Sometimes you stumble upon something that leads to success. My journey into the SEO world began almost 10 years ago. It was just after September 11 in 2001 and only months after I was hired that our sales plummeted 80% at our fiber optics company. At the time the plunge was so great we didn’t know what to do. We called all the leads in our database and followed up on all the quotes with little success. We make a ton of cold calls. It was going to be a rough road ahead.
As Director of Sales and Marketing I was charged with overhauling an outdated website. I figured I would throw up as much information I could find about our products and hope people would find us. I loaded the homepage with links and keywords before I understood their value. I also developed an email list and regularly sent as much useful information I could find to regularly find customers.
As the time passed we started getting more and more calls. People were finding us. When you searched for the products we were offering, we often came up in first place. At first, I didn’t understand why. As we started adding more and more customers, I realized I stumbled upon an effective strategy for any company selling products. Even through we never recovered our pre-boom sales volume, we added over a hundred customers and made the company profitable again in a short time frame.
I refined this strategy at other companies and tested more ideas, adding more features and turning our websites into selling machines, connecting with customers 24/7/365 all over the world. At one company, we received so much recognition from our website outranking all of our competitors that we almost eliminated our travel budget. We got too busy to visit our customers, and they came to us anyway without the visits. Another company is still running the same Google Adwords advertisement 7 years running…and their sales are up over 300% since the campaign began.
Ten years ago few could visualize the tremendous success an effective website could bring to an established business. Most people were looking for new products and ideas to exploit the potential. Even today, only few established businesses are truly using the potential of optimizing their websites and developing a true internet strategy. In these lean times, people are starting to learn where the future is!