Web Site Promotion and Internet Geography

Publication Date: 2007-01-19

Article category: Web Site Promotion

Location, location, location.

The geography of the Internet is words. They define its peaks and valleys, as well as its real estate values. While some words or phrases are the Oxford Street of the Internet, others are more akin to a back street of a provincial town.

The value of a retail site is a function of who and how many people will walk past the front door, and words on the Internet are no different. The more people search for a word or phrase on search engines (especially Google), and the more likely a useful economic return can be gained from that search, the more that word or phrase is worth.

Example1. The Happy Walks Holiday Company.

Happy Walks are looking to use their website to attract more visitors. To do this they have decided to aim at particular keywords that their users may use, and so they looked first at the word 'walking'. This looked very productive as it gets 9379 searches per month on Yahoo, probably 3 times that on Google, plus some for MSN, ASK, AltVista and others, so maybe 50,000 searches per month. Sounds great!

So why not chase the high return words? To return to the high street analogy, for the same reason everyone does not all have an outlet on Oxford Street, because such a move will not usually provide the best return on investment (ROI). To get your pitch on Oxford Street will cost you a LOT, and even then will still be insignificantly small. In addition the vast majority of people walking past your door will not be interested in what you sell, or will fail to notice your small frontage amidst the retail behemoths that surround you.

Example 2. Happy Walks sees a fly in the ointment.

Happy Walks have just had a shock. They have looked at the competition for the word 'walking', 195,000,000 sites have the word walking in them. Plus when the search results for walking are broken down, they include searches for walking holidays, walking sticks, walking boots, the walking dead, dog walking, walking with dinosaurs, walking in the air and a host of other non-productive searches for Happy Walks. So Happy Walks starts looking for words that have less competition and are more focused on their products.

So how does this fit with our High Street analogy? Supposing you could find a smaller street, just off Oxford Street, where the rents were much cheaper. Admittedly there are less people, but more of them are interested in what you sell. Well that is what good keyword positioning, and search engine marketing can do for your web site.

By analysing your market sector on the web the words and phrases used by your audience can be found. Your web pages can then be tweaked so that search engines will emphasise your pages over others for those phrases. Good link campaigns can be initiated to raise your rank in the search engines index for your chosen phrases. Finally paid advertising and marketing can also be targeted to work toward raising your search engine rank.

Example 3. Happy Walks finds a happy home.

After some searching Happy Walks instead decides to focus on 'UK walking holidays'. Admitedly this gets much fewer searches, around 1600 per month, but it also suffers from far less competition, only around 960 sites use this phrase. Additionally, those people using this search term will be far more likely to use Happy Walks products, and if Happy Walks decides to use paid search as an advertising option it will be far cheaper and more effective.

Fortunately it's not just picking the right keywords. 

Once visitor numbers for your site start to rise, a virtuous circle can develop. However these visitors must have a reason to come back, so it's not time to rest on your laurels yet (is it ever?). A steady stream of new content, or a service that will be used time and again will help to bring visitors back. The search engines want to focus on active, interesting sites and so will detect that content has changed and improve your ranking appropriately. In terms of our Oxford Street analogy, this gets you a better site on your niche street. After all,  as every retailer knows to keep your customers you've got to keep your stock looking fresh and change the window display.

So in our High Street analogy, as your ranking improves so you can come to dominate your street, and if appropriate open branches in neighboring streets. After all you have enough traffic that some of them will be interested in other similar products, and you will still carry some of the rank that you built up with search engines with you, so you're not starting from scratch in these new markets. Don't worry if this all sounds a bit retail centric and you're not a retailer, thats just the analogy, these concepts hold true for any market.

Whats the take home message? 

1. Choose focused, specific keywords and don't get blinded by search figures and traffic.
2. Develop content, linking campaigns and paid marketing around those words.
3. Create interesting valued content to keep your visitors coming back for more.
   

Because on the Internet as in so many areas of life, it comes down to location, location, location.