So I attended a meeting at a local telivision station of local businesses and an internet "Guru" Service. The so called "Guru" blasted efforts at search engine optimization as not worth your time.
"How many of you look past the first page in a google search?" he said enthusiatically. To which the majority of the crowd admited they didn't. "Do you know how hard it is to get to the front page of Google?" he chanted."Too hard!" he exclaimed.
Well those of you in the know should be throwing th "BS Flag" right about now. Even the most basic SEO programs will yield signicant results. For about 2 hours worth of work I was able to add keywords and descriptions to a website I was working on Donelson Furniture at a grand cost to the consumer of around $25. I had been doing some social media marketing for them mostly through twitter but then vacation rolled around and I didn't stay on it.
When I returned I found almost 90 people had visited the website from google alone. it is over 125 search visitors if you include bing and yahoo. All from 2 hours worth of work! One of the visitors is even buying a bedroom set.
So why does SEO work if people only browse the first page? Well truth is people only browse the first page when they find what they need. Many people (expeciially us web-dev types) have to look though many pages to find exactly the right site with the right solution for us. Second, just because your website isn't number one in an overall catagory (like furniture) doesn't mean that it won't rank high in a subcatagory (ie Office Furniture). Third, you can use solid seo technique to create a geo-friendly website that can bring visitors looking to shop locally right through your door.
If everything I mention above hasn't convinced you of the importance of seo I have four more points that will!
1. Two hours of Seo will not just increase your visitors for one week. It will have a profound impact on the total number of visitors each week of the year for every year that you have your site.
2. You can and should (SEO is not a one time and leave it alone tool) add to that two hour effort on a daily or weekly basis adding value and visitors progressively and organically.
3. If you do it yourself SEO is often free. That's to say you can do it in otherwise wasted spare time(I have no purpose when funiture customers stay home)making valuble contributions rather than wasting time.
4. Somebody always makes it to the top 10 in google and that somebody is making a lot of money! So why can't it be you?
To leave you with a final bit of irony. The local TV station (an ABC affiliate) actually found us origionally when their Ad rep. was looking for local furnitureand found our website from google! In her initial marketing pitch she even had printed and assembled "About Us" information that she had copied Directly form our website!
Let's all eat are Elephant's one bite at a time, by climbing the rankings ergonomically and taking SEO as it should be taken. Slowly but surely!
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