A couple of months ago, as my partners and I were in the middle stages of forming our company, a very good business opportunity came our way. We found ourselves in the unusual position of pitching our web design services before we even had a web site ourselves. Needless to say, we decided we needed to get our site online pretty quick.
Unfortunately, search engine optimization takes careful planning. It takes research and time to find the best keywords to drive traffic to your site. We didn’t have this luxury – we needed to get online fast – so we picked some basic keywords, did some basic optimization and got our web site up. Now at least prospective clients can read about our services online.
I’m actually happy that we waited to optimize, because now this gives me a great topic to talk about on this blog. We now have a baseline to measure our success – a great case study to show potential customers.
I did my first evaluation of our baseline this morning. I found that we ranked fairly well with some of the keywords we chose on the fly, but the problem appears to be that not many people are searching for those key words.
We decided early on to target our web design, web development, social network marketing and search engine optimization services to areas near where we live – namely Westfield and Carmel, Indiana. Our thought was that a company located in Westfield, Indiana, might type “westfield web design” in a search engine. So was our hunch right?
Not so far. We haven’t had any hits for that keyword combination, yet. And by doing some preliminary research on the handy dandy Google Keywords Traffic Estimator, we may not get many. It just isn’t a popular keyword term.
This underlines the importance of properly researching your keywords – you need to guarantee that the keywords in your site are going to get hits!
On the flip side, I am encouraged that the keywords we did pick placed fairly well in Google at the outset. Part of this is because the terms aren’t that competitive, but at least we know that our seo technique is sound.
When I talk to prospective clients about SEO, I mention that it requires time to do it right. It involves evaluating your progress and making changes until you are hopefully in the Top 3 to 5 result rankings for your chosen keywords. Next step, we will closely evaluate the keywords we have chosen and replace them with keywords we think will be more effective.
Then we’ll sit back, wait for the search engines to index our site again, and evaluate the results. It is not an exact science, but patience and dedication to the task should yield positive results. I’ll keep you updated on our progress right here. Hopefully, we’ll all learn something new!
