Nigel Muir, MD of search marketing specialists DBD Media, offers seven tips for increasing your visibility in search engines
1. Ensure that your website is built with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind. Many web designers don’t understand SEO, so engage someone who does, or seek additional advice to make sure that your website can be found on the search engines for the keywords that really matter to your business.
2. Use pay-per-click (PPC) through Google AdWords, Yahoo and Bing to ensure you have page one visibility on the search engines for those important keywords. If you don’t have the budget to compete with larger competitors, target and refine your ads by geography, time of day, etc.
3. Ensure that users click on your ads. Inspire interaction with your ad by making it different from those of your competitors. Add a call to action, such as ‘Book now’ or ‘Buy Now’, or use elements of urgency, eg: ‘10% discount for February booking’, and accurate price points – for example, ‘Sony 32" TV £299’.
4. Exploit the ‘long tail’ – According to Google, more than 60% of searches made each day are new. Make sure that you build your campaigns to cover the long tail specific searches that people make. Use individual hotel names rather than just resorts, and use dates, eg: ‘Alcudia holidays July 2010’.
5. Get the links right. Make sure that the link from your search listings land visitors on pages that are relevant to the keywords they searched on. So if you run a holiday cottage business for example, make sure that a visitor searching on ‘cottages in St Ives’ lands on a page listing all your St Ives cottages, rather than your homepage.
6. Get a PPC expert to quality-check your PPC campaigns. They will ensure that the structure of the campaign is right, that the targeting options are right for your business and that you have the right type of matching and negative matching in place to get the most out of your budget.
7. Build a Facebook profile for your company and use Twitter to let your prospective customers know what you are doing and what promotions or offers you’re running. Remember that social media and blog sites are indexed by the search engines, and can help potential customers find you more easily.
Nigel Muir is managing director of search and PPC specialists DBD Media.
www.dbdmedia.co.uk
