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Don’t let the search engines hold you hostage!

by Ed on 24th October 2008

If you’re worried about changing your website, webpages or domain name for fear that it’ll affect your rankings on the search engines, first ask yourself do you have any rankings to worry about?!

A few days ago I had a call from someone who wanted some advice on the search engines.

He wanted to setup a blog, and wanted to know if adding it to his current domain name as a subdomain (so it would be http://blog.company.com) would affect his rankings on Google and other popular search engines.

I asked the obvious question, "What rankings do you currently have?".

His immediate reply was "Oh…… actually none at the moment.".

Now this fellow operates in a very competitive online industry. The search engine phrases he would need to focus on to get a high volume of traffic would be nigh on impossible to get good rankings for, unless he was prepared to put a lot of time and effort in (or pay someone good money to do it for him).

He told me he wasn’t going to do any of that (for reasons unstated.)

So after this brief dialogue we both came to the obvious conclusion… why worry about the search engines when his site didn’t stand a chance of getting ranked for phrases anyway?!

As a result he’s going to host his blog where he prefers. He’s not going to worry about Google, and instead is going to focus on proactive ways to drive traffic to his site.

I suspect that approach will generate more traffic, sooner, than spending up to hundreds or hours (or thousands of pounds) and waiting months in the hope Google will send decent volume of free traffic to his site.

Are you unduly worried about search engine rankings?

If you operate in a niche indsutry (not many competitors) or are local then it could be very easy for you to get to the top of Google for key phrases.

But small businesses who operate in broad industries would be better served with paid advertising to bring traffic to their site. I know I am.

My advice to any small business owner — unless you’re either an SEO guru or work inside Google — is to get your sites online, start adding content and use proactive tactics to get targeted prospects on to them.

-Ed.

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Article by Ed Rivis

I'm the Amazon 5-star rated author of three books about web marketing, and since 2008 have spoken to more than 4,000 business owners at conferences and seminars around the UK. I've also developed software that automatically generates lead pages and home-study programmes that help small business owners like you generate more sales-leads and win new customers and clients, online.

Ed has written 326 awesome articles.

  • http://www.thekissbusiness.co.uk Karin H.

    Hear hear Ed

    Content – good and informative content – first, then work on getting qualified traffic to your site (or brick and mortar shop – there’s no difference IMHO). Then google and other rankings will take care of themselves.

    Recently I had a huge discussion with a ‘client’ of mine who wants me to keep adding features and glitz to their website. At one point I blatantly refused to add anything else to it UNTIL they start writing what I’m calling ‘the stories behind the pictures’ (they sell greeting and postcards made from original paintings and photographs).
    I could earn more by ‘going-along’ with every request they put my way, but that’s not the point in helping them to create an effective web-presence.

    “If you want your website to work – you will have to work on your website!” It’s as simple as that!

    Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)

  • http://www.holidays-abroad.com marcus

    Hi Ed

    good writing .Can you help with SEO or other forms of advertising for our websites?

    we are a hotel provider(rooms)

  • http://www.dermashield.co.uk Peter Friswell

    My business is manufacturing a skin protection product called Derma Shield. http://www.dermashield.co.uk/ If you Google our brand name 18 of the top 20 come back to me but that’s not the problem.

    If you have dry cracked or chapped skin, or maybe you have contact dermatitis from work you are not suddenly going to wake up one day and say, “I need Derma Shield”. We don’t have the wherewithal of large companies and can’t get involved in big budget spending so I have been turning to the Internet to increase my sales.

    I found out quickly all about key phrases and with research I found some that worked for me and attracted customers. I have actually had a website since about 1995 and was working on SEO with version 3 but I didn’t seem to be able to get anywhere. I taught myself Dreamweaver and built a satellite site http://www.dermatitis-page.info/ that started to climb up my own key phrase rankings but the main site just sat there and whilst still ranking high for Derma Shield just wouldn’t move for the other key phrases such as hand dermatitis or skin dermatitus.

    It was driving me nuts! So (at long last – I can almost hear you SEO professionals saying) I employed an SEO professional who started off with an SEO audit. To me £500 is a lot of money but it was about the best £500 I have ever spent.

    A professional company of web designers built version 3 of my site and it was a massive improvement over version 2. With drop down menus, videos and other fancy bits it really looked good – and to be fair it brought in a fair bit of business. But why oh why didn’t anyone tell me that Google doesn’t like fancy things. It turns out that only a small percentage of my site was actually indexed!

    Here’s my tip. Go to a couple of your own site pages; copy the entire url and paste it into Google. If you get, “Your search – http://www.your-website/your-page.html – did not match any documents”, then your next action should be to find yourself a good SEO expert.

    As for me; well I’m just finishing off version 4, which is very search engine friendly (I hope J). The new site should be up and running from 29th October, so stop by and take a look.

    Keep up the good work Ed.

    Cheers

    Peter Friswell
    Derma Shield
    Cwmbran
    UK

  • http://www.dermashield.co.uk Peter Friswell

    p.s. I forgot to say – The expert wasn’t Ed or any of his associates so this isn’t a contrived plug.

    Cheers

    Peter Friswell
    Derma Shield
    Cwmbran
    UK

  • http://www.confidentialseo.com Gordon Drayson

    Organic SEO works VERY well, and is very cost effective without the concern that adwords customers have of “once you stop your adwords account, you stop your traffic also.”

    These days, “Long Tail” searches are the norm. I have been doing a great deal of research into this, and you will find that this is definitely the way to go if you are wanting to get a serious number of targeted people visiting your website, for just a few hours a week, work.

    Ask me about these types of searches if you are interested.

    Gordon Drayson
    Drayson Design

  • http://bizrichard.com Richard

    ‘afternoon Ed.

    You’ve taught us all some very important stuff over the months – amongst which is that there is little point in having traffic if it’s not the sort of traffic we want – because it’s unlikely they will do anything for us! (Same for any form of advertising really.)

    Whilst rankings might get you more visitors, is there any point in paying for this if they are not right. So, for me anyway, building lists of my sort of ‘customer’ by more ‘direct’ means is far more important than any ‘rankings’. I know it might take longer, but it will probably be more profitable in the end I suspect.

    Best regards.
    Richard Calderwood

  • http://www.thekissbusiness.co.uk Karin H.

    Gordon, with Organic do you also mean ‘Local’ searches? Searches say for plumbers in… (fill in your own town or county even when you think it is a rather specialised product or service you’re after).

    Tracking and checking search phrases will show trends and you can of course take advantage of that. A few months ago we noticed an increase on the search term: repairing parquet floors. We wrote a new – dedicated to repair and restore parquet floors – wood floor guide for our site and that is now the most frequently found and entry page. It includes recommended products to use – which we sell of course ;-)

    Karin H.

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