Do You Dominate In Google?

Google dominates the US search engine market.

January 16, 2007
Found in: Articles : News : Web Site Marketing & Strategy :

Another year, another Google victory.

Back in 2005, we posted an article - Are You Losing Sales to Competitors? - focusing on consumer buying habits and how they related to search engines. Now, a little more than a year later, this behavior has increased significantly and Google is still on top.

The number of U.S. Web search queries has grown 30 percent since December of 2005, comScore said. Consumers performed 3.2 billion searches on Google sites, while Yahoo drew 1.9 billion searches.

This is great for Google, but is it great for you?

With the number of searches per day increasing, and the number of web sites on the internet growing, continuing to do little or nothing to get your company web site included could be perilous. Some estimate as many as 85% of web surfers paddle out to their first wave using a search engine. Included in even half of these users are potential buyers that could take your revenues skyward.

How to make Google ogle for your site.

Using search engines to attract more leads, what is often called Search Engine Marketing or SEM, is a creative mixture of art and science. It is kind of like surfing in that the wave is the search engine with its ever changing face, barrels, and blow-outs and your web site is the board trying to both analyze and navigate the waves toward shore. The user searching for you is waiting on the beach. Thankfully there are some things you can do to significantly increase your chances of success in reaching the buyer on the beach.

• Things You Can Do
• Know the keywords that best describe what you do in the eyes of your buying audience.
• Use the keywords in the title tags of your pages. For example, this page captures the phrase "improve buyer experience".
• Create new content containing your keywords frequently and often.
• Focus site structure on simple navigation and getting information in 2 clicks or less.
• Test. Test. Test.
• Each search engine has a way to check how many total page listings they have for you.
• Instead of typing in your normal search terms like "iTunes Phone" or "CES News Coverage", you add a prefix with a web site url such as "site:enthusiastinc.com" or "site:www.searchenginewatch.com". This will tell the search engine to show you all listings for that web site, regardless of keyword relevance.
  
• I have included examples using our site for the topsearch engines below:
• See 'enthusiastinc.com' listings in Google.
• See 'enthusiastinc.com' listings in Yahoo.
• See 'enthusiastinc.com' listings in MSN.
  

These recommendations seem simple enough but are often difficult to get implemented for a variety of reasons. Many times the web site and web site marketing in general get very low priority due to the current inability to track results and efficacy. Still other times the web site is in the hands of a very capable but in-demand IT staff that just doesn't have time to deal with it.

Kickstart Your Search Engine Marketing Strategy

You could go back and modify all your existing web site to add or enable the recommendations above. However, the web savvy population is growing and reaching them will require more than a band-aid and some clever keywords.

Enthusiast specializes in unique web solutions to solve challenging business problems such as few or no search results in Google. Contact us for more information or feel free to sign up for our newsletter, Enthusiast E-News, for valuable information and special offers.