optimum presence
Written by Ghislaine Hubbard
Ghislaine Hubbard, WiB member and owner of Tunbridge Wells lingerie shop AphrodisiaUK.com, explains how she maximises the hit rate for her website AphrodisiaUK.com.
"How do I tell lots of people about my website without having to spend lots of dosh?" That was the question I asked myself when I set up AphrodisiaUK.com as an add-on to my Tunbridge Wells-based lingerie shop four years ago.
Obviously, I put the website address on my stationery and carrier bags and handed out cards at local networking events. I wanted to reach national and international customers, who I would never come across in my day-to-day dealings.
I tried print and radio advertising - with patchy results. As the saying goes: you know you are wasting half your advertising budget, but which half? I also fleetingly experimented with pay per click (where you pay anything from a penny upwards every time someone clicks on your weblink and visits your site). There are many pitfalls with this method, but the end result was each time I topped up my account the money disappeared alarmingly quickly with not an order to show for it!
The breakthrough began when I found myself in need of some curtain rods, and typed 'curtain rods' into Google's search facility. I telephoned the first website that came up in the non-sponsored (i.e. free and organic) results, and they had exactly what I was looking for. "How on earth did you manage to come up first?" I asked the man at the end of the phone. "My daughter optimised my site for Google," he replied. "To be honest, I'm getting more orders than I can cope with."
It hadn't cost him a penny, although he wasn't quite sure what his daughter had done. "She fiddled around with the backend of the website, that's all I know," he expained. That started my journey of discovery on how to make my website more attractive than my competitors' to the Google robot. Googlebot, as it is known, trawls websites every few weeks, assessing and reassessing their relevance.
Their relevance to what exactly, is the question. The answer, I discovered, is to keyword phrases typed in by customers.
The first step is to work out what keyword phrases your customers are likely to use to find your product or service. If you are a travel company specialising in packages to Tobago, for instance, don't even attempt to optimise for the phrase 'travel' or 'package holiday'. These are simply too general and you will face daunting competition. However, you stand a good chance of scoring well for 'package holiday Tobado', if you follow the basic rules of website optimisation. You should certainly be able to get yourself in the top 10 for 'kent package holiday company, Tobago' with very little trouble.
Aphrodisia currently comes up number four for the phrase 'sexy lingerie' ahead of 3.5 million competitors in google.co.uk. We are no.1 for 'lingerie Tunbridge Wells', and do very well for a range of other phrases such as 'plus size bridal lingerie'. Type in 'lingerie' and you won't find us unless you have the patience to hunt through page after page after page, with 24 million competing websites for that word.
Once you have brainstormed some specific keyword phrases, consisting of three or four words that your customers might well type in, test these in Wordtracker.com. This useful free tool will show you how popular these phrases are, and how many websites are listed for them. What you are looking for is a combination of words that is not only highly relevant to your business but frequently typed in, with the lowest number of competitors. Wordtracker has a facility that will calculate this for you. Once you have established your keyword phrase, you need to weave it liberally into the copy on your site's front page - be careful not to overdo it; too much repetition is offputting. It needs to be in the title, the main body of text at least once, in the photo captions, and in the metatags at the back-end of your site. You can find creative ways to reinforce the phrase in a way that seems natural, for instance by introducing headers and footers where the phrase can be repeated.
Wishing you optimum success!