Get Found in Google - the hydraulic way

Hydraulic platformsWhat can social media tools do to help small businesses get found online?

Let’s face it, Google is the answer to all your problems. Got a bad knee? Google will diagnose it. Want a plumber? Google will find you one. Need to know which hotel to stay in? Google will help you decide.

The only question is how do you get your business found by Google?

Well, you can either have an expensive website built and resign yourself to paying hundreds of pounds a month for search engine optimisation or you can embark on a complicated and costly ‘Pay -Per-Click’ advertising campaign that could lose you money a lot quicker than you make it.

At least, that’s how the options have looked until now: expensive and shrouded in technical mystery. The good news is that things are changing fast. Now you can get great Google search visibility for your business - and it doesn’t have to cost you anything.

At ‘mu:kaumedia we’ve learned the hard way about search engine invisibility. Our first site was very pretty but completely invisible to Google because we decided to have it designed entirely in Flash. We didn’t know any better and the web design company were happy to do what we asked and take the money. In the end, the only visitors to the site came via our business cards or links on other sites.

Our second site cost us £300 and featured a content management system (CMS) that just about let us change the content of the pages. Unfortunately, the mysteries of Google were still beyond us and we never got round to doing even basic search engine optimisation. If we turned up in the Google search results, it was more accidental than intentional.

Over the last few years in business, we’ve met many people in a similar situation - people who don’t understand the way Google works and wouldn’t know where to start optimising their websites even if they did. Like you and me, they still need to be found in the top of the search results, though, or they run the risk of falling behind in the race. In a stroke of genius Google made it easy for these people to start using Adwords to fix their problem - and grew immensely wealthy on the proceeds.

I spent £200 experimenting with Adwords and sold nothing because, as I discovered, we had actually had nothing ready to sell. Then I discovered ‘blogs’ - web sites built with software designed specifically to take advantage of the way Google works. Because blogs feature regularly updated keyword-rich content, inbound links from other sites and a simple structure, Google rewards them with a high ‘relevance’ rating. ‘Wordpress’ is the most powerful, easy to use and easy to manage of the different blog platforms available and the software we use to set up sites for clients

What can blogs offer your online marketing?

Imagine them as hydraulic platforms. The more relevant Google judges your blog, the higher the platform rises in Google’s estimation - and from that elevated platform, the more easily target specific keywords to reach high positions in Google’s search results.

Google mapAnd you don’t have to limit yourself to capitalising on the ‘hydraulics’ of just your site or your blog. There are plenty of other places you can use to get your keyword-rich content high up into the Google search results. The following list contains just some of the things we use:

• Wordpress blog (our main site)
• Ecademy
• UKBusiness Forums - particularly the press release function
• Twitter
• FreeIndex
• 4Networking
• MakeYourMarkConnect
• A1 Business Forums

Blogs and other social media tools are starting to change the way we think about our presence on the front page of Google’s search results. First of all we’re in control. The software is free and supported by an entire community of developers. Secondly, we can learn about Google by hands-on experimentation and the results are almost instantaneous. And we’re beginning to realise that to focus all our energies on that single company website is missing the point.

The era of the web designer, the search engine optimisation expert and the Adword consultant may well be coming to an end and being replaced by a whole range of expendable, free and easy-to-use software that’s quick enough and powerful enough to respond in minutes to changing world events and market opportunities. And the ability to respond quickly into niches as they emerge may well turn out to be the real benefit in this kind of marketing.

Research shows that the businesses that survive recessions are the ones that increase their marketing activity when hard times hit. If we are poised on the edge of recession as many people believe, then we’re going to need to be flexible, responsive and inventive in our approach to online marketing and reduce costs at the same time.

To achieve this you need to learn how Google works as a priority. Then you need to get clear about your business keywords, find the hydraulic platforms that are already out there and don’t be afraid to use them. It’s the future.

August 13, 2008 | Filed Under Benefits of blogging, marketing 

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