Of search engines and consumer friendliness
von Mark Howells-Mead
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
As a business considering using the internet to promote a product or service, it won’t be long before you hear how important it is to appear prominently in search engines. But why is this so important? Surely a consumer will just put your company name into Google, hit the search button and then be able to find your website straight away, won’t they?
Well, yes and no. Many companies providing a product or service are well known; in this case, the use of a search engine will enable a potential customer to find the company website. They will be able to look at the information you’ve collected about all your products, contact you via the online form and order in your online store. Easy. But what if they just heard about a product in passing, and want to find out more about it? It’s in these instances that your company or product needs to be well represented by a “search engine friendly” website: a term which you’ll hear all the time from internet professionals.
“Search engine friendliness” is how internet professionals describe the accessibility, accuracy and legibility of the information on your website: all of which contribute directly to how your website is represented in the search engines. Simply put, if your website isn’t readily accessible or doesn’t contain keyword-rich content, it’s not “friendly”. If you search online for a product or service offered by your company, and you aren’t directed to an informative and relevant website straight away, then that’s a sign that your website needs to be reviewed: potentially on a technical level but almost definitely on a content level. It’s no longer sufficient to place a photo and price of your product next to an online contact form and wait for the orders to start rolling in.
Insightful data available from industry leader Google shows that the internet is used as a resource for product information by consumers on a huge scale. A recent Google study of internet usage in Germany (linked website in German) shows that around 60% of customers in the automotive, technical and tourism markets carry out internet research prior to their purchases, regardless of where they buy the product. The same study concluded, for example, that a whopping 87% of people using the internet in the tourism sector were looking for product information. Your customers want to find information quickly and without fuss: a delay or inability to find sufficient information in the modern internet is highly likely to lose you sales.
Newspaper, encyclopaedic and review websites feature highly in search result listings, purely because of the large amount of keyword-rich content they contain. That’s why you’ll often see results from so many travel review websites within the first few results for many topics. Searches at Google.com for cheap flights, holiday deals or hotel reviews return many non-official websites within the upper echelons of the results listings, containing detailed information about the term simply because these websites are well indexed and feature such a plethora of precisely apposite keywords. Entering a general term such as “best Swiss cheese” at Google.com returns a list of over 1.6 million websites at the time of this article: yet none of the top 20 site listings are for providers of Swiss cheese: rather, they are culinary or reference websites. The kind of statistics I’ve referenced make the need to build a good online profile and gaining positive and complimentary reviews just as obvious as having an excellent website with lots of product information.
Managing your online presence in the internet today means interacting with users and customers online using social media and blogging tools, taking advice from industry specialists (like our own highly experienced Crossmedia team) and using the internet as a means of two-way communication. Gone are the days of the internet as a shop window: continuing the simile, your customers want to come into your shop, poke around, read your product information and talk to specialists just as easily as they would in the high street. If a potential customer doesn’t get the information he wants with a minimum of effort, he’ll quickly turn to a competitor who can offer him what he needs.
Geschrieben von Mark Howells-Mead am 9. Oktober 2008 um 16:49 | Permalink
Tags (Schlagworte): internet, online, online reputation management, search engine, search engine optimization, seo, social media
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