Whenever I begin a speech, I pose four questions to the audience and ask them to raise their hands if the answer to a question is "yes." How would you answer?
In your personal or professional life in the past two months, when trying to fix a problem or to research or buy a product, have you
(1) responded to a direct mail advertisement?
(2) consulted magazines, newspapers, TV, or radio?
(3) used Google or another search engine?
(4) electronically (email, Skype, Facebook, etc) contacted a friend, colleague, or family member who responded with a Web URL that you then visited?
Over the course of a year, in front of over ten thousand people from many dozens of groups including college students, marketing professionals, and executives at Fortune 500 companies, the answers were surprisingly consistent. Between 5 and 20 percent of people answer each of the first two questions affirmatively. These answers mean that the ways most companies have historically reached people—advertising, direct mail, and pleas to the mainstream media for coverage—are only effective in reaching a small portion of potential customers. However, between 80 and 100 percent of people raise their hands to indicate that they have used a search engine to find a solution to a problem or to research a product or that they have checked out a Web site suggested by a friend, colleague, or family member. Clearly, creating effective Web sites that are indexed by search engines is critical for any business.
Unlike non-targeted, in-your-face, interruption-based advertising, search engine results are content that people actually want to see. How cool is that? Rather than forcing you to convince people to pay attention to your products and services by dreaming up messages and ad campaigns, search engines deliver interested buyers right to your company’s virtual doorstep. This is a marketer's dream-come-true.
However, most marketers don't know how to harness this exciting form of marketing. Their most common mistake is to spend way too much time worrying about the keywords and phrases they want to optimize for and not enough time creating great content on their site–content that search engines will reward with lots of traffic and that visitors will find useful.
And nearly all organizations are terrible at building an effective landing page, the place people end up when they click on a search hit. Too often, buyers arrive at a site only to wonder what they're supposed to do now. It's like the outdoor part of a Hollywood movie set. Sure it's a beautiful facade, but if you actually went through the front door, you'd find nothing there.
OK, so that’s the bad news. The good news is that these common problems are easily solved… If you're Tuned In.
Smart companies create web content that actually meets the needs of your potential customers (instead of search engines). The information that people see when they link to your site is meant to be the beginning of a relationship. Here's the rule: When you write, start with your buyers in mind, not with search engines.
