Marketing your Driving school website on Google
Marketing your driving school on the internet. Should you do it yourself? Read the first few paragraphs until you feel you are out of your depth & then don't give up go to the paragraph title 'Beginners Guide'.
Marketing your driving school website - self or company
Marketing your driving school website on the internet can be a lengthy procedure, taking a lot of concentration if you do it yourself & of course a lot of technical knowledge. This should not put you off trying it yourself though, everything can be learned over a period of time.
Should you decide to contract the work out then it could get rather expensive. There are pitfalls you need to avoid if you are contracting out & if you have little knowledge as to what is involved in the marketing of your driving school on the internet you will not know if you are getting value for your money.
I have written below a few checks you can make to see if the company you are dealing with knows their business & cares about yours.
SEO companies
Professional SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) companies all seem to make the same statement that they can get you more business on your website if you pay them. Based on that you would probably look for the best price, but what if the best price does not deliver the best results.
Before you sign with an SEO company there are several questions you need to consider.
Have they analysed your website?
A good SEO person will need to analyse your website and its software to determine the work needed to ensure all pages can be indexed and highly ranked by the search engines. They should provide exact details on the work that they will be carrying out. This work is an essential starting point.
Have they analysed the linking strategies of your high ranking
competition?
A quality SEO company will look at your competitors and identify the quality, number, and source of their inbound links. From this they can see how many links and of what quality you need to rank above these competitors.
Are they building high quality links to your website with their own inhouse link builders?
Many SEO companies will claim to build quality links. A good rule of thumb is that it takes between 1 and 2 hours to find, contact, build and quality control each link that Google would count as a quality inbound ‘vote’. If you are being offered a high number of low cost links chances are they are from automated sites and will do your ranking no good whatsoever. In the same way if an SEO company does not have dedicated link builders you will either not get enough links of a high enough quality or they are outsourcing the work which means that they do not have full control of the type of links being acquired for your website.
Beginners Guide
Well if you are not into all the technical stuff here is a beginners guide to the terminology.
- ♦ Search engine: It's the little box on your computer that you type in any item you want to find. This box is provided by Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
- ♦ When you type a word or phrase into the box it will search the whole of the internet to help find what you are looking for.
- ♦ There will be millions of items (web pages) that have to be searched to select the item it thinks best suits your request. For your website to be selected by your customers it has to be OPTIMISED - that is Search Engine Optimised (SEO)
- ♦ What is Search Engine Optimised? When you read a book it has a contents page, content & an index. That's exacly what your website has to have, a structured design that allows the search engines to easily go through your pages looking for the best match words that the searcher is looking for. Like humans, a search engine gives up when things are difficult to find.
- ♦ You can optimise your own website if you imagine you are writing a book. Graphics and great website design are not paid much attention if any, by the search engines. Simply concentrate on your website content for best results.
- ♦ Links - what's all this about inbound/outbound links? Links are an important feature for a search engine because they help tell it how popular your website is. The more links you have going from your site to other like sites (out bound links) the more 'brownie points' you get. Inbound links (coming from other sites to yours) gives you even more 'brownie points'.
That's it. If you have the patience the you could see that marketing your own website is a possibility. If you want a quick fix to your driving school advertising without the complications of SEO work try Google advertising
Read the rest of this marketing your driving school website on Google for lots of useful information on how your driving school can become a success story for 2010
