Would you lease a space in a building for your business in a street with no vehicle or foot traffic, in the middle of nowhere, and no sign outside your windows saying your company is there? We hope your answer is “Absolutely not!” If no one can find your business location then nobody can buy your services and products. Simple as that.
The same is true for a website. We can design the best website in the world but if nobody can find your website then all that hard work invested in the website design to make it functional and beautiful is useless, literally a waste of time and money.
When you build a website essentially you’re putting the listing of your website on a giant yellow pages virtual book better known as the internet. If you’re old enough to remember what yellow pages are then you’ll remember if you wanted to find, for example, plumbers, you would simply look for the word “plumber” and then you would have a list of all plumbers, usually in alphabetical order. That’s why you had many companies whose names started with an “A” or even “AAA”. These companies just wanted to be the first one in the list.
Why being on the top of the list is so important?
Because people get tired really fast when looking for a service or product so they’ll usually settle for calling the first few names in the list of “plumbers” in the yellow pages.
On the internet people’s behavior is no different, they tend to hire or buy from the few companies that make it at the top of the List. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately), the listings on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc are not in alphabetical order which means you can’t catapult yourself to the top rankings of Google search by simply naming your company something that starts with the letter “A”.
Instead, sites like Google rank their listings according to what they believe to be relevant to the term being searched. Google uses an algorithm, that is, a set of rules written by people who work at Google, to determine in their opinion who should be at the top of the search rankings and progressively down to the bottom of those search results.
Businesses will try to figure out how to make it to the top of these search results for several search terms, or keywords, searched in Google, Yahoo, etc. This is what is called in the industry, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the act of working on a website and off the website (but still on the internet) to help the website rank higher in search results.
As you can imagine competition among businesses varies depending on how common that product or service is. So ranking on the top of Google can be extremely easy to nearly impossible.
If you’re starting a new website for your business, even in a competitive industry, realize that you can work on short term SEO goals while simultaneously working on the long terms goals. It could take a year to help your website rank high for a particular search term that is not very competitive while it may take several years to rank high for a very competitive keyword.
And like any well-oiled machine… the machine needs to be constantly oiled. Once your website ranks among the top results you can’t just stop there. Remember, competition. Once you stop performing Search Engine Optimization on your website then you’re giving room to other businesses to keep trying to make their websites stand among the top results and therefore outrank you.
Please, Don’t waste your money
If you’re going to hire anybody or spend your own time building a website and then spend No time at all getting people to go to your website, you might as well grab $100 bills and flush them down the toilet. This is probably the #1 mistake many business owners make: The build a website but feel like SEO services are not required. That’s like buying a car but refusing to put gasoline in the tank.
So your website needs constant effort to be able to be found online and maintain that position so people can keep finding you. If you stop trying to make it to the top results in Google it would be equivalent to going back to leasing a building for your business, in the middle of nowhere, and covering those windows with brick.
Be a smarter business owner and make sure to think of SEO as an equally important part of your website design requirements.
Contact us, Time is money and we’re ready to help you right now!
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