Good Search? Bad Search? What's the Difference? – by Jennifer Miller
September 20, 2007
Search matters to anyone with something to sell online. If you want customers to visit your website, and more importantly, purchase what you’re selling, you’ve got to understand the basic principles of search engine optimization (SEO).
Unlike search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization works by means of attracting free traffic. With SEM, visitors arrive at your website based on an ad you’ve placed—so you decide the landing page your visitors see. With SEO, a search engine spider decides on the landing page your visitors see. That’s a significant difference.
Searchers, after all, are people with short attention spans—and they know how to use a back button. If you’ve optimized your landing page for the keywords searchers choose, you’re able to instantly catch the attention of visitors and let them know—in the best scenario, intuitively—that they’ve arrived at the right place.
Why Does It Matter?
No matter how wonderful your products or services are—or even how great your content is---if your visitors don’t immediately perceive that they’ve hit the right landing page, they’ll leave. People don’t just want a good landing page, they want a relevant one.
Searchers are pretty consistent in the way they look for information. They select an engine to use such as Google, MSN, or even a particular online store, such as Macys.com. They then type in a few words that describe what they’re looking for into the small search box at the top of the page.
The results that appear are called organic results, because the searcher has arrived at them via a natural search process as opposed to being marketed. Searchers then scan these results and form expectations based on the title, brief website description, and URL that appears on the results page. Once they’ve selected a result to click, they then spend roughly five seconds looking it before deciding to either dive deeper into the website or hit the back button.
The best organic results are like front-page newspaper headlines—you can’t control everything that your audience sees, but you can still make your brand “read well”. Also, the more space you take up on the search engine results page the better because the only other way they’ll access your website is through your search ad—unless they happen to know your URL, which is not something you want to count on.
What Can You Do About It?
So clearly good SEO techniques are vital to successful internet marketing. This means that high rankings in the search engines are essential to the success of any e-commerce website. High rankings make your products and services more accessible—and more visible—to potential customers.
Your website should get a high ranking for keywords that describe your business, as well as the products and services you sell. Do your homework and the necessary back-end analysis to find out what words people are using to find your website.
Once you have those words, use them to write compelling ad copy that is highly relevant to the needs and desires of your target audience. For example, if you have a landscaping business, the top five keywords users would enter into a search engine to find you might be: landscaping, garden, backyard, design, and lawn care. Use these words throughout the headline and text of your homepage, as well as in the page descriptions and title tag.
Finally, when visitors have arrived at your website, you obviously want to offer a positive customer experience and build trust. That means you must present accurate and relevant information in a way that does not make the user think. Keep in mind the two most important questions your potential customer has: What is it? and What’s the cost? If you can answer these before your users ever even think them, you’re doing a great job.