Everywhere you look (including some of my old work), you’re told search engine positioning is 95% of all web traffic. It is – IF you’re renting villas in Italy, selling super luxury cars, or if you have a hotel located in a strong destination market like Orlando, Napa Valley, or perhaps Palm Springs. BUT before you go to the trouble and expense of a search engine optimization program, consider these facts:

• Our highest-traffic resort website got 300,000 unique visitors last year and is generally found under its key term on page one in a Google search. Yet ONLY 15 percent of their traffic was generated from the search engines. Seventeen percent was generated from links with other sites and the remaining 236,000 visits were generated from their proprietary database of 78,000 guests!!! So their SEO brought in 4,000 visitors a month which is great, but not as good as their database.
• The Legendary Marketing site has ranked in one of the top three positions in Google for well over five years. And yet, Google has generated only 164 visitors so far this year. This is a TINY percentage of our traffic, which is well over 20,000 visitors a month!

Once again, the key to the high number of visits is not a high search-engine ranking, but a database of 25,000 people who subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Am I saying that search-engine positioning is not important? HECK NO! But before you spend a great deal of time, money, and effort to improve your site’s rankings, (Which we can do, in fact we can get you on page one!) look at how much traffic any given search term generates.

For example, different variations of “ORLANDO” and “GOLF” bring up 3,000-5,000 searches a day in-season, which is obviously well worth a shot at getting. You will, of course, be competing with every major hotel chain in the world, every major tour operator, and a local outfit Disney, but, hey, no one said it would be easy!

On the flip side of the scale, you’d be shocked at how little traffic a term like “MN Golf Resorts” might generate; recently it was fewer than 50 searches a day and that counts golf schools and a bunch of other Minnesota golf-related terms.

For businesses drawing their business from a 30-mile radius and not in a major metropolis or destination area, the effort at achieving search-engine prominence is very often not worth the money, which can range from a few hundred dollars a month to a few thousand!

5 Ways to Get Better Search-Engine Positioning

1. Do you own URLs that include your key words or phrases like, “Orlando Hotel Finder,” or “Atlanta Cigar Company.” This is an easy way to boost rankings.
2. Look at the copy on your own home page. Does it repeat the key word or phrase you want to achieve ranking for? The more copy you have that includes key words, the more chance you have of good rankings. (NOTE: Very often, high ranking sites have copy that reads poorly but helps ranking: that’s the trade off!)
3. Do you have at least 50 inbound links (400 links is better!) from other sites that mention your key word or phrase in the link? For example, if you’re selling golf homes in Vail, you would ensure that your inbound links said “Vail Ski Homes,” rather than the actual name of your property. This is because search engines rank the words in the link.
4. Buy your position. This is a tricky business as very often words are bid up far beyond their true value. But it can be an excellent way to test the market without spending much money. If it works, keep doing it!
5. Hire someone to provide an optimization plan. We even offer this service but – I warn you – I talk more people out of doing this than I talk into it! It has to make sense before I’ll take your money!

A final warning: Many of my partners get weekly solicitations from outfits telling them that there are all kinds of problems with their site that hurt their search engine rankings. Most of these are automatically generated emails from dubious software that reports on such things. I called a couple of these companies and questioned their findings.

“Are you sure if I do these three things you suggest that I will get higher rankings?”

“Yes,” they say.

“And,” I continue, “would it be correct to say that with all the problems with current site’s set up, I have no way of ever getting a decent ranking?”

“Yes, I’m afraid that it would be very difficult to get your current site ranked high” (because of this or that).

“Really,” I said “This site has been ranked number one in Google for seven years and three months, how much higher do you think I can get if I pay you $500 a month?”

The silence was deafening!

Even when companies can get you higher rankings, don’t confuse traffic with income. It’s very easy to double or triple site visits and not sell a dime more in product if the visitors are not the right type of visitors!

Search engine tactics change all the time. See the marketing vault for the very latest information.

Search engines are important, BUT building your own database of prospects is far more important!

Don’t get conned!

If you do want to be on page ONE of Google we can make it happen click here or call 352 266 2099!