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Improving Your Organic Position On Google: A How-To Guide For Small Business

 

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I was speaking with a small business owner yesterday who told me that improving his search engine optimization was not important because he bought Google Adwords (when he could afford them -- not presently, btw). I agreed with him that Google Adwords were an efficient new advertising market and I encourage small business owners to experiment with them as we are. Unfortunately, I have a few issues with small businesses over-relying on Google Adwords:
  • They are expensive and getting more expensive as that market gets more "efficient."
  • They are an on-going cost.
  • Managing your keyword buying strategy can be up to a full-time job.
  • According to this fascinating research, having a top position on an Adword is equivalent to having an 9th or 10th place on the organic search terms and that the top organic position pulls in 250% more traffic than the top paid position.

If yours is like most small businesses and startups, you are in a relatively narrow niche. In that case, I would strongly encourage you to pursue an organic keyword optimization strategy -- doing it well can produce many new, qualified prospects already shopping in your niche. Here are the steps you should be thinking about:
  • Start tracking the keywords you think you want to start optimizing around. Ask yourself, what is the one phrase that someone might search on that nails our "value proposition" or the problem we uniquely solve.
  • Start tracking your company's ranking (which page -- front?) on Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Google has a little over 50% of the search market, so it is still worth watching the other two engines.
  • Start tracking the traffic these keywords are sending to your site and how that changes over time.
  • Ensure your keywords are reflected in your sites' meta data. (use this tool if not sure)
  • Use the keywords in important places on your site (i.e. page titles, bolded words on pages)
  • Use the keywords in the titles of your blog articles.
  • Create a special web landing page for people coming from Google who searched on your keyword that speaks to exactly what that visitor wants, rather than give the visitor your generic message -- this will dramatically increase the likelihood of "conversion."
If you get on (even) the bottom of the first page of Google for a good keyword phrase, it is like having free Google Adwords 24x7x365 -- worth it's weight in gold in driving qualified prospects into your small business funnel.  The increase in traffic you get as you move up the rankings on the search engines can be dramatic.

I will give you an example of how this works for the SmallBusiness 2.0 blog with the search term "business 2.0." Today this blog is at position #12 when someone types in "business 2.0" into Google, meaning we are the second organic result on the second page of Google. The 12th position this week ended up attracting 58 people to this blog. Four weeks ago, we were position number 15 and attracted 17 people to this blog through that term. Eight weeks ago, we were position number 18 and attracted 7 people to this blog through that term.  As you can see, moving up from position 18 to position 12 meant an 800% increase in the amount of traffic (suspects) that entered our funnel.  We will end up taking some of the measures described above to try to push ourselves onto the first page of Google and we suspect that there will be even more non-linear increases in traffic associated with the move to the first page.


-- Brian Halligan
 
 
comments Comments

Posted by Brian Halligan on Wed, Dec 06, 2006 @ 10:54 AM

COMMENTS

So, in my case, wouldn't that mean that I'd have to change the name of my blog to take advantage of Google the way that you did?

posted on Wednesday, December 06, 2006 at 10:06 PM by David Kurlan

Hi Dave,
The "title" of your blog is "understanding the sales force" which includes some interesting key words for your line of work. When you visited us, Mark did a quick keyword analysis looking for keyword arbitrage opportunities for you and I recall he had a couple of recommendations. Perhaps we should use some of those words in your title. ...You should also use the keywords in titles of your blog articles and when you use bolding in your blog content.
Brian.

posted on Thursday, December 07, 2006 at 1:42 PM by Brian P Halligan

I think 'write interesting stuff' should be up there in capital letters. There is *no* cheat for getting past this barrier. If you don't attract readers and organic links, then it's game over.

posted on Friday, December 15, 2006 at 3:10 PM by Ian Delaney

There is a problem with the research that says "having a top position on an Adword is equivalent to having a 9th or 10th place on the organic search terms" because they are considering the "top position" as the top spot on the right rail of ads which is really usually the 4th position in Adwords. In fact, the real top spot would fall squarely within that "golden triangle" that the research is spot-on about. So while many people do skip the paid ads and start with organic links I think that trend is fading some as the paid links are becoming less and less differentiated. I would say that on today's Google having the #1 paid spot is more comparable to have the #2-3 spot in the Organic listings. In fact many national brands like those I do SEO and SEM for will still pay for that top paid spot even if they already dominate the top organic spots - just to be sure they don't lose that lead to the other paid advertisers.

posted on Saturday, December 22, 2007 at 3:14 PM by Stephen

It depends how desperately you need the customers. If you're being too successful with your top ad you could be getting many people on to your site but you'll be paying big for that privilege and you need to make sure these people are worth the big spend it takes.

posted on Friday, February 20, 2009 at 6:32 AM by sushisushi

Comments have been closed for this article.