Help! My Website Cannot be Found

“Help! My website cannot be found!”

It’s almost the universal cry of business owners and entrepreneurs on the web. If it’s your cry, take heart.

You may have spent hundreds, even thousands of dollars having a professionally designed website developed. However, you may not be horrified to discover that prospective customers who are looking for exactly what YOU have to offer are not finding your website.  You type in the name of your business and discover that your website cannot be found.

Now THAT is a serious problem.

At the root of this problem is that most people, when they go to the web are not searching for your business by name. Chances are, unless you’ve been promoting your business off line using such traditional media as newspaper, radio and television; your best prospective customers/clients do not know your business exists.

Because your prospective customers don’t know who you are or what you can do for them, they will be searching for the solution your product or business provides to solve their problems, help them meet their goals or help them to satisfy their desires. In other words, when people search the web, they search the web with the GDP (Goals, Desires and Problems) in mind.

Keeping that in mind, if you want prospective customers to find you via the web, the first step to getting your website found on the web is to figure out WHY web visitors would want to buy goods or services from you. If you do not already have a good idea of WHY web visitors would want to buy from you, then pick up a copy of the book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results . This information is essential for creating a web site that works hard for your business.

Once you have figured out WHY visitors are looking for your business and what SOLUTIONS you can provide, then you need to find out what terms these potential customers/clients are using to find those solutions.

It is at this stage that most business people get horribly off track. Instead of searching for the terms used in the search engine queries, many people do their own search instead and see how many result are returned.  If they see millions of pages returned, they figure this is a good search term, because there’s lots of competition on the term.

For example, if you perform a search query for the keywords “organizational development” you will get 4,360,000 different results returned. If you have never heard of Organizational Development or OD, you are not alone. Organizational Development is a broad term used to describe a field of work and study devoted to creating effective and healthy human systems within an organization. Few outside the field use the term, yet those within the field use it so freely and frequently that many are shocked to learn that it’s not part of the everyday business vernacular.

In our theoretical example, if you are an organizational development consultant doing your own research for your web site, you will find your search engine query on Google will tell you that there are 4,360,000 sites on the web devoted to organizational development. Naturally, you become either elated (there are MILLIONS of people searching for the solutions I offer) or deflated (I‘m the proverbial needle in a haystack!). What you do not see is the other side of the coin, which reveals that only 4368 searches were done in the previous month for those exact key words.

That is the twist.

There are over 4.3 million sites competing for less than 4400 searches. Note: One must also wonder how many of those searches were performed by organizational development consultants during the development of their own web site.

Meanwhile, a service offered by most organizational development consultants is the creation of systems that foster a sense of teamwork within a company. Not surprisingly, there were over 30,000 searches done during a 30-day period for the term “team building” according to just one source.

The key to being “found” on the web begins with focusing on the solutions you or your product provides. While this sounds like “Business 101”, it is amazingly easy to lose sight of as you develop your web site for your business.

Keeping the solution you offer in focus is the first step in creating a website that works as hard as you do at creating more business for your business.  When you focus on the words your best customers might use to find the solutions your business offers, then you’re on your way to overcoming the “Help!  My website cannot be found!” syndrome.

Posted by Kathy | Filed Under Small Business Profits 

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