If you know anything about Internet marketing, you know that getting your website into the top 10 rankings in the major search engines is absolutely vital to growing your online business. It instantly drives highly targeted traffic to your website and it makes you a serious player in your industry.
Each day hundreds of millions of people search for products and services online. While some of them click the paid ads, the vast majority of searchers click on the free search results. If your site ranks highly in the natural search results you get free traffic that converts to paying customers.
The web is a giant marketplace and the search results are where the battle for hearts, minds, eye balls, and wallets is won or lost. If your site is exposed to this fire hose of relevant traffic you make sales while you are sleeping. If you are stuck on page 10 nobody sees you, and it is getting hard to stay in business.
Why Top 10 Rankings Are So Important To Your Success
The reason it is so important to get your website top 10 rankings is the majority of people who conduct a search on a search engine never go past the first page results – the top 10 ranked websites. So, if your website is not included in those top 10 search results, you are missing out on over 97% of the traffic that could be going to your website and buying your products or services. Ouch!!! Just think of the last time you conducted a search using a search engine. Did you go past the top 10 listings on page 1? Probably not. 97% of people don't.
DID YOU KNOW: "92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web." (Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project)
Your Painful and Expensive Problem...
Getting top 10 rankings can be very expensive. Professional search engine optimization firms normally charge upwards of $10,000 PER MONTH to get you top 10 rankings AND they force you into long-term contracts. That is great for them but not so great for you.
If you don't have the know-how or the time to quickly get your site ranking high in the search engines, then request a free analysis and consultation. No hard-selling of anything, we'll just talk about where you are and where you want to be.
Developing Your SEO Strategy
Once you have taken a close look at your competition, you'll begin to see how important a locally targeted SEO strategy is for your business. Outranking your competitors is your ultimate goal, of course, but it is an ongoing process rather than an occasional effort. Your webmaster should regularly study both your personal traffic flow and that of your competition, so your website can be updated to reflect emerging keywords while the competition for those keywords is still low. The way people look for things changes over time, and adapting to those changes is the foundation of good solid SEO.
Take into account the competition ranking for your keywords on a local level. Google's keyword tool, for instance, will return world results per month, local results per month, and the competition level. If your current keywords show few returns, then you need to replace them with higher-ranking keywords as a first step.
Learn to use the keyword competition statistics to your advantage. This is especially important if your website isn't on the front page in the search engines. While the ideal is to rank in the top five for the high competition keywords, this isn't effective if you aren't close to that goal already. To increase your ranking and exceed your competition, you'll have to be more creative than they are.
As a business, your success depends on choosing keywords based on the local search preference, rather than global search. Again, the amount of traffic you get is not a reliable sales indicator, especially if your traffic can't use your services. While it is true that attaining the number one position for a high competition keyword will have a large impact on your business, ranking in the top five positions for multiple lower competition keywords provides a far larger internet footprint over time.
The Final Analysis
Understanding and using SEO strategies at the local level is necessary if you want to compete aggressively in the business world. As more consumers rely on the internet for basic information, deals and specials, and choosing businesses, for your business to move forward, you need to address your competition's internet presence as well as your own. By seeing what your competition is, and isn't doing, you can develop a proactive SEO strategy designed to increase your visibility in the major search engines. Effective keyword use and proactive SEO will, over time, move you ahead of your competition, and provides you with a highly cost-effective means of finding new customers.
Websites are very powerful marketing tools, but they are useless if you don't take the time to use them effectively. If you're like many business people, you are probably less than satisfied with your website's performance. If you want to change that performance level, and move ahead of the competition, then developing and implementing a strong SEO strategy is the first step to doing so. Use what your competition is doing as a guide, and use their weaknesses to your advantage, and you'll see your search engine rankings rise.