Building the on-line visibility by SEO

In the last post I was writing about Concretizing Ideas and little bit about webstore. Now the webstore has been up and running few months and the learning curve has been very steep. I would say that it is very fun to learn running and marketing the online business in pragmatic way. In this post I want to share some experiences from there.

As I mentioned in the last post, the business is in bootstrapping mode and since the idea is new the costs are kept in very low level. The first lesson what have I learned is the importance of the marketing in on-line business. By marketing you try to get visibility and without visibility you don’t have any visitors. Without visitors you don’t have potential customers and without potential customers you don’t have paying customers and so forth. So the first thing to do is to start building the pipeline by getting the visitors to the site (and start tracking the conversion from visitor to paying customer).

Is the Google the best way to get visitors to the site?

I started couple of Google Adwords campaigns and tested different variations of keywords. This is very effective way if you have big marketing budget and you can afford to pay 0.50 to 2.50 € CPC. Ironically the best keyword with the best conversion (from impression to click) is the most expensive. I would say that it is very easy to spent 1000 € / week to get traffic to your site. The heavy advertising in Google Adwords is not actual (yet) and I need to find something suitable.

If Google Adwords doesn’t work let’s try Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are very lucrative because they have very good possibility to target advertisement to target audience. (Just wondering have you “liked” some page, brand, group etc.?). When creating campaign it is very easy to setup demographic factors and other properties of target audience. For example create campaign that displays ads to females at the ages from 20 – 30 and who likes “Motherhood”, “pregnancy”, “ babies”. Ads are displayed only matching profiles and there are less “false impressions”. Comparing Facebook Ads to Google Adwords I got better results from Facebook campaigns than Google. Unfortunately I can spent one month marketing budget in one day in Facebook too. Still, I like the targeting possibilities of Facebook Ads.

Search Engine Optimization

The best results I got from search engine optimization. It takes little more time but when it is done good enough it pays itself back very quickly. By good SEO I got more visitors to the site than Facebook Ads or Google Adwords campaigns. And now I can say that the Google is the best way to get visitors to your site and visibility. When your site is the number one in the search results from different keywords (let’s say that is the most expensive one in Google Adwords) your SEO is succeeded. You’ll get impressions for free and clicks don’t cost you any more.

The basics of SEO is very easy and I followed the guideline below:

1. Keywords in the title
2. Keywords in the page URL
3. Keywords in page content
4. Meta tagging of the pages
5. Keywords in headings
6. Keyword proximity
7. Keyword prominence
8. Keywords in link-anchor texts
9. Keywords in high quality outbound links e.g. links to respected author’s article etc.
10. Page age and size e.g. updating the content by blogging

So the keyword is the word that is written in the Google’s search field. I defined few important keywords and applied the steps above. What happened? Soon I found out that the webstore is the first search result or at the first page of the search results when searching with those keywords. And when the link to the page is the number one in search result, it is clicked most probably. Journey continues and there are few keywords that are hard to conquer and of course this is the first step to get customers to the pipeline.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned!