Who would have ever thought that online search would have a huge impact on a company’s ability to sell or attract customers? A recent article on CNN Money titled Get right with Google describes how small companies can lose up to 20% of their revenues due to losing their rankings on Google for specific search keywords or keyphrases. This problem probably does not only exist for companies that depend on Google (the article probably focused on Google due Google being the leader in market share in terms of online searches), but probably also exists for companies that rely on any of the top search engines to generate traffic to their websites.
Online search engines have become a great marketing tool for many companies, especially for small companies that couldn’t afford expensive advertisements in publications and other types of media. But at the same time such companies that just rely on search engine marketing are at a huge risk of losing a lot of their business due to the fact that search engines are constantly refining the algorithms that are used to rank websites based on certain keywords and keyphrases. That makes one wonder how a company can stay on top of all the advances that take place on the internet?
There are probably hundreds and hundreds of ways to do so, but a very simple, cheap, and cost-effective way would be for companies to use a free online analytics tool, such as (and by far the greatest free one out there) Google Analytics to monitor website traffic and keyphrases that lead to the traffic. Any anomalies that are noticed should be immediately looked into and tested against various variables and benchmarks (such as looking up certain keywords or keyphrases that were generating the most traffic for the website from a search engine) and test the page rank of the company’s current website against the past page rank. Since almost all search engines claim that their search algorithms are proprietary, the only way to go about improving page ranking is by visiting websites that have “stolen” the website’s spot on the search engine and analyze the way keywords are used on the website, what websites link to the website, the way the link structure of the websites work, etc. From this point, the company’s website must be modified to match the new trends that are allowing for other websites to perform better with that search engine.
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