Practitioners of alchemy strove to turn
common metals into gold. It was a magical effort to achieve wealth.
Unfortunately for its adherents, no compound was ever discovered back then to
create such a reaction. Today, however, there exists a tool that can help
entrepreneurs realize fortunes -- Google.
In the past, growing your customer base took significant
time or money – often both. Yet, in a digital world where most purchases begin
online, Google search results can funnel large amounts of interested prospects
to small operations – quickly and inexpensively.
That’s because people trust Google to serve up the most
relevant and authoritative sites. Currently, Google is the most popular search
engine online with 68 percent market share. It processes over 3.5 billion
searches per day.
While only a tiny sliver of those searches relate to your
business, it nonetheless can deliver massive volume. What’s more, Google
provides the needed tools to transform more searches into sales. With Keyword
Planner and AdSense, you can literally learn and listen to what people search
for online. For an entrepreneur looking to fine tune their business, that’s
real “gold.”
Take for instance the local dog walker. Search results
may reveal a volume of searches in the area for pack walks. A business can take
advantage of insights like that to modify its services and give people what
they want. Competitors not listening lose out on real money.
The power of insights like that can fundamentally change
how business is done. In the past, entrepreneurs relied on their gut to
determine everything from concept to inventory. But with digital trails out
there, today’s startups can use data to accurately predict what will resonate
with consumers and ring cash registers.
Just as important as what people
are searching for, though, is how people are
searching for it.
There are many ways you may describe your product and
what you sell, but Google measures by a different yardstick: finding the site
that best matches the words people search by. This part of the science can’t be
overlooked. About 94 percent of clicks are on the first page of results. Google
has convinced the world that all life’s best answers are on Page One. Put
another way, if you miss Page One, you don’t exist.
Getting your site to rank higher is about having it
tightly match popular and relevant search terms. Exactly. Consider a customer
we once had: a die cast car model company. People may search for die cast as
two words – or one. They may hyphenate the words or misspell the first (dye).
The point is that on search sites, it doesn’t matter how you describe your
product. It matters how people search for it.
After looking at the analytics, we rewrote the entire site to reflect how
people searched online. Business more than doubled.
Another example: When we started Vitals, we were building
pages to help people find cardiologists. Yet, on Google, five times more people
search for the term “cardiology.” By optimizing our pages for that keyword
instead, we generate more traffic, allowing us to monetizing those pages
accordingly.
Another way to take advantage of Google is to ride the
“long tail” of search. As consumers decide what’s best for them, we move
away from the 80/20 rule of business that dictates that 80 percent of your
profits come from 20 percent of your products. For instance, local bookstores
line their shelves with bestsellers, knowing they can move the inventory
quickly. But online, Amazon kills every independent bookseller by being able to
carry every book in print. Every. Book.
Amazon doesn’t have to go after words like “buy books
online” because people find the site by searching for the title of a book
instead. Similarly, when we built Vitals, we made a page for every doctor in
America. Then we added a page for every city. And neighborhood. And specialist.
And health plan. And specialists by health plan. Millions and millions of
distinct pages, so Vitals had the “perfect” answer to every search.
All told, Vitals is a site with tens of millions of
pages. Our traffic flows from various searches: Doctor name, doctor specialty,
doctor location, specialty location, etc. It’s counterintuitive, but instead of
having a single front door for business (the “Home Page”), you can build
millions of doors into your site, thereby increasing revenue by several orders
of magnitude.
The best part about Google is that – even a decade later
– most businesses aren’t using its magic to their advantage. That means there’s
still ample opportunity to outwit many of your competitors. An awful lot of
business owners still think of search engine marketing as voodoo. Trust me,
it’s not. What it’s really, is free gold.
Source: entrepreneur.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment