Search pages are 'battlefield' for business owners, Adams tells chamber

With 93% of online traffic starting at a web search, Bell Media Vice President of Business Development Chuck Adams said businesses can no longer ignore their online presence, especially in search rankings.

“Page one of the search engine results is really the battlefield for local businesses today,” Adams told the Homewood Chamber of Commerce at its May 21 luncheon.

Adams has 30 years of entrepreneurial experience, and Bell Media is a digital agency that offers services such as website design, social media maintenance, marketing and more related to companies’ online footprint. His speech to the chamber was an overview of search engine optimization, or SEO.

Since the majority of American consumers use search engines like Google daily, including to find local businesses and products they need, Adams said SEO is critical to make sure the right customers find your business.

“It’s how we live today,” Adams said, noting that 5 billion searches happen on Google daily. The first page of results is where most traffic happens.

Search engines like Google index websites for various factors that make them more likely to rank higher in search results. Using keywords relevant to your industry will help, but Adams said having good SEO involves much more.

The design of a website and whether it’s user-friendly will impact its ranking and how likely people are to stay on the page and look for what they need. A page that loads slowly or doesn’t immediately show what you offer is less likely to draw and keep traffic.

Having consistency in a business name, address and phone number across all websites and social media — down to spelling out or abbreviating words like “street” in an address, Adams said — also help the search engines index a site.

Creating fresh, regular content on your business website that answers questions for likely customers is also key to good search rankings, Adams said. That content can include a blog, videos, white papers and other media. With the growing popularity of voice-activated devices in homes, he said writing in a way that is natural and sounds like human speech will also boost rankings.

Content that is relevant to your ideal customer and their needs will produce better results than writing to try to capture as wide an audience as possible, he said.

Other tips he gave the chamber audience included getting backlinks, where another site links to their business site, and technical SEO, which is ensuring that the code behind a website is built in a way that’s easy for the search engine to automatically index.

Technical SEO often requires an expert in website design and coding, which Adams said can be done by a company’s in-house IT expert or by hiring an agency like Bell Media that specializes in digital marketing. However, it’s “too critical of a component for SEO today … to ignore,” he said.

Adams told the chamber that SEO is not simple, fast or free. It can take six months of continued effort to start seeing significant results, but he said over time businesses will see a higher quality of traffic to their website. That higher ranking and traffic boost can lead to more store visits and purchases, which Adams said is what all business owners are looking for.