Being a more relevant business on the Web

There is a difference between having a business on the Web and doing business on the Web. A Web-based business traditionally doesn’t have a store front, although there is no reason why you cannot set up a Web-based business and then settle down in a building somewhere.

In the early 1990s I actually knew someone who managed an online consulting business from a small rental space because he had to have a T1 line and the phone company would not run it to his house. His office was at home but his server was in the smallest commercial rental space he could find.

Large metropolitan cities in the United States (and probably many other countries) usually have one or more companies that provide a suite of offices, meeting rooms, and land lines for consultants and other freelance business people who don’t have the revenue or want the hassle of maintaining their own office space. You can arrange to use conference rooms and have your calls answered by a full-time receptionist for a fraction of the cost of hiring your own staff and renting or buying your own office space.

But a Web-based business, outside of the consulting arena, typically doesn’t have to provide any sort of fulfilment offline. There are no phone calls, no meetings, no products, no special arrangements. A domainer may work entirely from home without ever having to interact with people. An affiliate farmer could equally never step inside a “client” relationship.

If your fulfillment occurs on the Internet, you operate an Internet-based business. If your fulfillment occurs offline, you operate a brick-and-mortar business. Some in-between people may do their fulfillment by email rather than through the Web, but even there many of them operate from their homes and don’t need to meet with or talk to customers.

I go to such lengths to qualify my division of online business-makers because the brick-and-mortar businesses face a different set of search engine challenges than the online businesses. Simply having a physical address, for example (even if it’s only a drawer in a mail-drop shop), entitles you to admission to local search directories, yellow pages directories, and some other exclusive business directories.

In fact, it could be argued that the lack of a seriously credible resource for online businesses implies that the world of search has a great deal of maturing to go through with respect to virtual business entities. It might help Google considerably, for example, to offer online businesses a way to “vet” themselves through a special off-road directory that is tied to, say, WhoIs data.

An online business can stretch its relevance across a multitude of topics. An offline business limits itself by its very business model. Traditional business models don’t encompass many different revenue streams until the companies become conglomerates. It’s hard to see a meat-packing company, for example, pursue relevance to shoes with its Web site.

A complaint I often hear from specialized business operators is that they cannot pursue the long tail of search because their business is so focused. To that I say, “Nonsense!”

You don’t have to change your business model in order to expand your Web site’s relevance. In fact, most businesses that develop PPC campaigns probably spend a lot of time targeting advertisements at people who are searching for topics that don’t appear on the business sites. It’s not that the chosen keywords are irrelevant to the business sites. It’s just that the businesses think more clearly when they are building ads than when they are building Web content.

Now, your PPC campaign needs to have some good landing pages, and you’ll get a better quality score if your targeted keywords appear on the landing page, but some products and services can be referred to in so many ways that many targeted keywords won’t appear in landing page copy.

And many businesses don’t open up their landing pages to search indexing anyway because they lack the sophistication to distinguish traffic coming from PPC ads and traffic coming from other sources (which is not necessarily a fault of those businesses — drawing the lines takes some technical savvy that typical business operators and managers just don’t have).

So a traditional business Web site is usually only relevant to a small percentage of topics that actually pertain to that business’ industry, goods, and services. For example, if I were asked to optimize an ice cream company’s Web site, I would create a page for everyone of their flavors — but I’m not talking about a “product” page. I would create a literary work of art — a feature article that discusses the ice cream flavor to its fullest.

The more copy you put on a product page the more relevant that product page becomes to a multitude of potential queries about the product. Many people will struggle to search for product names and references they can only vaguely remember. So using as many phrases or expressions as possible to promote your products and services makes sense in a lot of ways.

But giving a business site depth also helps it with search engine optimization. The more pages a site has the more time the crawlers spend poking around the site, following links, reindexing content. The day of the five-page brochure Web site have come and gone. Tacking a shopping cart package onto the brochure that is the front end of your Web site is about as lazy and wasteful as you can get.

Your business has a relationship with its products, services, customers, vendors, owners, community, industry, and the world in general. You may not have time to write about all that stuff but someone else in your industry will eventually make the time to do it. Guess who’s going to get more search visibility than you?

Being the first company in an industry to write a book-size Web site is a bold move, but it’s also a smart move. It creates a resource that cannot be easily duplicated because by the time duplicators find out about it the book-size Web site will already be indexed. And the sooner your content is indexed the sooner you’ll get more links pointing to it.

Creating a Web site with large, brandable sections of content also helps because those sections can be used to attract new customers and business partners at a more granular level than the primary URL for the site (usually a domain name). Your sub-brands can be built out on sub-domains or directories, it really doesn’t matter. The URL doesn’t matter.

What matters is whether you create content and make that content visible. Just creating 1,000 landing pages that are only visible to PPC visitors is a huge waste of potential long-tail resources. Your landing pages may not be pretty or informative but they could be. In fact, there was a time when many business owners complained that they had built up large, informative sites but their doorway-page competitors were beating them in the search engines.

“Every page on your site has the ability to act like a doorway,” I told those folks. Other people in the search optimization industry also said as much. That’s where content-rich doorway pages (landing pages) came from. But the overdependence on PPC strategies has stripped landing pages of their ability to rank well in search results.

Every landing page you create should serve dual purposes: it should rank well for at least one relevant query in the long tail and it should help convert PPC visitors. Your only excuses for creating inefficient landing pages are ignorance and laziness. Time is not an issue because your business has been around for a while and it’s not likely to go away soon. You can expand your Web site’s visibility 1 page at a time regardless of how long it takes.

More businesses are also turning to blogs to help increase their visibility, but they are doing this for the wrong reason. Having read all the gung ho reviews of social media optimization and tutorials about “link building”, many business owners now assume that they have to have a blog. But most blogs attract only a very few links and most links won’t help you with search engine optimization anyway.

Which is not to say you should not develop traffic-driving links. If you can get most of your traffic from links, you don’t need search engines — but that is a message often missed in an industry obsessed with driving all traffic through search engines. At the end of the day, search engines are just Web sites like everything else.

So why should a business develop a blog? Because it can share information with its customers every day. Honestly, if you cannot blog more than 2 times a week you need to find another strategy for promoting your business on the Web. And some people might be shocked to see me write that. I’ve told people that blogging only twice a week is okay as long as they are consistent. Consistency is more important than frequency.

But in a world where a blog search is updated with new results every few seconds, you need to stop and ask yourself how many people will even see your posts for the first six months. A new blg should be pouring out content at a rate of 1-2 posts per day for at least the first year. Build a solid readership and show people you can be a useful resource.

Most business blogs are updated once or twice a month. That is way too seldom to be of any use with search engine optimization. SEO begins with content. The links you think you need begin with the links you give yourself through your content. The resource you want to build so everyone else links to it is composed of all that content you don’t have time to create.

Twice-a-week blog posts are training wheels for companies that are afraid to invest heavily in Internet visibility. They need to see results before they realize the payback can be huge. But they are afraid that if they are not literary geniuses no one will read their blogs.

The truth is that blogs that are filled with long, informative posts and which are updated often usually build audience share pretty quickly. But you have to stay focused. You cannot start out blogging about nails, switch to hammers, and then talk about hanging shelves unless you run a hardware store. The blog has to show people you know all about your business, that you mean business, and that you are the person to do business with.

If you don’t take your Internet visibility seriously you’ll get the minimal visibility you’re asking for. Relevance is not just about keywords and query research. It’s about information, usable and helpful information. To be more relevant on the Web a business site has to be more informative, and more informative than its competitors.

The rest usually takes care of itself.