By Carole Hawkins, [email protected]
In life there are no shortcuts. The same can be said for Internet marketing.
The best way to generate electronic leads for your company is to post good content on your website. And plenty of it — about 100 pages according to Chris Behan, president of Socius Marketing in Tampa.
Behan talked about the do’s and don’ts of getting customers via the web at the Florida Builders Association’s Southeast Building Conference in Orlando.
Behan’s Internet marketing company serves home improvement clients such as American Home Design, Alure Home Improvements and Reborn Cabinets.
Rule No. 1 is companies need a website, not just social media and ads.
“Social media is not there to create the market for you,” Behan said. “It’s there to bridge the gap, to help close the market and pull those people in.”
A company web page also needs to be optimized to come up high on a search. That’s because 80 percent of traffic comes to websites through an organic search. Only 20 percent comes via advertising.
SEO dos:
• Content is king. Write real web content, not just filler. Talk specifically about what the company does and where it does it. Add new content regularly.
• Size matters. KB Homes has 9,240 pages. M/I Homes has 30,000. Create a page for each service and location where the service is offered. Ten services times 10 locations equals 100 pages. Customers often search for a service offered nearby. They rarely land on a home page first, but instead, on the page that targets exactly what they need.
SEO don’ts:
• Blogging. It was over-used and now doesn’t drive traffic as well as it once did. Google saw that web surfers tended to skip over search results with the word “blog” in them, so it lowered blogs in its rankings. It’s now rare for a blog to appear in the first page of a keyword search.
• Duplicating content. Don’t write one page on a topic and then duplicate it for every location by simply swapping out the name of the city. Also, don’t copy content from a manufacturer’s website. Google punishes websites that add little value to the Internet and that includes duplicative, thin content or content that’s poorly written (grammar matters). Communicate as if each page is a salesperson who is selling services to a particular territory.
• Link building. Don’t buy into marketing that promises to generate 10,000 links to your website. Google wants links to be completely relevant and from within the industry. It punishes websites that try to manipulate the search algorithm with spam links.