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I must mean search engine optimisation, my target audience must be google??
Clearly not, my target audience is interested people, starting with those I know or know about me on twitter and then through word of month. My interested in the search engines finding me is secondary. Depending on your business model you either agree with this or not. If you are the marketer type that likes to sit and watch your visitor number sky rocket from that PPC (pay per click) campaign or an online store then this isn’t for you. However if you are a small targeted B2C (a business that sells to the public) that already has a presence this is the future. Google loves content, and almost as much as people love content.
Yesterday I wrote something interesting and saw my visitors go from 14 to 87 in a day. Now they are low numbers but everybody has to start somewhere and that for me is where I started. The amount of direct hits I got from that was scary, nearly 50% in comparison to the day before which was only 10%. So why?
Well for the first thing a few of you, yes you! Must have sent somebody this URL somehow and not just clicked a link on your twitter. Hopefully today has the same level of inspiration and gets the traffic again.
So let’s outline some lessons:
Write things that interested you as a business or a person, write often, at least once a week so people have something to check back on. Tell people that there is new content, if that be through a twitter stream or just though an email to those who subscribe. Gone are the days where people do the rounds in the morning, if they do then they are going to be a hop to the BBC website or google news and neither of us are likely to hit the news.
From a search engine point of view google will get excited by the amount of links heading towards your site even if they are from a few tweets and the ever changing content. The more you write the more boxes you tick with google, right now it thinks about me in terms of notepads and staffing. Now it has a chance to think about me in terms of social communications.
Google on average takes three weeks to show change! So if you want an audience yesterday then start writing, tell people you know about it and ask them to spread the word. If you get 40 people visit your site and 2 of them want your services then that is far better than any search engine will ever give you.
If you write interesting articles at a level your reader can understand then you will do just fine. It’s amazing how many people in marketing feel that using there industry acronyms make them look clever without explaining them.
Digital, online, PPC, SEO, what? Website, banner campaign, payed search engine advertising, optimising your website so google can read them. Not only do you use more words and have to write less to bulk up your content, the average person in the street at least has a clue what you mean?
Public opinion is a big big thing, this is the reason I don’t have any comments on my site, not because I don’t want a discussion but because my target audience isn’t the sort to be nice. They will either correct something in my article, invalidating my status as an expert or bang on about my lack of good english. This is written for the common man and if you have trouble understanding it you will have stopped reading by now. I’m not saying use of good english is a bad thing, i’m just saying getting the message across is the key here.
If people would be kind enough to let me know what they think, please do so through twitter or email.
Thanks for reading
