The end-all for each and every business out there is reputation and the ability to be found by their target audience. If a company is not easily found, a revenue opportunity is significantly missed. This holds true with a brick and mortar store, an online based company, or a business that has both. For this conversation, let’s talk about how your target audience finds you online — search engines.

As you pursue optimization for both global and local search engines, keep in mind that you are making a great long-term investment. Over 80% of the typical (successful) website’s traffic is derived from search engine queries. This means that major search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) and local search engines should be the focal point of your online presence campaign. That said, let’s take a quick glance (well, a 13 minute information-rich glance…) at how search engines work via a video from Oxford Learning Lab:

Now that we have an understanding about how a search engine works, it’s important for you to know that optimizing your site for search engines is not an immediate fix (like Pay Per Click marketing). However, it is one of the best long-term investment that you can make in terms of overall targeted traffic to your site. In other words, your site traffic will exponentially increase over time, but you will also receive a more focused traffic that you have more of an opportunity to convert into profit. So, take advantage of this search engine optimization series that we have published this past week (or get in touch with us to help), and optimize your results!

As today is September 11th, I want to take a moment to remember the victims of the 2001 tragedy on September 11th. My thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of all that lost someone that day, or as a result of the catastrophic event. Always remember.