In order for your online business to be successful, and ultimately make a profit, you must have customers. Sure, having a high quality product or service and offering them at a reasonable price is important, but in the end these will be worthless unless you have customers. It is therefore critical that your business, seen online as a website, is viewed as much as possible by potential customers. When a consumer is using a search engine such as Google to find goods or services in their area, the search engine uses a process called search engine optimization, or SEO, to find products or services relevant to the keywords being searched. If your website has good SEO, it will appear high among the search results and therefore draw you in customers (known as traffic). Since your business is relevant to what the customers were looking for, ideally you will make money off of this relevant traffic. Using SEO to draw in traffic gives you potential customers, and is much cheaper than traditionally advertising.
When a customer is in search of a business or service provider, such as a daycare for example, they will often begin their search online. When they use a search engine such as google, and type in the keyword “Daycare” they expect that the results that appear will be relevant to a daycare service. Search engines know this, and therefore use SEO to determine which web pages, among the millions of webpages on the internet, are most relevant to a searcher’s keywords. Using SEO, search engines are able to scan the millions of web pages to look for keywords and links to determine which web pages are relevant to certain searches. As a business owner, you want your webpage to be as highly ranked in the SEO process as possible. This will bring you in potential customers, and will thus make you money. You can help ensure high SEO results by making sure that your title is relevant to your business, and what a searcher would use as keywords. If you’re a daycare, use daycare somewhere in your title and throughout your website. If you fail to do this, your SEO ranking could be hindered and could thus lose potential customers.
As always, word of mouth is by far the most successful form of gaining new customers. People trust their friend’s opinions, if their friend had success with your business, then they assume that they will aswell. Search engines realize this, and found a way to carry this method to online: links. When website relevant to your website create a link to your website, your SEO is increased. Additionally, if customers on their facebook or blog accounts link to your website, your SEO is also increased.
SEO is also much cheaper than traditional advertising. If you successfully optimize your SEO, it’s like free advertisement. Although people can pay to have ads placed near the top of search results, recent studies have shown that website’s still get more viewers from being high among search engine results (via SEO) then through paying for banner ads for consumers to click on. Ideally, if your website appears higher among search results, it will be viewed more frequently, therefore drawing in more customers. You will therefore be able to spend less money on advertising, and can count this saved money towards your profits.
Usually, the main purpose of any business is to make money. In order to make money, however, you must successfully market and sell your goods and or services. In the internet marketing world of today, the cheapest and most efficient way to do this is to have a website that appears high among search results. This is done by having the maximum SEO. Having first appearing search results will draw in customers to your business, increasing your sales. You’ll also be able to spend less money on traditional advertising, thus increasing your profit.