topic. Just for interests’ sake, try searching SEO. Here’s what happened when I did… there were 184,000,000 results!

184,000,000 different pages each professing to have the secret to SEO.

Interesting that one of the top results was a press release from Yahoo! saying that firms need to improve their SEO activities. Here’s a quote from the article:

The search marketing team of Yahoo! says that firms need to upgrade their search engine optimization (SEO) campaign to make sure they get better return investments.

On their blog, Yahoo advised marketers to do proper keyword selections, saying that this area is important especially when a company starts using professional SEO services. They added that, depending on the goal of an SEO campaign, sites will need to focus on high-volume search terms or product-specific phrases.

It is also important for an SEO campaign to respond to consumer behaviour.

The Yahoo! marketing team explained: “Users are more sophisticated in their searches now, and we’ve seen that up to 20 per cent of searches in any given month can be search queries never seen before by a search engine.”

The Belfast telegraph published an interesting article on SEO called “Angelina Jolie, Britney and Beyonce nude, dirty tricks and the changing face of SEO” – take a minute to read it here.

While Yahoo! are giving us hints, remember that it’s really NOT in the search engine’s best interest to tell you exactly how to win at SEO. Why? Because if they did tell you, how would they then rank sites? And, more importantly, how would Google, the biggest search engine, compensate for the revenue loss as people stopped using their sponsored link advertising program?

The truth is that they really don’t want you to know how to do it, and that’s why they are constantly changing their ranking systems. That’s why here are hundreds of books, articles and DVD’s sold on SEO. And there are hundreds of companies selling their SEO skills. And why doing it successfully costs a significant amount of money.

How much is an SEO campaign?

I called a prominent SEO company in Sydney last week to ask them. They quoted me $600 per month over 12 months for 1 term. That means if you want to get a top ranking for 1 page (e.g. electrician Newcastle) you would be paying $AU 7,200 per year.

Google’s keyword research tool tells me that in January 2010 there were 260 searches made for that term. That’s $2 per search! And there’s no guarantee that what they do will get you near the top of the first page.

That’s risky.

Is there another option?

Yes, actually there is and it’s using sponsored links advertising. These are the little ads that appear to the left of the search results page. Here you can, for less than the cost of an SEO program, not only promote your site but you can promote it against any search terms you choose, you can track your results so you know what’s working and you only pay when someone clicks your advert.

So for a few dollars a day, you can run ads wherever you want, whenever you want and be in control.

And if you don’t want to do it yourself, for a fee (of course) we can help. Or you can buy a study guide and do it yourself – if you have time. The best study guide I know of is by Perry Marshall; it’s called the “Definitive Guide to Google AdWords” and it’s available for about $US100 at PerryMarshall.com

Get it and read it, the content is current and valuable.

At Mediaglue, we can help you craft and maintain a comprehensive Google Adwords campaign to help drive specific, targeted prospects to your website. As part of the Acorn Software Group, we are better positioned than most companies to be able to offer a solution to your marketing needs because we know the trade service industry inside out.

Visit our website for more details and a show case of what we have done for other simPRO users: www.mediaglue.com.au or contact James Yuille on 1300 884 757 or james.yuille@mediaglue.com.au