One difficulty that we hear recurrently from our clients is, “How can I be #1 on Google?” Perhaps you have been told by a acquaintance, co-worker or marketer that they can help your website attain first-rate rankings on Google. The actuality is that you can be #1 on Google; however, that is a distortion of the situation.
Go to Google http://www.google.com and type in a phrase that you believe your customers would search for. Chances are that they aren’t automatically going to search on your business name, as they may not even know about your organization yet. Instead, they will search on a phrase that characterizes your business so, do a search on such a phrase.
The Google results for that search are divided into three parts on the page. Sponsored results are at the top and right side of the page and the “organic” Google results are on the main body of the page.
The listings on the top and right side (sponsored results) are businesses that use the Google adwords tool to create and link paid ads to their website. When a prospective vendor pledges that they can make your website number one on Google for a specific high value keyword term, the only way they can make that pledge is to configure your website with the Google adwords tool. Adwords is just a instrument. You can do a very basic setup in about 20 minutes or you can get into an actual strategy and analyze by spending hundreds of hours. With adwords, you are able to pick the keyword terms where your ads will appear, the text of the ad that will appear and oh, yes, the amount you want to spend when prospects click on your Google ad. You will be able to setup your credit card which Google will charge automatically, to keep pace with your budget. Keyword terms that are in low-demand may cost as little as $.10 per click while keyword phrases that are in tremendous demand can sell for $20 per click and sometimes much more. Companies are willing to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars each month for this Google service – the adept advertisers are able to analyze the results of this investment to figure out which keywords and ads may provide them with the highest return on their advertising investment. If you want to use the Google adwords tool, be prepared to spend consequential time to really learn the in’s and out’s of the system. It is a fantastic tool that people make a specialized career out of.
For most small businesses, if you are not yet at the point where your website is a key element of your business process, your time may be best spent initially in developing helpful and unique content on your website. By developing great information for your prospective customers on your website, your website will become a useful resource for your customers and will also be indexed by search engines like Google. As your rich and unique content is indexed by Google, some of the key phrases that you employ in your website may begin to display in the organic results in the main body of the search results. Even if they don’t appear on the first page of Google results, they may appear in the following pages.
Although there are no direct out-of-pocket costs to Google for website listings that display in the organic results, they are certainly not free. You will have spent a great deal of time thinking through the issues that are critical to your prospective customers, developing exclusive and appropriate information about these issues and apply them to your site.
Broadway Marketing Group is a Columbus Ohio website design firm that specializes in affordable, search engine friendly websites.