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| Photo by Svilen Milev |
Your Web Structure Should Help You Stand Out in Google Results!
IX Brand SEO helps small businesses with search engine optimization, online reputation management, and business process improvement. Located in Sugar Land, TX, IX Brand SEO works with clients throughout Southeast Texas. Other clients are located in Virginia and Colorado. Call us at 281-343-3284 to visit about your business and goals for Internet marketing.
I had lunch yesterday with David Schroeder, Executive Director of the Wharton Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), and several representatives of a local web design firm working with WEDC on its new website. As an aside, here’s a shout-out to Scheller’s Restaurant in Glen Flora, TX, where we enjoyed some outstanding food and a chance to visit with neighbors and friends. If you’re in the Wharton area and haven’t tried Scheller’s, you’re missing some fine food! Check them on Facebook for the latest specials and hours.
Back to search engine optimization and website design, which was the topic of our lunch meeting. During our discussion about the new WEDC website, we touched on the subject of website structure. In my view, there are two schools of thought about the best way to do this. The first view holds that your website is a reflection of your business or organization and it should reflect that entity — in fact, it should provide visitors with your business vision, your business mission, and the business information that you want to convey to Internet visitors. In my experience, most business and nonprofit websites are designed this way. They are built to convey, “what I want to tell you” about my business.
There’s another way though, and I see this other way as offering advantages for search engine optimization (or better Google rankings) as another way of thinking about it. This other way is also more likely to lead to more customer conversions and more satisfied Internet visitors. This other way is focused on “what do you (the prospective customer) want to know” instead of “what do I want to tell you.”
How can you get insights into what your customers want to know? Use good keyword research at the very start of your website design or redesign. Find out what keyword phrases people are searching for that are relevant to your business or organization and then use those phrases to build your website design. An example from a previous post was the keyword phrase, small business assistance. Lots of people search for small business assistance and WEDC provides that service, so a good candidate for a webpage on the new WEDC site would be small business assistance. I have several clients who own turf grass sod farms and they have webpages devoted to turf grass sod maintenance because lots of people search for information on that topic. A doctor client has a page for knee replacements because many potential patients search for information about that topic, and they’re looking for highly-qualified doctors to perform knee surgeries. A potential client I talked to before Christmas provides packing and unpacking services. The phrase packing services gets lots of search traffic according to Google, but the phrase is not used as a the topic of a webpage on this company’s current site. That packing services Internet traffic is going to competitors now and these nice folks need to change that situation with a website redesign.
So when you’re thinking about developing a new website or a redesign of your existing website, think about responding to “what your prospective customers want to know” instead of “what you want to tell them.” If you find out what your customers want to know by paying for good keyword research, your website will do better in Google rankings and it will work better as a marketing and sales tool.
If you have any questions about this topic, please give me a call at 281-343-3284 and enjoy a lunch at Scheller’s in the near future.
Happy New Year!
