Arizona High Tech Talent Partnership

Does your Website Need Professional Help

During a recent Internet Marketing presentation, I was asked the following question:

How do you determine if your website needs professional help?

The determination that a particular company website marketing team is not doing well on their own and needs to hire professional Internet Marketing help is fairly easy. Convincing the company to actually take the action needed to get the help hired is much more difficult.To determine if your company is doing a dismal job of online marketing, perform the following searches:

1. Search for the company name on all three major search engines. (Google, Yahoo and MSN are the only search engines that provide any meaningful level of traffic.)

• Is the company website ranked #1 on all three search engines?
• Are there any negative references (reputation management problems) in the first 30 results?

2. Search for the name of the company principals on all three major search engines.

• Are positive references to the company principals listed #1 on all three major search engines?
• Are there any negative references in the first 30 results?

3. Search for the company’s main products and services and industries on all three major search engines.

• Are they listed on the first page (top 10) of results ?
• Are there any negative references to the company in the first 30 results for those search terms?

A recent Wall Street Journal article notes the importance to many people of their name Googling well. The same applies to a company name. Although that article primarily dealt with people’s personal names rather than business names, within that article there were a couple of relevant quotes.

The author of the Wall Street Journal article stated that Professional networking site LinkedIn Corp. says its members profile pages often turn up high in Google search results when the users opt to make the pages accessible to the public. This example of the LinkedIn.com Profile of Bill Austin bears this out since it currently ranks #8 on Google for Bill Austin and #3 on Yahoo for Bill Austin.

The other relevant quotation in the article comes from Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, who was quoted as saying “Any time you can distinguish yourself with a distinctive name or a distinctive characteristic that sticks out in people’s minds, that’s going to be the best solution.” This applies to company names and branding just as it applies to your own name.

Another excellent example of name branding comes from a local Scottsdale Arizona business called Go Daddy Group where CEO and Owner Bob Parsons has cornered the market on his name on Google, Yahoo and MSN with his “Hot Points” Blog and a lot of high powered Public Relations and Marketing.

If your company website, company principals and company products and services are not listed high in the search results common search terms that an ordinary person would use to find and/or research your company, then you do need professional help to move your website from relative obscurity to the prominence it deserves in terms of search engine rankings. Hiring Professional Internet Marketing help could be the most important product or service you ever purchase.

Whether your online reputation is suffering from the impact of negative articles and reviews or is suffering from irrelevant website traffic due to use of last century’s technology in your web site design, structure and environment or lack of attention by your marketing or IT staff, a professional Internet Marketing Firm can cut through the political chaff strangling your company and fix your small business online presence.

Our goal is to educate clients on the importance of clean results for Internet searches for their company names, principals, products and services. With the advent of the Internet, more and more individuals and companies are relying on information contained in search results as part of their due diligence in researching companies before they consider doing business with them. Negative results impact sales. Positive results bring the potential for more business. AZhttp has the expertise to bring positive results to the forefront for searches for the company name, principals, products and services while causing negative search results to more to obscurity in the search results over time.

Successfully marketing and branding companies for their niche market can be an expensive proposition. Small businesses spend thousands of dollars annually in advertising, marketing and Information Technology (IT) and large businesses spend millions of dollars each month on those activities. Internet Marketing can level the playing field.

AZhttp’s premier Small Medium Enterprise product, Mega Tune Up, provides businesses with a low-cost solution to learn the steps they need to take to effectively market their website should they want to market their company, products and services internally. Stellar Tune Up trains your staff how to use state of the art search engine marketing principles and web 2.0 technology to market the business website internally. For companies with no internal marketing and IT staff, AZhttp, Inc. can serve in the capacity of these departments and work remotely to brand, market and grow businesses online.

Call us today at (480) 998-0246 for details or contact us by EMail.