This weekend I was at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The venue was host to the biggest motorsport property in the UK, the British Superbikes (BSB). The event was different, because as well as being supported by other motorbike classes, BSB hosted the Trofeo Abarth 500 GB, a new one-make car series. It could have all [...]
The Internet has been with us for at while now. We hear stories about how 500 million people are members of sites like Facebook and more impressively how that ‘customer’ base has been built in just a few years.
Nevertheless, there are still many businesses who don’t prioritise the internet as a source of revenue, who have been conditioned to think that a company’s web presence is a job for the guy in IT or that agency that charges more than the lawyers.
This week I have seen headlines in traditional media with headlines like ‘Why you should consider Internet marketing’ as if it was still the bleeding edge of promotional activity – as if there was some reason why you might not do internet marketing.
Functions that are fundamental to business are still being marginalised internally and that provides technology companies that can explain the business benefits of their services an opportunity.
Take search. Even a 5 year old entrepreneur with a lemonade stand knows that location is important. If nobody knows where to find you, no-one can buy from you. Nowadays, even passing trade can be hijacked by competitors making real-time offers to tempt your customers down the street using location based services, but your customer’s journey probably started much earlier – with an internet search.
Why then, do savvy business people who understand that location is important, not think about the location of their website in a page of search results?
Perhaps it’s too hard. Perhaps the mystery built up by the ’search industry’ has convinced business owners that they are powerless to have an effect on the corporate machinery of sites like Google, bing and Yahoo!
Even if that is the case, why aren’t search experts then given the same priority as an accountant or lawyer?
In fact, it’s not the case that search is hard. While Google is not as transparent as the yellow pages, there are simple rules that have not changed for several years that almost anyone can follow to get the basics right.
Like accountancy or tax, there is a level of expertise that will meet basic requirements and then there are more complicated issues that require more expert knowledge to make the most of the system.
(It’s at this point that I feel like starting this blog again, having come up with the analogy between search and tax, but that will have to be another post!)
If you accept that location is a fundamental business requirement, then how you rank in search engines becomes a priority ahead of many other business functions. You page rank in relation to your key search terms or keywords needs to be a metric that has the same importance as your sales conversions or gross margin.
What if you could have a tool that did for search what MYOB or Sage does for accounting or what SalesForce does for CRM? What if you could do search engine optimisation (SEO) ‘the Google way’ in a step by step way that demystified the process but provided real business benefits?
What would you want from that service suite?
