Once your site is up and running, here is some information about how to get new clients from your site. Having people find your site on Google is the biggest way of getting new business from your website.
THERE ARE TWO WAYS OF GETTING TRAFFIC FROM GOOGLE:
- Paying Google to put your ad on the right side of the search results (pay per click advertising)
- working to get your site a higher ranking in the free search results that takes up the majority of the page.
Here’s how to get started:
PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING:
You need to sign up with Google for an Adwords account (https://adwords.google.ca), create an ad, specify when you want Google to show your ad (for instance, a Realtor may want his ad to show if someone types in “West Vancouver Realtor”, and then you specify how much you are willing to pay for every time someone looking for your keyword clicks on your ad and goes to your website.
This can be an amount anywhere from 10 cents to $5 per click depending on how many of your competitors are bidding for the top spots as well. You can specify that you are willing to pay up to a certain amount every day (such as $1 per day) so that you do not spend over your advertising budget. We set up the account with your credit card, so whatever amount you approve for Google to bill you for advertising, automatically gets charged to your card every month. You can at any time increase or decrease your bid or your budget, or put the campaign on hold if you’re getting too busy.
This is an excellent thing to do, but can have pitfalls if the keywords are not properly defined. (for instance if the Realtor had his ad served for the word “Realtor” rather than “West Vancouver Realtor”, people from all over the world would click on his ad, but he would get no business from it. It is very important to always define every one of your keywords with the actual location that you are doing business in.
You can set this up yourself, or have us do it for you, if we do it for you, it will take perhaps an hour to two hours to do. If we do set you up, we also teach you to go in and edit your settings, so after setup you yourself can be in control of your campaign budget.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION(SEO):
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of changing the text and other elements on your site (specifically the home page) to make Google display your site in a higher position than your competitors. You will get the best result from your page being on the first page of search results. The spots on the first page are highly contested by all companies, and it can be a lot of work to get on the first page if there are a lot of companies competing for these spots. If the keyword you want to be found for is less contested, it is easier to achieve a first page ranking.
As the way Google ranks pages is under their control, and all the other sites are constantly changing what they are doing on their sites as well, we can not guarantee a first page placement. However in all cases when we have performed SEO for our clients their search results for the main keywords have greatly improved.
THE SEO PROCESS:
- You provide us with text for your home page, the top five keywords that you think people will type in when they are looking for your product or service, and the links to your top five competitors.
- We analyze the competitor keywords, find which keywords are most used, find any important keywords you may have missed, and create a list.
- We then analyze the search volume on each keyword, and find if there is any keyword with good volume that you can get a larger slice of the pie on because less people are competing for it.
- We now give you our list of suggested keyword to optimize for, with the reasons why.
- Once you approve the choice of keywords, we now change the text, titles, meta tags, links and photo names on your home page to reflect the right percentage weight of your keywords, without going over the acceptable limit and being banned for Spam.
- Once you approve the home page text, it is posted.
Google updates its database about once every 4-5 weeks and re-indexes all the sites, so it may take this long for the changes that were made to get picked up and the ranking of your site to change.
This initial process can take anywhere between 5-6 hours or time @ $95/hour.
FOLLOW UP SEO:
Once the new ranking becomes apparent, if you need to work on improving the ranking further, we can then work on building your site’s ranking further by creating an inbound link campaign. We do this by finding where your competitors have links, and making sure you have links pointing to you that have your keywords as the link text. The majority of these places are free. You can also do this yourself – 10 minutes a day will do wonders!
We do not suggest getting into “link exchanges” as this can have a lot of pitfalls.
READY TO GET STARTED?
Contact us book in your SEO, or call Britta at 778.387.3525 to ask questions!
LEARNING MORE ABOUT SEO : (search engine positioning)
A very useful suite of tools that can help you to write the *right* text for your home page to get found on Google… Please note that if you do this wrong, it can cause you to be [banned] on Google instead. We provide SEO on an hourly basis if you would like us to do it for you… usually a basic package including some writing is about 4-6 hours.
We also offer Google Adwords campaign setup if you want an instant guaranteed spot on the top of page 1 for your keywords.