To stay competitive in today’s marketplace, merchants must embrace the Internet and develop a symbiotic relationship with it. Look around, everyone engages in some sort of online presence; email, “Window-shopping”, and social networking to name a few. As Internet users, we only differ in our objectives. Your website or online presence must clearly define your objective.

Focus

If your website is going to standout among the rows of its competitors, you must adapt a narrow and specific focus. Develop a positioning or “Mission Statement” to guide and articulate your Company’s motivation and website direction. Limit this proclamation to 25 carefully chosen words that will be prominently displayed on your Home page. Furthermore, this information will become valuable when selecting Meta-Tags and Keywords relating to your website.

“…offer local merchants effortless expansion into the lively and profitable e-marketplace, while consistently providing online consumers a safe and comfortable shopping experience.”

Adding a regional component to your website is one good way to provide focus to your keywords and avoid a battle with corporate giants in the “Google Sandbox”. As the Internet continues to grow it has become increasingly difficult to achieve top 10 placement in search engine results; using today’s most popular search terms.

When developing the concept of an online shopping centre, we came to the realization that search terms such as “online shopping” or “lots of stores”, were monopolized by the corporate giants; i.e. Toys R Us, EBay and Amazon. With their Alexa.com or Google page rank, marketing teams and endless advertising budget, we were in no position to compete on the big stage. I’m a little shy and I don’t like the big stage anyway…time for reflection.

What if we can perform on a smaller stage, where our little show would look big? The answer was Cornwall, Ontario- Small town charm with big city thinking; population nearly 60K. By selecting the regional component of our website, we essentially removed the need to compete with corporate giants, globally, internationally, nationally or even provincially. It is very unlikely that EBay or Amazon would shift their advertising focus to Cornwall or even Ontario…Canada perhaps; nothing less.

It’s all about focus. Is it ridiculous to surmise that an Internet consumer from Beijing or even Vancouver, would type in the search term “online shopping centre” with an expectation that a website from Cornwall, Ontario would appear in the top 10 results? Their search is more likely to be more focused, like “online shopping in Cornwall” or “Cornwall shopping centre”?

By choosing a regional component to your online presence, the selection of your web site’s focused keywords and meta-tags becomes easier. Furthermore, this detailed process effectively targets your local online consumer; reducing the number of unrelated or uninterested visitors to your website.

A carefully selected domain name (www.cornwallshoppingcentre.ca &.com), used in combination with keywords and meta-tags focusing on the region, as well as the strategic use of proven and recognized industry terms, is certain to drive a steady stream of motivated, targeted, and local consumers to your website.

www.weal-dream-it.com

We are the Corporate Image Consultants

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 2:12 am and is filed under Branding and Image. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.