You already know that your company website has become an increasingly crucial marketing tool, a means to being accessible to as well as influential on your customer.
Suppose, however, that a customer looks your business up at a moments whim, and, failing to see you within the first few search results, simply ceases to look any further? Such a possibility poses some significant risks for you: 1.
Your business misses out on time a customer or a potential customer could have spent engaging with your brand name.
2.
A potential customer may end up spending time engaging with your competitors brand name instead! Your website may use the ideal interface, the flawless graphics, the ideal marketing colors, and the fun games to entertain the user and keep her engaged for hours.
It may even convince the user that your brand is second to none.
However, it is only when the user is given a clear path and easy accessibility to your business site that the investment you made into your site pays off.
This clear path is paved via Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
SEO involves pinpointing the keywords that are most relevant to a website and tailoring the web construction and content accordingly.
Doing so helps the website score a higher position in the results search engines produce when those keywords are entered.
This method can be equated to the real-life example of sales representatives ensuring that wholesalers place their product on the ideal shelf space where the customer will not fail to see it and will be more likely to pick it up.
SEO should not be confused with SEM, Search Engine Marketing.
Both SEO and SEM have the same goal: placing an organizations website as high up on a search engines results as possible.
However, SEM attains its goal by a different means: a certain payment is made to ensure that a site attains a certain ranking in a search engines results, a setup best known as the 'pay-per-click' scheme.
When we relate these differences in terms of the analogy above, in the case of SEM, the product producers will be paying the wholesaler to place their product on the designated shelf.
In the case of SEO, however, the producers will focus on the product itself, designing it in a way through color, shape, and logo that the wholesaler themselves would want to put it on their most accessible shelf space.
Experienced internet-based marketers advise that a company employ both SEM and SEO to direct the desired flow of traffic to their website.
SEMs are best in producing immediate traffic; however, they do become costlier in the long run when all the 'pay-per-clicks' keep adding up.
A website that invests in SEO, on the other hand, ensures that its content remains relevant to the keywords and builds up the traffic of users looking for relevant content.