Website Optimization Is Only Part of the Marketing Equation

As a local marketing firm helping business owners get their businesses found by their ideal prospective clients, we often have small business owners come to us asking us to optimize their website or even build an optimized website thinking that this is the only answer to getting found on the Internet.  While website optimization is definitely an important piece, optimizing a website by itself is not enough.

Business Optimization versus Website Optimization

As you think about Getting Found on the Internet for your products or services, you can often relate this to a recent purchase process you’ve been through.

Bare with me on this one as I use a recent example of a vacation our family took to Destin, Florida.  As we began discussing the vacation, my wife and I began searching online to see what it would cost since we would be there for a week.  Our searches yielded many travel sites including Trip Advisor, Expedia, VRBO.com, Yahoo Travel and even Craig’s List.  While we read these sites, we ultimately clicked through the site of the property we would be staying and called to book a condo for the week.  The important thing to remember in this getting found experience is that none of the search results were for the site of the property but were really more directories of properties.

Today, there are thousands of Internet directories on the web ranging from the most popular including Google, Yahoo, Yelp, Bing, Manta, MapQuest, Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Merchant Circle, DesignRush and others to some that you may not have ever heard of like Local.com, Mojo Pages and others.  Many of these Internet directories are doing the same as our experience with finding a condo in Destin… they are facilitating the process.

While optimizing a website is important to getting found on the Internet, getting your business listed consistently throughout the top Internet directories can be as important to getting found as optimizing your website.  In fact, we are often asked if linking a website is no longer important and our answer is the same.  Linking a website with authentic links is very important and these Internet directories are authentic links.

Internet directory listings is merely one example of what can be done beyond optimizing a website to help a local business get found on the Internet.  Another important area is social media.

How Does Social Media Help Local Businesses Get Found

We will discuss a couple of areas in this discussion since they go hand in hand.  First, let’s go back to the discussion of optimizing a website to help your business get found.  One of the most effective ways your website can help you get found is by sharing engaging content that is important to your ideal audience.  Blogs, pictures and videos are three valuable content tools allow you to do so.

So here is how this comes back around to social media helping you get found on the Internet.  When using blogs, pictures and videos to help with optimizing a website, one of the most effective ways of getting these found is by sharing through social media.  For many of our clients, we help manage this process where they are providing us the content.  In many cases, we are then assembling it – pictures into videos, emails or voice recordings into blogs, etc.  The content is then published on their website and shared throughout their Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media properties so that their audience is made aware of it.

While these are merely a few examples of how to help get your local business found on the Internet, there are several other important pieces to the getting found equation.  Give us a call at 469-420-0180 and we would be glad to serve as your local marketing firm.