Ever find yourself visiting Google.com and typing in phrases
relevant to your website to see where you come up? Of course you
do. Everyone does it. Have you ever stopped to think how much
time is taken up over the course of a year just by that niggling
thought at the back of your mind “Am I on the first page?” – I
bet it if you counted up all the times you did it you would be
looking at hours. But are search engines really that important
to the success of your website? No, they’re not – here’s why..
1. They waste your time.
Admit it – you spend hours just seeing where in the rankings you
appear when you could be spending that time improving your
business, adding more great content to your website or following
up on those sales leads.
2. They owe you nothing.
There is nothing more dangerous than your website’s traffic and
hence your business’ revenue being dependent on one type of
resource (i.e. search engine) or worse still one particular
search engine. They can change the way they list and rank sites
over night – they are not indebted to provide you with
consistent traffic. Just look at the latest sweeping changes
made by Google – businesses literally went under as a result of
being solely dependent on one primary source of visitors.
3. They sap your soul.
There can be nothing more disheartening than seeing your ranking
in the search engines either fall from page 1 to page 99 or
disappear completely. People can get caught up in a mesmerising
dance with the search engines constantly changing their site to
pander to the needs of the search engines. Remember this – high
ranking in the search engines does not equal profit. What brings
you profit is a good product or service, an excellent website
with valuable content and a great conversion rate of visitor
into customer. 99% of website owners think their problem is lack
of visitors – it’s not, it’s lack of understanding of what it
takes to convert the current visitors into customers. Only worry
about your search engine ranking if you’ve got all other
elements of your business and your website as close to
perfection as they can be.
4. They’re not the be all and end all. There are much better
ways to attract visitors via the web than search engines.
Website owners who really know their stuff and have invested
100s of hours marketing their website (or got experts like
magnet4web to do it for them!) attract over 80% of their
visitors via sources other than search engines – directories,
links etc. If a search engine goes bust or changes the way it
ranks you and you rely on it too heavily you can suffer in a big
way. If the vast majority of your traffic comes from many, many
links then you can still continue to thrive.
Remember – traffic from search engines should be treated as an
additional source of visitors to your website – not the only
source.
Michael Cheney Sales & Marketing Director, magnet4web.com (c)
About the author:
Michael Cheney is a successful entrepreneur and owner of
magnet4web.com - one of the UK's leading website marketing
companies. You can read more of his articles and download your
FREE website marketing guide "How To Turn Your Website Into A
Customer Magnet" at www.magnet4web.com
