Website Strategy, Content & Search

Over the last two weeks I shared a couple blog posts about The 9 Essentials of Web Success. Last week I wrote an Overview of the 9 Essentials. In this blog post, I want to summarize what I spoke about in Webinar #2, Website Strategy, Content, & Search

I have created a number of Strategy Document Templates available on our Downloads Page.  Please consider downloading these documents and use them as a guide as you think about these strategies that we will discuss today:

• Website Strategy
• Content Strategy
• Search / SEO Strategy

Your Website should be the center of your digital marketing strategy. While some businesses may have great success on Facebook or Google+, it is very important to important to have a domain and a website that you own and you control.

Outside of Email, most Internet experiences involve search of some kind. Google is the world’s most popular search engine with more than 85% of market share in mobile and desktop. The other 15% is split between Bing & Yahoo. Broadstreet is a Google Partner, and so our examples will use Google, but most of the examples I share apply to Bing and Yahoo also. 

In the Webinar, I give an example of a Google Search for parts for an ambulance stretcher. My client, CotDoc.com, sells replacement parts for the stretchers made by Stryker and Ferno, the world’s leading manufacturers of these cots. Combined, these two account for more than 90% of the market for this type of equipment.

When I go to Google and search for “stryker power pro parts”, the top 3 organic search results are pages on CotDoc.com. I love the fact that OUR RESULTS are above the manufacturer’s home page.   I find that to be impressive.

So let’s discuss WHY this page is #1 on Google. First of all, think of what Google is trying to do. They want to give you an answer to your question. Typically, this is done by “keyword matching”, meaning the words in your search should align with the keywords in the top-ranking Web page. Much of this is controlled by “on-page SEO” meaning codes that we control when we are building the site.

In this case, you can look at the page with the #1 rank and see that, first of all, the page is all about “stryker power pro parts” so it is highly relevant. Additionally, things like the Page Title are very important. Page title appears in the tab in your browser and is very important for Google. Page title should describe what the page is about. In this case it says “Stryker Power Pro Parts” - an exact match. The other important on-page SEO is meta-tags, which are codes that are hidden from view but visible to Google’s robots, also known as crawlers, that check your site on a regular basis. The search engines use this code to get a better picture of what your page is all about.  

This Knowledge graph is effectively a free website that Google gives you for free. You should claim your listing and setup a Google+ My Business page immediately. You should take control and upload images, information, hours of operation, etc, and a link to your Website. Below is an example of  another one of my clients, Tyler Brothers, and you can see how we put together their Google My Business page, and you can see some statistics on how much traffic has come through this.

Try to remember that Google presents different results to every individual based on a number of factors. In addition to your basic search results, Google may also present to you one or more of dozens of different displays. For example, images may be displayed. A map may be displayed. If Google thinks you’re looking for a specific business it will show a condensed version of your business in the “knowledge graph”.

I mentioned earlier “on-page SEO”, meaning the factors that YOU can control-- content, page titles, & metatags, for example-- but a more important factor in your Search ranking is something called backlinks. Backlinks are the foundation of Google’s page rank algrorithm. The idea is that more links to your page indicates more credibility for you, and if the credibility of the linkers is HIGH, then you will rank high. This image indicates the types of links to your site that can be found on the Internet. More links from these sources will increase your page rank.

There is much more to say about these topics, and I hope to go much deeper in the next 8 weeks of Webinars. For the Webinar related to this topic, you can watch the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNmK_P9UVy0

If you missed the introductory segment for Web Success, please check it out here: bit.ly/WebSuccessIntro

Links to other Web Success blog posts:

• https://www.broadstreetconsulting.net/blog/web-success-webinars-summer-schedule
• https://www.broadstreetconsulting.net/blog/nine-essentials-of-web-success

To sign up for the webinar or to learn more about Web Success, please visit: https://www.broadstreetconsulting.net/web-success