I must say that I am surprised at what I find doing search engine optimization.
One of the tricky things is how dynamic the internet is. It is constantly changing. I can use software designed to give answers to what is happening in a given market. Then a day later or even a few minutes later and the answers change. Maybe not a lot. Occasionally by a lot.
What does that mean? Really it means that the ways in which we get to measure the internet are rough approximations. Part of what I do is keyword research. Recently I learned some techniques to be more accurate in predicting the traffic through Google for a given keyword. These are new techniques to the SEO field and it will take time for them to mainstream.
What I look for is enough traffic to make predictable sales. At the same time I am looking at the competition. Are there 30,000 competing websites or 100,000? I can often compete against 30,000 and fairly quickly. To compete against 100,000 takes time and effort. To compete in a local market is even more straight forward.
The reason I make these statements is because of Pareto's Law. The old 80/20 rule that we've heard people mention.
Now I think that Pareto's numbers, 80/20, don't work for the internet. This is because so many people put together a website and stick it on the internet. It's like building a raft to travel downstream. You build it, stick it in the water and push it out, forgetting to get on. The result is that you totally missed the goal. The number of websites that are treated this way is astounding.
Here's an example. I just did a search in Google for "tennis racquet". I used the quotes so that I get the two words together. There were 569,000 responses. Only three companies selling tennis racquets made it to the first page. There were 33 in the first 100 and who knows how many more in the 569,000. Three on the front page is 10% of just the first 100 responses. But - if your tennis racquet business is past page two, you're as good as toast.
Now this is good news for anyone who is serious about their website succeeding. With so many websites floating down the river with no direction, the real competition numbers are drastically reduced.
How does all of this work? It is really a straight forward process. Provide a website that the search engines can read and that is reader friendly. Use appropriate keywords in your content. Update or add new content regularly. Promote your website. Add quality links. Stay away from any techniques where the search engines will penalize you. Watch your statistics for your website. The simplest statistics being how many come to your site and how many buy. Work on improving the number of people that convert from being a visitor to being a buyer.
That's most of it. You can do a lot of it yourself. A little work here and there and then it starts cranking right along. The parts you can't do or don't want to do is where Site Street comes in.
Dan Hunt