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"If you build it, he will come."
- Field of Dreams
If you build it,
will they come?
While walking through his cornfield, Ray (played by Kevin Costner) hears a voice whisper, "If you build it, he will come," and sees a vision of a baseball field. Believing he is somehow being asked to build it, Ray plows his corn and builds the field. The rest is American movie history.
I had a vision, too. If I built a website, clients would follow. I registered a domain name, TheSquareDealer.com, on December 9, 2002. A year later, I had the most simplistic website that anyone could ever imagine, featuring my home improvement company. The problem was, the only way people were getting to my website was by me handing out business cards to potential clients or clients whose work I had completed. The website was not generating its own traffic or leads through the Internet and search engines. There had to be a better way to generate traffic.
Over the next couple years, I read constantly about website design, Internet marketing, and something called search engine optimization (SEO). I was also beginning to generate traffic through something called Google AdWords. I was paying per click for people to visit my website, and it was working. Our company focused on wood fence installation, and sales had doubled from the previous year.
One day, I was noticing that my rankings within the AdWords system had plummeted. I tried upping the bids of my clicks from about $1.00 per click to as much as $10.00 per click. I was still at the bottom of the pile. Traffic to my website was falling, fast. After being in constant contact with Google, they told me that AdWords had changed, and that my site was too graphic. I didn't understand what they meant; my site had pizzazz. They said I should talk to my website designer or my website optimizer, and that Google could not help me further. I begged them to explain more, because I was the one who designed the website and had no clue what search engine optimization was. Google had evolved.
Google's Evolution Helped Transcend Web Your Name®
By this time it was mid-2005, and Google had been constantly pushing itself to a higher level to keep the spammers from ruining its search engine index. Google's AdWords was able to detect that my site had little to no relevant content on it. Content is the words you read on an Internet web page. Google could not read photographs, no matter how good the work was that they showed. Google could not read the graphics that said PHOTOGRAPHS, because they were just that, graphics. Google was quickly thinking outside of the box to stay one step ahead of the spammers and their competitors. In the mean time, I was falling one step behind my competitors. I threw a bunch of content from the contact page onto the homepage, and shortly thereafter my high rank within AdWords ads returned. Presto. Thank God, Google had thrown me a bone, and they didn't have to. I continued to research the subject of search engine optimization to determine what the best methods were to get my website rankings up in the natural search results.
Today's Field of Dreams is
now a WEB of Dreams!
In 2006, I had an idea, I would continue with the construction avenue of the business and branch out further into website marketing. By this time I was generating a lot of revenue through the Internet; why couldn't I apply the same techniques to other businesses? I decided I would call my new company, GoogleME and applied for a trademark. A few days later after being constantly blown off by the trademark attorney, he told me I could not get a trademark for the term GoogleME because it was confusingly similar to Google. (Let it be noted, in hindsight I think he is wrong, GoogleME is offering a service in a different industry, like Delta faucets and Delta airlines.) The attorney died of a heart attack, but not before I thought of a new name: Web Your Name®. It was brilliant and broader than GoogleME, though not too broad. Web Your Name® was now open for business.
In 2007, our construction company did $488,000 in sales with no telephone book ads, no direct mailings, no magazine ads, no radio advertising, no Google AdWords, and no marketing costs. I eliminated spending through AdWords by maximizing my visibility through natural search engine rankings. I did this by creating relevant unique content and increasing my PageRank. PageRank plays a key role in achieving natural Google rankings. I had proven success to the only person that matters, me.
Although SEO was new to me, computers were not. I was born to understand the ins and outs of computing, programming, technology, and how they work. Not everyone can write content; it is much more difficult than one would imagine. You too can live the "Web of Dreams", but you are probably better off hiring someone with nearly two decades of experience with computers and technology than trying to learn everything that I know in a few weeks or few months.
Attempts to do-it-yourself have not been completely unsuccessful, but the odds are stacked against you. If you and I were to go head to head in designing and optimizing a website, I could beat you in my sleep with my hands tied behind my back. Sure it sounds cocky, but I know all of the little things that are most important to building a successful website and marketing it through Google. Another difficult task for a person doing a website themselves is obtaining quality links to increase your PageRank. Whatever industry you are in, you can outshine me in that industry, but the "Web" is my playground, my turf, and my territory, and you are at a great disadvantage. You could spend hundreds of hours or dollars designing and building a website and your work to optimize that website won't have begun. Lastly, after you spend hundreds of hours and dollars designing your website, then hundreds more hours optimizing the site, you'll have to spend hundreds more hours waiting for Google to determine if your website deserves to be in its TOP 10. AdWords is the ONLY Top 10 Google shortcut.
If you optimize your website's content, the traffic will come. Forget economics.
I know Googlenomics.
Internet marketing is not as simple as building a website; potential clients will not automatically find it. You must have good content on your website, or, as we like to say, "Content is Key." If you build it, optimize it, and Google likes it, then the traffic will come, assuming you have decent PageRank. PageRank is a huge factor in achieving success on Google.
A CNN Money article noted Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) grew its share by 0.9 points since July to take 65.6% of the search market in November. That's the largest share Google has ever garnered. You cannot judge a marketing company's success by Yahoo! traffic. Yahoo! is the laughing stock of the search engine industry. Web Your Name® had its Google market share increase up to 1,000% on some websites.