It always amazes me how little importance foreign entrepreneurs in Spain give to their Internet presence. Particularly in the real estate market, website owners seem to believe that their website is nothing but a necessary expenditure and fail to understand a couple of key facts:
- a professional Internet presence is a significant part of the overall marketing plan, and the single most effective way to generate potential customers
- online marketing is substantially different than offline marketing
- people judge a company’s credibility by the content and design of their website
- websites do not work without promotion
By overlooking these key facts, website owners are not placing enough importance on their company’s Internet presence. A common belief amongst website owners is that once they have paid somebody for a website, that is the end of it. And instead of outsourcing the promotion of their website to a professional, they assign the task to somebody they know. The resulting website often look outdated and unprofessional, with hardly any fresh content, but plenty of copy in the ‘about us’ section to feed their ego.
Afterwards, website owners ask: how do I get rankings in search engine results? Instead of going to an SEO expert, they cram the meta tag with all related keywords and phrases and hope for the best. Then they sit and wait for traffic to start pouring in. Time goes by, and nothing. Then the website owner wonders why they built a website in the first place. Some even research into link exchange, but what most of them don’t know is that they need to link with the competition to increase their website’s credibility. Most of the time, however, they avoid linking to the competition, and instead link every known spam website. More time goes by, and the website owner and his designer remain the only two people looking at the website. Finally, the website owner decides to contract an SEO expert. Instead of taking the SEO expert’s advice, however, the website owners requests an even flashier website and insists on his own design.
The SEO expert is forced to go along with the website owner, and tries to build the website in compliance with Internet marketing standards. The SEO expert insists on regularly updated content, but the request falls on deaf ears; instead, the website owner’s sole concern is the look and ‘feel’ of their website. The website owners demands that the website be within the top ten Google search results, without updating any of the content.
Unfortunately, most companies in Spain using an SEO company do not follow the expert advice they have contracted and paid for.
SEO is time-consuming, ongoing and difficult. If it were easy companies would do it themselves. It requires that you:
- accept that online marketing is substantially different from offline marketing
- accept that you know little or nothing about it
- spend time and effort to develop regular in-demand content for your website
- choose an SEO company wisely
- take your SEO company’s advice on board
Contact us for a free analysis of your website. We will look at different aspects of your website and explain what you need to do in order to make it suitable for search engine optimisation
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