The Web Design Company Blog

I get this question often. So, I though I take a minute to write about this in short. You start your SEO by analyzing your website and the competitors website on the search engines.

Without starting at this point, you will never know where you are, where you are going, when you got there and what you are measuring in terms of success and results.

We give our clients some 7 pieces of software to analyze and monitor SEO efforts. This helps our customers see where they are and when they achieve their goals.

After you achieve each SEO goal you need to start looking at new territories to gain visitors. Unless you are the size of Wikipedia, there is always more to do in SEO there are always new sources of traffic to consider to get more customers. Just don’t try to “bite the whole elephant in one go”. Do your SEO step-by-step and try to keep focused. By analyzing you site and your competitors site you will be able to get down to the tasks you need to achieve and move on from one task to another until you reach your goals.

If you don’t know how to analyze your site and your competitors site, you may want to consider an SEO audit for your site.

PR: wait...  I: wait...  L: wait...  LD: wait...  I: wait... wait...  Rank: wait...  Traffic: wait...  Price: wait...  C: wait...

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Unless you want to make money online you don’t need SEO . SEO is one part of the online strategy to getting customers, leads and making more business. If a website is sitting in the search engines listings on page 1,000,000  or even page 10 on goggle search, and no one can find it, then the website is really not doing its’ job and it probably was a waste of money in the first place.

There are 3 ways to get people to a website to generate leads and purchases:

1. Place adverts offline and some people will visit the website (hopefully the website has been tested for conversion at that point).
2. Place adverts and banners all over the internet where people see them to visit the website
3. Get people from free searches on the search engine, which is often referred to as “free traffic”.

For serious marketers and companies, they use all the above to some extent or another, depending on their industry. Very advanced marketers and companies also use social media in the mix to some extend or another.

However, the fact is that in the long term of continually getting people to a website is still via the search engines. There is no advert that you can pay for it once and will get you people forever not even for a long period of time, only for the time that it is advertised.

Every advert that one places, online of offline, costs money, however, once the strength in the search engine has been achieved for rankings on the first page of Google, it is much easier and cheaper to maintain in the long term.
With SEO one can achieve long terms visitors to a website, without paying for adverts over and over again. SEO is combined of many tasks that need to be preformed to achieve the goals. It does take some work, but once there, the work reduces significantly with time (unless you are in a space where there is fierce competition and a new site with dedicated SEO people pops up every single day, which is not very common in most industries).

SEO is not magic, it takes work and time and it pays big dividends for those that understand SEO and perform this job daily or outsource it to get the free traffic.

So is SEO important? Sure it is if you want to get more clients, more leads through the website and if you have the long terms vision of the internet. It is not only the vision of how many people you can get today, which is part of the whole picture, but how many more clients and leads you can get for as long as the business is in existence. The internet is NOT getting smaller, it is getting BIGGER, much bigger each year and South Africa is only at the beginning.

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Many people these days want to make a living online. Online business has become some sort of a fad. Though having an online business is a great thing (and I speak from personal experience), turns out that many people find barriers to entry, here are some points to consider if you want to start an online business:

1.    You need to have either the technical skill or the money to build the website.

2.    You need to find a product that people want to buy.

3.    You need to continuously educate yourself and keep updated in the online world, things change often.

The first barrier to entry is usually the biggest one. People want to go online but do not have the budget to build a good website that would actually get customer to buy and then continue the work to promote (exactly like an offline business) to get more customers to buy the products. Truth be told online and offline: the business that has the biggest budget to acquire a customer will always win.

The second problem is very common even in the offline world: the research for a viable product or service to sell online. The considerations though are sometimes slightly different online than offline.

The third problem is easily overcome by persistence; this is a great entrepreneurial skill. That said, not everyone has the skill or wishes to acquire it. Online unfortunately things change faster and more frequently, whether promoting or updating a website, changing SEO strategies or social media strategies in the online world it is critical to keep up to date (otherwise the website, which is the business, slips away and the competition wins).

If you are considering entering the online business world, think to yourself if your idea would work offline. If it wouldn’t then why do you thing it would online?

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