Getting Your New Business Online Isn’t As Easy As You Believe – Here Are a Few Tips to Help
It’s not unusual at the beginning of the year to see many new businesses take their first few hesitant steps into the world of the Internet and then give up by February because ‘it didn’t work’. For some reason, the media has given us the impression that starting an Internet business is easy and quick and is the route to riches like never before. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near the truth!
Although it’s fair to say that companies like Amazon did indeed have a fairly swift rise to the top, it was by no way smooth and they only did it with a massive injection of funds and a lot of people helping to make it happen. You don’t just create a website and then suddenly be able to deliver over a million books overnight, it takes planning.
And so when you create your first web site and decide you are going to sell your product or services to all those who happen to find it, you need to be ready for a few bumps and scrapes along the way and maybe the odd failure. Most of all, you’re going to have to be ready to wait – for getting things right will take an awful lot of patience.
The first thing to remember is that anyone who finds your site, for whatever reason, will most likely never have heard of you and so you’ve got a bit of work to do on that front. Many marketing companies say that any potential customer needs to have heard of you at least seven times before they will consider working with you – and it’s no different on the web.
In fact, it’s probably far more difficult on the web because of the fear of new technology that many people harbour. Let’s remember, many people still don’t understand how it works and have concerns about the security of such systems. When you consider that there are scare stories on the mainstream news nearly every day, it’s no surprise that people will be worried.
So the first task of any new business is to simply ‘get known’ and that involved a lot of work both off-line as well as on-line. Expecting your new web presence to make you millions in the first few days is a mistake, so you need to tackle that first.
While we’re waiting for the work to beat a path to our door though, we can begin to research how to actually tap into some of the people that are searching for our products. For this we need to do a bit of research and luckily there are lots of tools available to help us.
What you need to keep in mind is that the Internet is a little different to traditional advertising. Historically, you could only advertise to people who may be passive in their view of your advertisement. If reading a newspaper, you would hope to sow a seed into someone’s mind when they are reading and then hopefully you can get them to your product or service at a later date. But online, things are different. More than any other medium, you are actually looking to attract people who are actively seeking your products.
This, then, changes the way we work because we now need to find out what people are searching for and appeal to them directly. If we can align our offering with their search and couple it with an attractive website that they are happy to do business with then we can potentially make a sale.
First of all then, we need to do a little bit of keyword research and this is actually not as difficult as it sounds. We begin by looking at what it is our product does and try to find out what keywords we as consumers would potentially use to find it. Another way is to ask friends who I’m sure would be willing to help. Simply ask them, “if you wanted what I sell, how would you search for it”, then, write it down.
But this is only half the story because it may be that nobody else is looking for these words and so we need to find out how many times that word is searched for and only then we can make a decision as to whether it’s good enough to target as one of our terms.
To do this is deceptively simple. All you need to do is go along to Google and type in ‘Google Keyword Tool’. The first result will be the tool we need so we click on it and type some of our keywords in the big box that appears and then press ‘search’.
Here’s where the fun begins because this tool will not only tell us how many times that keyword has been searched for, but also give us a list of other keywords that may well be useful to us. These will be words that others have used to achieve similar results or maybe just contain some of our words and are related in some way.
So we now need to look at the number of searches that each keyword provides and make a decision as to whether it’s worth targeting. Although this can be complex to work out, here are a few ideas to get you going.
Number of searches
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as saying “you need more than 300 searches per day” because it really comes down to what you sell and how much you sell it for. If you only need to sell one product a month in order to make your millions then you may be quite happy to be number one for a search that isn’t used that often. However, if you need to sell things with low margin in high quantity then you need to make sure that your chosen keyword is searched many thousands of times.
But this can cause other problems. You see, if your chosen term is searched for many thousands of times a month, chances are there are other people who are already optimised for it and making their money – they’re going to be doing a lot of SEO to stay there.
How you handle this is entirely up to you, but at the very least you should do a lot of work to examine and choose the keywords you want to use and test them. Then find a happy medium – some easy, perhaps lower-volume keywords that you can work on initially whilst you work on the high volume and possibly more competitive terms.
Competition
Possibly the most important thing to look at is the competition out there that is already making money out of your keywords. These are the companies that have done a lot of their SEO and are in the top ten for the keywords that you want to dominate. Fortunately, although it’s long-winded, it’s actually easy to check what the competition is up to.
Without getting into the details of on-site optimisation, I’ll just explain that the most important aspect of it is the ‘title tag’ and this is shown by what appears in the top of your browser. That blue bit of text at the top is great for telling you what’s going on and what keywords your competition is using, so let’s look into it.
For this, you’ll probably need a notepad, but if you grab one you will be able to make some notes that will make your life a lot easier. With your chosen keywords from earlier, simply search for them. This will give you a list of ten results that you can now examine.
Now, click on the first result and write down the words that appear in the title bar of the browser. This will give you an insight into the keywords that your competition is currently using.
By examining all the sites in this way, you will quickly find patterns that you can look to also compete on and therefore you have quickly found which keywords you need to optimise your site for. Armed with this information, you can then go ahead and start creating content and building links.
In subsequent articles I’ll explain just how to create the killer content that Google will love and will make your website leap higher in the search results.