SEO to Be or not to Be That Is the Question ? Surely to Be !

I'm writing this article purely from a stance of bewilderment, as to why more businesses do not use Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it's often shortened to, when promoting their websites. This is written by some one who as done it, got the T-shirt and would buy another. SEO is responsible for achieving all my holiday cottage bookings, along with a decent website.

I'm writing this article purely from a stance of bewilderment, as to why more businesses do not use Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it's often shortened to, when promoting their websites.
There is to a large degree a lot of Webmasters that have not studied or even heard of the subject which, in case you're one of them, it is basically a technique to get your web pages ranked high on search engines.
This is how I came to know about SEO and how it continually improves the sales from all my websites.
The first time one of my businesses ideally required high volumes of Internet customers, was when I bought my holiday cottage in Whitby, North Yorkshire. The cottage cost me a little under £200,000 in 2007 and unfortunately to acquire the property, I also had to acquire a large mortgage! Okay I love Whitby and I use the cottage myself but it was primarily a business as unfortunately I am not personally on the UK rich list. I needed to obtain as many holiday bookings as possible to pay the mortgage. I started off with Google AdWords, which is an excellent and immediate service, but long-term it is expensive, if that's your main way of attracting customers to your website.
At this point I can jump forward in time and honestly report that the end results of my applied SEO studies and efforts towards my website for the holiday cottage resulted in virtually 100% bookings all year round and entirely from the Internet. This is because www.endeavourcottage.co.uk with high PageRank 4 is very near the top of most search engine rankings, including Google, for all the relevant keywords like, Whitby Holiday Cottage. Okay that's great for me, but the thing that blows my mind is why the majority of people with businesses that have a website, and often also high overheads, don't seem to place the same importance on getting customers reading their web pages as I do?
You only have to look on the Internet under that holiday accommodation category to find there are many holiday cottages, guesthouses, hotels (with often attractive websites) that are well-designed, but they have applied no SEO. Therefore their website will be way back in the search engine rankings with extremely few visiting customers from the Internet.
Okay some people might think that this lacking occupancy of holiday accommodation could be because at the time of writing (August 2009), we are in the middle of the worst recession for many years, but I don't think that's the case. It is certainly not for my cottage and a few other well promoted cottages I've noted. There's been plenty of evidence on the news that people are holidaying in Britain more than usual, mainly due to the weak performance of the pound against the euro, coupled with the fact that they're going for short holidays closer to home. Probably to a degree, businesses are struggling because of the catch 22 situation of less money equals less marketing, equals less customers, equals less money. But I truly believe that -if they invested a little money into their websites, especially on SEO, the returns would far outweigh the costs.
I can personally confirm this with my own various business websites and especially with my own holiday cottage website. The cottage is priced very fairly in my opinion, and, thankfully, my customers' opinions, according to the guestbook. But there are a lot of similar cottages to my own which are priced just as fairly, which are very low on bookings. This is literally losing them hundreds of pounds per week and, taken across the year, this equals thousands of pounds!
I am trying to stay away from boring statistics as much as possible in this article but just to clarify the above statement; researchers say that 84% of people never make it past page two of search engine results. An analogy could be that the web is like a giant city with shops scattered throughout. So if your website is in the top 10 listings for the relevant keywords, on page 1 of say Google, it's like having your shop at the prime location at the entrance of the shopping mall, where everybody passes. Likewise if you are back on page 60 your shop is out in the sticks where virtually nobody walks past!
I was talking to a hotelier who was complaining how difficult it was to get high occupancy levels in his 14 en-suite room hotel with prime location sea views, even though the cost of the property must have been somewhere in the region of £1.5 million. This particular gentleman was desperately showering money on advertising in magazines and papers, but when we came to the subject of his website, he basically viewed it only as a medium for the advertising through magazines and papers, which contained the website address etc.

When I mentioned why didn't he use the Internet more prominently as the actual source of people finding his website, his reaction was; " If I relied on the Internet my hotel would be empty, there's just too many websites and people never find you". Obviously this hotelier had never considered the fact that if you managed to get your website high up search engine rankings, that would be a very different situation. By doing keyword research, I found out immediately that the two word term Whitby Hotel was searched just over 135.000 times in July 2009. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that if his website had been on the first page of Google for those keywords alone, he would have caught the attention of some of those potential customers.
One of the problems I've found when giving people factual information about the Internet, like the example above, they tend to think you're exaggerating, just trying to attract their custom for SEO or even worse may be lying. I find this very different in my main business which I have operated for 26 years which is the installation of CCTV and security alarm systems. I think this is probably because people understand things like security alarms and they can actually see and touch what they're buying.
But having said that, when it comes to SEO I can go on the Internet and, using the keyword research tool, this will show potential customers the number of people searching per month for particular combinations of words appropriate for their website.
For example, in June 2009, over 9000 people searched for the collective three word term, Whitby holiday cottages. Not as many as the two word term, Whitby Hotel, but enough for my needs. I also show examples of my own websites, like my holiday cottage, using Google analytics tool, which produces an instant report of the number of people visiting my actual holiday cottage website, even the location from which they are searching. The kind of result it shows is from free organic listings on Google search engine. I usually receive each day, somewhere between 200 to 400 hits on my cottage website. Obviously not all genuinely interested people but it's still enough for me not to get many days which are unoccupied. A slightly negative aspect of this is that when my family and I stay in Whitby, we usually have to book into a hotel, because our cottage is occupied by customers and so as the saying goes, a victim of our own success!
If I was the Whitby hotel owner in this example, and knowing SEO and its potential, my top priority would be the best website I could possibly afford and, even more importantly, a strong and effective SEO campaign.
A word of caution, there are some great and friendly SEO companies out there but also unfortunately there are truly some disreputable companies that will try to blind you with science. They will ask for a large upfront fee by exaggerating the amount of work necessarily to get your website ranked highly on search engines for your keywords. Even worse, they often also ask for large ongoing monthly fees, exaggerating the amount of work to keep your website well ranked.
What actually determines the amount of work necessary to get good search engine rankings, is the amount of competition for the keywords required. Sometimes the keywords have little competition and require little work to get good results, and obviously sometimes totally the opposite. For example, if you were selling golf clubs and try to optimise your website for those two words, there will be literally thousands of websites throughout the world optimised for those two particular words and so the competition is extremely high. But the opposite can be true. For example, my own security company website is optimised for various keywords like CCTV Bradford. The fact that I'm using a local term 'Bradford' and there are not many companies in Bradford installing CCTV (thank goodness) ? so when you use that local word 'Bradford' coupled with 'CCTV', you have very little competition to be at the top of Google. Try it yourself, my website is www.adalarms.co.uk and by typing 'CCTV Bradford' I have got the top two listings on page one of Google and in this example it was easily acquired. With my holiday cottage in Whitby there is a lot more competition, because there are a lot more privately owned cottages and agencies with many cottages on their books, optimising for the relevant keywords. But it's totally achievable with an effective SEO campaign.
If your website is not ranked well, I would encourage you to consider an effective campaign of
If you'd like more information my website SEO for your website. It might encourage you to log into your online banking more often!

If you'd like more information my website search engine optimisation

Alan Davidson

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