I’m On the Web – Why Isn’t My Site Working?
I recently surveyed 30 small businesses near me to see if they had Web sites on the Web. Of the 30 small businesses near me, only 11 had Web sites. I found 19 of these businesses, or 63%, had no site. A Web site is essential for almost business today. Over half are losing dramatic market share without that site.
If you ask these businesses without Web sites if they had a site, they would probably tell you they did. Search those 19 businesses without sites using their business name on Google, and a listing for them would pop up. The listing would show their business name, address, phone number, email address, and maybe a photo and a small map with directions. So they thought they had a Web site. Not really. They had a listing; but that’s not a Web site. Phone companies and others create directories on the Web. Your listing may be a part of one or more directories. For those companies without a Web site, you will still see their listings on such directories as citysearch, yellowpages, local.yahoo, superpages, and dexknows. These are often paid for by the business.
When a potential customer does a search in an attempt to locate your business or more particularly your product or service, they will generally search by category – not by your business name. For example, if I search in Google for “Allen Shoes” (without the quotes) at the moment I will find NO stores listed with links from directory sites listed in the returned result listing on the first three pages with the exception of two links from the manta.com directory. The links returned by Google on this search are to real Web sites.
What really happens is that in the various categories (such as the “Allen Shoes” category) only the top pages in that category are spidered by Google. Google isn’t looking at the entire directory listings in that category.
For serious search engine optimization, you need that Web site. At the deeper level, for good search engine optimization (at least on Google) you need strong content, and you can’t do that with a simple listing. You also need strong incoming links from high quality sites. If you have strong content, you’ll get those links. Finally, you need a dynamic Web site. That means you need a blog and lots of people commenting on your blog. Your goal is to create a dynamic environment that draws potential clients into your site. Working the social media often is very important.
We can help with this. Why not contact us and let’s get started.
