How can search engines help my business?
Learn how to use search engines to increase your business leads and sales, and make your
advertising dollars go farther. Now that you have a deep understanding of how search engines index
Web sites and how users search for Web sites, you can begin to address your own Web site's strengths
and weaknesses. Learn to leverage those strengths and correct the weaknesses to give your business a
competitive advantage.
Pre-requisites
- You should attend the first course in our series - Understanding Search Engines
While this course is not a required pre-requisite, you must have a deep understanding of how search engines work. We will be relying on your knowledge in this area and won't be able to slow down the course for others if you do not understand the basics.
- You must have a live web site.
This session will be a working session and will not be useful to you if you do not have a web site to work with.
- You must have FTP access.
If you want to take advantage of our professional expertise to help you install Google Analytics in this session you must have access to your site via FTP.
You no longer have to set aside millions of dollars for national advertising because your best national advertising
outlet is free. It is called a search engine.
If you are launching a brand new web site, chances are your only visitors during the first few months are going to be your mother,
your father, siblings and friends. They aren't going to help your bottom line.
Topics covered include:
Site structure and goal conversion
How to structure your navigation so that it guides the user to the path of converting to a lead
Keyword research
How to select your target keywords
- Route One: paid search testing
- Route Two: researching from various sources
- Group according to searcher's intent
- Weigh in what is most important to you and how aggressive you want to get
- Competitive v. low search volume
- The power of long tail
- Understanding landing pages for keywords and not saturating the homepage
Competitive analysis
How to find your competition, how to measure the effectiveness of your competition, and how to beat the competition at their own game
Link popularity
Explaining the importance of links and understanding credibility and trust
Content Building
Learn why static web sites with very little original content fail to produce
- Original Content Creation
- Understanding tagging
Taking Benchmark Measurements
Without beginning measurements you can't measure your success or failures.
- Understanding conversions and ROI
- Importance of measurement-- everything should be measurable
- Setting up goal tracking
- Identifying site goals
Ongoing Measurement and Adjustments
Learn best practices for recording the progress toward your goals.
Take Away
You will:
- Setup a Google Docs account for managing your competitive analysis spreadsheets.
- You will take away a list of changes to make on your site (you can make these changes if you are technically saavy, you can have your web developer make these changes, or you can hire us by the hour to make the changes).
- You will also install Google Analytics on your web site so you can begin taking benchmark measurements and be able to take on-going measurements to assess the effectiveness of your changes.
