If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Likewise, if a potential customer searches for your company name and they don’t find it, does your brand really exist?
Search engines answer the second question. When you don’t show up on Page 1 of search results for your own company name, then you don’t exist
Let’s say you have a promising discussion with a company who is interested in your product or service. The next day, they want to do research about you and your company. If you’ve given them a business card, you would hope they would dig around their desk or find it in their wallet, sit down at their computer and type your website address into their browser. Or maybe you’ve connected on LinkedIn. They could visit your LinkedIn profile, find your company website address and click on the link from there.
But what’s more likely to happen – because people take shortcuts – is that they will go to Google and type the name of you or your company as a search query. Research shows that more than half of Internet users have searched for themselves onlineto manage their reputation. Have you done this? And more importantly, have you done this for your company brand?
You have to consider: What will interested people think if they search for your company name, and you don’t show up on the first page of results?
Now if you’re a savvy Internet marketer, you may think this sounds rather elementary. This blog is not for you. I’m writing to thousands of small and medium sized business leaders who haven’t figured this out. It isn’t that they’re not smart–They simply don’t know.
Ok, so now that you’re back from searching your company on Google, let me close with what can be done to develop your brand existence on search engines. (By the way, did your company show up anywhere on Page 1? Anything past the first page will be seen by less than 5% of Internet users).
Showing Up in Search Results
The good news is there is a direct path to search engine existence. But it’s not easy. It takes consistency and commitment. Here are the steps:
Build a search engine friendly website
- Simply launching a website isn’t good enough. You have to use a platform that is “SEO friendly”. Our agency uses WordPress exclusively because it’s both SEO and user friendly for making simple edits and updates. Bottom line, WordPress sites are easier for search engines to crawl and properly index so that they know how to match up your web pages for user searches.
Consistently produce quality content
- In the same way you need to show potential customers you are staying relevant and know what you’re talking about, you have to prove this to search engines. The most important way you can do this is by keeping the content on your website updated. The way to exceed average and get noticed by search engines is to write a new blog post on your site once per week.
Build a high quality link profile
- Your link profile is the accumulation of other websites that link back to your website. Think about it, the more high quality industry experts who speak highly about you as an individual, the better for your reputation. Well the more high quality industry websites that link to your company website, the better.
It’s time to get on the grid. Stop accepting the painful consequences of that great prospect searching for your company and finding you don’t exist.
