Expanding Your Company’s Market

How do you bring new customers to your company?

Your products and services meet a real need but you are having trouble expanding your market. Your website is online, you have spent months crafting your message and getting your online services right but you have yet to see it pay the desired dividend. Sound Familiar?

A long held principle of marketing is Location, Location, Location and it is a principle that holds true more than ever today. The only difference is, in a webbed world, the best location is achieved through a process called SEO

What is SEO? - Search Engine Optimization

A direct and cost-effective way to expand your market and increase your revenues.

Many organizations realise that to make sure your products and services are visible on the web, it is vital that they obtain a good listing on the major search engines. It is a direct and cost effective way to expand your market and increase your revenues. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is dedicated to improving the listing of your website on search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Potential customers should gravitate towards your company.

The internet is becoming the first place people turn to when looking for a product or service. The expanding use of broadband internet connections allows everyone to be permanently online making the use of search engines second nature. Many have search engines as their home page or incorporated into their browser so that they are always available.

Search Engines act as a doorway between your customers and you. Ranking highly in those engines means that more of your potential customers will see your services. This type of visibility, which produces significant business rewards, is the main aim of SEO.

What’s the catch?

The problem is that most organisations have no idea how to achieve a top listing on a search engine. Most adopt the crossed fingers and touch wood approach despite realising that high rankings rarely happen by accident.

The main difficulty faced when trying to achieve a top ranking is knowledge. Many SEO companies  mystify the subject, putting it on a par with an arcane science, in order to take advantage of unaware clients. This is not to say that there is no complexity as different search engines use a variety of criteria to develop their rankings. Google’s Page Rank technology, for example, claims to use millions of variables!

ADT cuts through this complexity by transparently describing the services we provide and how, based on tried and tested methods derived from extensive experience, they can help your company achieve the acme of SEO: High Search Engine Visibility.  

You Cannot Fool A Search Engine

ADT takes a realistic approach to achieving a good search engine listing. We work on the principle that you cannot fool a search engine. Remember:

The better your site matches the information people are looking for, the better it will be placed on the search engines.

This is exactly what the search engines are trying to do: match results to searches. This is the common denominator that cuts through all the complicated ranking techniques. ADT, in order to ensure your site properly meets this requirement, implements a number of processes to optimize your site:

1) Keywords, Phrases and Relevance

The first process in optimizing your site is working out: Who is the target audience? What will they search for? This information is then used to calculate relevant traffic levels. There is no point in having thousands of people visit your site that have no interest in what you do. The only effect of this would be to slow down your site so that it is unusable by your actual customers.

You want to focus your SEO to attract the audience who wants the products you are selling.

ADT is able to research the keywords and phrases that are best for your target audience. We can tell you how many times people search on specific keywords - and whether the term is so hotly contested that you stand no real chance of obtaining a benefit from using it.

ADT can help you identify search terms that people use to find what you sell. This is the key first step in attracting new customers.

2) Site Design and Architecture

Good site design and architecture is vital to search engine placement. In the same way that a site needs to be easy to use by a customer, it must also be easy for search engines to search. Unfortunately as websites have become more dynamic and interactive, their complexity has created barriers to searching.

Search engines generally create and modify their listings by visiting websites, through a process called crawling, in which they index the site using information like the site URL, page title, page text and meta tags as well as page headings, links and image names. Even putting an important word in bold can help improve your listing.

If, while crawling your site, the process hits a barrier, it will often stop indexing your site and move on to one from another company. Features like  Flash, Java Script, frame pages and dynamic URLs can all create these barriers and drive down the ability of your site to get indexed and listed on a search engine.

Following a few simple principles in site architecture can mean the difference between a great listing to none at all

ADT removes the barriers to indexing. We are able to either construct or modify your site so that it is highly optimized for indexing by a search engine. In some cases you may need to make a choice between the way you would like to see a page and how well you want that page rated on a search engine. Normally however, we can achieve the best of both worlds to achieve your desired look and a good search engine listing result.

3) Site Content: Text that Customers are Looking For

A fundamental building block in SEO is clear and focused site text. If your site does not properly describe your product or service in terms that are consistent with the types of searches being made, search engines will have no reason to direct people to your site. If, however, your site text is clear and authoritative on a product or topic, it is likely to perform extremely well on a search engine.

The better your site content, the better your search engine listing result.

Since search engines perform millions of calculations to rank their search results, an understanding of the process is required to provide a quality content optimization service. ADT knows from experience that important key phrases and words should be mentioned a number of times, but not too often. We also advise on the importance of page headings, optimal page length and how to improve your listing through the use of sub headings and punctuation.

To optimize for a search engine you need to think like one. Only experience will teach you this.

4) Site Links and Google Page Rank

Google is considered to be one of the most efficient and used search engines in the world. As a result it is sometimes necessary to tailor search engine optimisation to meet specific search engine demands. An example of this is Site Links which are used by some engines, including Google, to rate the value of your site by calculating how many other people link to it.  This calculation includes both the linking site and an assessment of the link subject to add value to your overall rating.

Knowledge of how the major Search Engines work vastly improves your site’s listing position.

A link from 100 other websites stating that your Real Estate Company has Great Homes for Rent will help improve your listing. Analyzing and increasing these off site page aspects is one of the more subtle aspects of ADT’s SEO service. 

 5) Your Site Needs to be Found to be Listed

Getting your website on the internet does not automatically mean you will develop a good search engine listing even if you have taken care to address all the above topics.

For your site to be listed it must be indexed, to be indexed the Search Engines must discover your site.

Search engines index sites either by discovery through other site’s links or through their online submission processes - some of which are free while others cost hundreds of dollars. ADT uses both manual processes and software tools to submit your site for indexing and listing. This often time consuming exercise is one of the final but absolutely necessary steps in achieving a good listing for your site on the search engines.

6) Maintaining Your Position

Once you start seeing positive results through increased site traffic and more orders and enquiries, you will want to make sure you maintain your search engine position. As new sites are constantly being submitted to the engines and old sites are being resubmitted, do not be surprised if, after a few months, your site starts to drift down the search engine results. The main reason for this is that the engines are always looking for new content and so, if left untended, your site will eventually be regarded as 'old' and disappear from optimal search engine lists.

Update your content to maintain your Search Engine position.

As part of our SEO services, ADT provides a monthly review and refinement process. We give a full report on how your site is performing on all the major search engines and can even track this information against your key competitors. Using this report and analysis, we can improve your site’s optimisation and expand the off site page aspects ensuring that your site is indexed regularly.

Additionally, we will track the number of people visiting your site and the number of business enquiries generated, to ensure your SEO service has a good return on investment.

Paid Services, Adverts and Cost Per Click

An alternative to SEO that helps increase the targeted audience to your website is to buy traffic.

That's right!

You can now buy adverts on search engines such as Google and Yahoo - and you will only be charged for visits by qualified leads. These services are normally very beneficial, provided the product or service you sell can support the type of costs associated. It is also worth noting that paid services work much better when taken with a complete SEO service.

Optimising your site will make it easier to use Paid Services.

For example, you still need to define the target audience; more so in fact, as now you are paying real money for people clicking to your site and do not want to pay for somebody that has no interest in what you are selling. Furthermore, people that do actually click the ad and visit your site are more likely to make a purchase only if your website provides sound professional information on your product or service.

Your customers are out there but if they cannot find you, you cannot expect to get their business.

Ask yourself: What can ADT SEO services do for you?