Jane interviewed Wendy Payne from Seahorse Sanctuary recently on OM4Tourism.com, and Wendy said something that I liked a lot:
Jane: What aspects of a website are most important for a business owner interested in marketing online?
Wendy: Definitely the overall professional image of the website design, but more importantly, the keyword search. If you don’t have this – you don’t have a website. It’s a bit embarrassing really, as we’ve had a website for 5 years, but it was really mostly being found by people that were looking for us specifically by name. The new website is helping so very much to gain business from people who’ve never heard of us. That’s very powerful!
(my emphasis). Thanks Wendy for expressing this so clearly.
By ‘the keyword search’, Wendy is referring to the fact that her site has a keyword plan and is search engine friendly. So popular keywords are now visible to the search engines, and the search engines now send visitors to her site she wasn’t getting before.
Most of the time I talk to business owners about keywords, they are pretty sure they understand them. They know they want to be #1 on Google. But the keywords they are interested in are almost always based on common sense and intuition.
Once they get the keywords concept, there is an ‘aha’ moment. Because you don’t need to guess as much.
As Wendy puts it, keywords help you get found by people who have never heard of you before. And that is pretty cool.