Make a digital name for your garden center

“We’re out there somewhere” is not enough. Web presence is as important as your business presence in the community. In this internet age, every business needs an online presence in order to reach potential customers. Your website not only showcases what your business is about to the World Wide Web community, but also has the ability to perform for you 24/7. Think of it as an investment that works for you constantly, day and night.

Having a search engine optimized website that shows up high in search engine results pages when people search for your services is like having a name in your industry. If people have never heard about your business, they won’t trust you. Same thing online: if Google has never “heard” about your website, Google will think it’s not relevant and won’t make it “findable” in search engine results pages.

Here’s what’s relevant for search engines and what you can do about it:

Off-page strategies:

1. Have link authority. Get quality websites, related to your industry only, to link to your website. The easy way to do this is by having a web page where you put all the websites of partners you work with, the associations you are part of, the chamber of commerce, the Better Business Bureau, and any other reputable companies you’ve done business with. Then, ask them to link back to your website. This establishes relevance and trust in search engines.

2. Have a presence locally and world-wide. When someone searches for “lawn care services,” under the paid ads, search engine results show local results by recognizing your computer’s IP address (where you are located). To be in those local results, which is a very significant position, submit your website to local places like: Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local. Also submit your website to social networks for local businesses: Merchant Circle, Patch, Yellow Pages, CitySearch, Local.com and Yelp.com. On these websites, you can create a profile page of your company, include your logo and website, and why customers should use your services. Your business can show up high in search results with the profile page you create because these websites already have lots of web traffic and an established web presence. The best part of this strategy is it’s free! Also submit your website to online directories like Dmoz, Joe Ant and others.

3. Blog and engage in social media often. Many times when you search something you see the Facebook page of a business first instead of that business’s website. That’s because Facebook and other social networks have web presence. So use Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google+ and other social networks on a regular basis. Also, have a blog and post relevant content frequently. Write guest posts on other blogs in the industry. Most importantly, connect your website to your blog and to all of the social network pages you create.

4. Start a Google Analytics account. It’s free! This way you know who clicks on your website, who your customers are, where they are located and on which areas you need to concentrate to reach more customers. You can also see how your website performs online and how much traffic you get from search engines.

On-page strategies:

1. Have great content on your website. First, have a clear and short call to action telling visitors what you can offer them and why they should choose you and not the garden center two miles down the road. Your homepage needs to have a headline, a call to action, contact information and logo. You have seven seconds to grab the visitor’s attention and convince them to click on.

2. Update content often. Search engines love new, relevant content. Educate the viewers about your business and services, your role in the community or any promotions. Write relevant information often and include powerful pictures.

3. Optimize your pages with keywords. Pick a keyword or two for each web page and include those keywords within that page. A page talking about garden design should have “garden design” in the URL (ex.: www.companyname.com/garden-design), headline, sub-headline and body text of the page.

4. Review your website’s Metatags. A metatag is a line of code contained in the background of a webpage. Search engines look at the metatags to learn about the web page and provide the Internet users with a specific search experience.

For example, if you search “garden center supplies.” See Figure 1 below for an explanation of the results.

It is very important that these metatags coincide with your website’s pages content. Websites that use these tags the right way can get a high position in search engine results because by effectively using metatags, they show search engines how to populate the results pages. To be able to manipulate these tags you need to do more research or contact an SEO professional or an HTML code editor.

The Internet community has been growing rapidly in the last 10 years. Your job is to facilitate the process so potential customers can find your website. Once they’ve found you, you have to keep them interested. Search engine optimization is one of the processes you need to integrate with your social media plan, marketing, blogging, and website content and design, in order to have a successful online presence and to drive traffic, leads and sales.

Camelia Clarke is SEO associate for GIE Media, Inc.