I never realized that when I spoke people only heard every other word I was saying. I don’t think I fully realized this until after building multiple websites for clients. As we would go through the development and launch I would thoroughly discuss with them search engine placement. I would explain that no matter how well designed their new site was it wouldn’t matter if people could not find them. I think my clients are like most of the people in need of a website today. They heard what I was saying but did not really believe that their new site wouldn’t just pop up when people searched for it.
I will never forget this one client in particular who changed her business and mine. After we spent a few weeks coming up with a terrific site devoted to her company I again explained how we would need to continue the momentum with search engine placement. I explained how this would benefit the site and help her grow her business. She declined to do the search engine placement so that she could add two more pages to the site and stick with in her budget. I again emphasized that it really didn’t matter how detailed the site was if people could not find her website when using one of the major search engines.
Weeks after the site went live I received a frantic call from her explaining that she had gone on Google and typed in a few keywords to search her site out. She even once including the exact name of her company and the city she was located in. She was crazed that nothing about her business came up. Of course I explained once again that this is why search engine placement was as important as the actual website development. It wasn’t until that moment that a light bulb went off and she realized that if her business was going to draw clients from the internet that she must start investing monthly into search engine placement as part of her long term marketing goals.
A few months after we started helping her reach this long term goal with monthly search engine placement I checked back in with her. At this point she informed me that she had so many people finding out about her business from her website that she was ready to move forward and add a shopping cart on to her site. She figured she could at least double her profits with this addition. She was thrilled to have a store front business and a healthy online business to go with it. She admitted to me that she wished she had taken my advice from the start and wished she had not been naive enough to think that online presence only came from a website.
The great thing about having a client that has a light bulb moment is that they can help bring awareness to future clients. Advice coming from someone that has grown a successful online business with proper search engine placement is better than any sales pitch I might come up with. Now when I have a client who is hesitant to move forward with search engine placement I refer them to her. I let her explain that the money she has put into search engine placement has at least doubled her business and allowed her to become a competitive online business as well.