Video Transcription
So today, we’re going to go through eight steps to online success, and I’ll just go through these quickly, but we’re going to go into each one of these in a little bit more in depth because I want to spend some time making sure you guys know the different parts and that you have plenty of takeaways to take this stuff and go back and do it for your own site.
So step one, understand the search engines, what’s the difference between paid, organic, map listings, things like that. Step number two, build out your site for the most profitable services in your service areas. Definitely important and definitely one of the top things you need to be doing. Optimize your site and your pages for search. Optimize your Google maps listing. Start getting those online reviews. Build those inbound links. Get that authority up so that you know if a competitor decides to start doing some of this stuff too, you’re already so far ahead of them that your authority is just going to overrule, and it’s going to be hard to start to knock you down. So, we’ll go through a lot of that today.
Step six, get active on your social media networks, and step seven, leverage that paid online marketing. Once again, pretty far down the totem pole, but definitely a great supplement to a very well built website. And of course, step number eight, as I mentioned, track, measure, quantify, tweak what’s working, change what isn’t, and get ready for that phone to ring.
So step one is talking all about the search engines, and when somebody types in a phrase, so in this case, window treatments Seattle, that page that comes back on Google is what we call, in our industry, a SERP or a search engine result page. And that typically has, as we can see on the right, it has a pay per click section. It has the local results or the map section, and then it has the organic listings below that. So, that’s a typical SERP page, and every one is different depending on what keywords are typed in.
So, here’s another one that’s interesting. This is window treatments, Memphis. And what you’ll notice is there are no companies right now running pay per click for that phrase. So, Google doesn’t show any ads because there’s no inventory of ads for them, so everything just kind of moves up. So, we’ve got our local results, our three pack or snack packs of local results, and then we’ve got the organic listings below that. And organic listings just means that these websites have optimized their page to show up at the top for these different searches.
Another thing that’s really important is, as I mentioned earlier, how people are starting to ignore the ads that are at the top of the search engines. You know, we saw the pay per click back here on the Seattle one. People are starting to get smart to that, and whether they’re doing it on purpose or not, just different eye tracking studies have shown that people just automatically gravitate towards that map area or even below that to those listings. So, this speaks huge volumes to the pay per click, and Google actually got rid of the right hand column ads now because nobody was really paying attention to them.
So, definitely important that the search engines are part of what you’re understanding and part of what you’re trying to accomplish and how they work in that kind of stuff.
