Can you guess what the number one question I get asked with regards to web marketing?

“How do I get my website found by Google?”

Ranking by Google, Yahoo and MSN is important, you certainly shouldn’t ignore it, but it is not as straightforward as you might think.

You see, even paying shed-loads of money to an SEO specialist doesn’t guarantee you a top 10 placement – there are way too many variables. It depends on the keywords you are optimising for, the links to your website, age, popularity and “ranking” of the linking sites as well as a whole bunch of other things…

… and it’s not like Google are standing around waiting for people to “crack the code” – the search algorithm is changed regularly, so even if you get ranked in the top three one time, you continuously have to work hard if you want to stay there.

But, rather than focus on SEO for this post, there is a far more important part to your website strategy which many people miss, and which needs to be addressed first.

Let me tell you about Richard…

Richard has a website, [not unusual] but he was only using it as a brochure site. He only wanted his website to provide credibility, when prospective clients wanted to find more out about his company.

He started working with a web marketing company who convinced him that he needed to optimise his website, and told him how [for a nominal monthly fee] they could get his website listed in the Google top 10.

Richard gladly went along with this, rubbing his hands at the thought of all the extra business that would be coming in…

… a few weeks went by…

… then a couple of months.

Still no measurable increase in the business he was getting. Yet the web statistics for the visitors to his website clearly showed that he was getting more traffic to his site.

When he first came to me about developing and utilising his USP, we talked about his business and we discussed his website. Richard couldn’t make out what was happening with it, and that his web marketing company hadn’t been able to go any further (I’m not actually sure why).

Firstly, I suggested he install Google Analytics (free) on his website pages so we could see what specifically was happening. Then we left it a week to start gathering data.

What we found was that the amount of traffic getting to the website was indeed increasing – but the problem wasn’t in attracting traffic – the problem was in attracting the right sort of traffic and keeping visitors on the site.

To get technical for a moment, the “bounce rate” for the home page (which was his main landing page) was at 97%.

Simply, what this means is that 97 out of 100 people who found his website were clicking the “back” button in their web browser – what they were searching for and what they were seeing on his home page were two completely different things.

So the first thing was to focus the message on the landing pages based on the keyword optimisation he already had in place. We did initially reduce the number of visitors he was getting, but the quality of visitors increased – they stayed on the site longer, and more importantly made contact for more information, which started making him money.

So what is the point of this post? Simply this…

… to successfully build your business, you need to focus on your message BEFORE you try and attract clients, regardless of the method of delivery to your prospects.

Yes, attracting clients is important, whatever media you decide to use – print or web based – but this is the most expensive part of lead generation. If you don’t have the right message, you are literally throwing money away you could use on other parts of your marketing – for a better return and to much greater effect.

Now, onwards…

… to your success!

Jez