Is your website SEO optimized to meet the needs of your target market, if not why?

How well do you know your business? If I ask you to answer that question from the perspective of owning the business chances are pretty good that you would be able to woo me with facts, figures, industry knowledge and anything else that I may ever want to know about your industry. How effective are you at translating that knowledge to the web and prospective buyers?

When someone searches for something you sell are you a option in the search results or have you decided to leave that part of your business to your competition?

Your website needs to be more than an extended static sales brochure it needs to be a lean mean optimized sales machine. Unlike your sales force,  your web site wants to work and produce revenue, but are you giving it the tools needed to preform at an optimal level?

Search Engine Optimization is a continually evolving process. Many business owners either suffer from a set it and forget it mentality or don’t even bother with optimizing their content at all. If you begin to understand how someone searches for your products and services you will then begin to learn how to meet your customer needs, capture their business and stay ahead of your competition.

Although a veil of mystery surrounds what SEO is and is not let me break it down to it’s simplest form. In a nutshell SEO can be defined as the process of improving your website or web page to become more visible in a search engine at the moment someone searches for your product or service.

Does Google know you exist?

Just because you have a website does not mean Google, Bing or Yahoo know you exist, you have to tell them. Your website needs a site index also known as a site map which allows the search engines and visitors know what is on your site. When you add one to you site make sure it is in XML format if you use WordPress I recommend Google XML site map. Once Google knows you exist, they can begin to index your pages accordingly. If your a client of mine, I have already installed this for you.

Be on target!

Who is your target market? Do you know? Most of the time the answer I hear is “anybody that wants to buy my product”  Could you be anymore general! You need to define your ideal customer once you do that you can then begin to create content geared specifically towards them.

For example if you sell real estate your might have multiple targets; first time home buyers, buyers looking for a bigger house, empty nesters, people looking for multifamily homes, investors etc. Each group has unique needs and behavioral patterns and your website should be optimized to to accommodate them.

Dedicate a page on your website for each of your target markets. Each page should have one specific focus, solve one particular problem, optimized with long tail keywords, and have a conversion form to capture contact information of that visitor.

Be one with your competition or at least know what they are up to.

Since you are both in competition for the same market share analyzing what your competition is doing can actually give you a leg up on them. What key words are they using? What local areas are they targeting? What is their messaging? You need to know. Once you know how your competition thinks you will begin to see their vulnerabilities and capitalize on their mistakes.

Don’t be a copy cat!

You may want to copy your competitors keywords and phrases but don’t! Never assume that your competition knows what the hell they are doing! They don’t. I have found all to often that people choose the wrong keywords to describe their business. They are either too general or have a lot of competition. You can read my post Google Ad Words are a big fat waste of money part 2 to find tools that can help you build out a list of key words that will help you rank more favorably than your competition.

Who doesn’t love fresh baked bread?

If you own a bakery it might make sense to optimize the phrase “Fresh Baked Bread”. Google has 4,790,000 results for that phrase; however only 13,500 pages have been indexed with the key word phrase Fresh Baked Bread in the title. I love warm fresh baked bread.

If you Google “Warm Fresh Baked Bread” you will get 48,400 results and this is where it gets interesting. I bet you didn’t know that Google only has 3 indexed pages with “Warm Fresh Baked Bread” in the title. If you optimized a web page titled with the keyword phrase “Warm Fresh Baked Bread’ instead of competing with 4,790,000 web pages you would know compete with 3. If you own a bakery you can thank me later.

Stay Local!

Let me let you in on a little secret. Optimize your site for the local area. There is plenty of opportunity to rank very favorably by adding a location to your keyword phrase and chances are your competition has not realized this yet. Well until now, oops!

As of right now Google does not have any indexed pages with Fresh Baked Bread Boston Ma in the title, it does however have 4,510,000 results for Fresh Baked Bread Boston Ma which makes this an ideal key word phrase. Again if you owned a bakery in Boston Ma, that makes fresh baked bread it might make sense to create a page optimized for that page seeing as there are over 4 million results for that keyword phrase.

I look forward to your thoughts.