Ten years ago or so, launching a web site for your organization was a newsworthy event. You were surely on the cutting edge, maybe even the bleeding edge, when you took the dramatic step of opening your organization up to those relatively few consumers who looked to the Internet as a commerce alternative.

Today, you’re a Luddite if you don’t have a web site and a dinosaur if all your web site does is showcase your products or services and provide an online ordering mechanism.

Building a web site is no longer a newsworthy event. But having one, even a tricked out one with all the bells and whistles, may be a non-event if you aren’t working hard to raise your site’s visibility in a crowded marketplace.

The Top 3 Things Web Sites Are ‘About’ These Days

1. Visibility
2. Visibility
3. Visibility

It’s not enough to have a web site loaded with all the must-have features if no one knows it’s there.

The Advertising World has Changed

A friend of mine relayed a story to me that should send a chill up the spine of any organization that isn’t fully invested in raising its website’s visibility.

My friend’s father-in-law was in the hospital. A nurse made a terrible error and hooked up the wrong medicine to his IV tube. It nearly killed him. After the doctors pulled him back from the brink of death, the hospital’s Risk Manager came to the room with a waiver offering the patient some relatively small amount of money in return for releasing the hospital from all claims over the “unfortunate incident.�

My friend’s mother-in-law, a 69 year-old woman who doesn’t even have an email address, turned to my friend and said “Go on the Internet and find one of those medical malpractice lawyers and make an appointment for me and you to visit him.�
That’s what she said; but it’s what she didn’t say that is so chilling.

She didn’t say “Go to the Yellow Pages and find a lawyer.�

She didn’t say “What’s the name of that big law firm that advertises on TV every day.�

She instinctively knew that the Internet was the preferred source for solving her immediate problem.

My friend used Google to search on the term “medical malpractice� and the name of the city the hospital was in. He took the results and googled each firm’s name to find more information not only from the firm, but from people who had used the firm and had written about their experiences in blogs and other social media sites.

What if you had a law firm serving that market? Would your firm’s name have come up in the top 10 Google results? Would you have had satisfied clients writing about you or your firm on social media sites?

You don’t have to be a lawyer to see that the world around you is changing.

If you don’t have top search engine placement and a strong social media network working on your behalf, you are invisible.

The good news is: It’s never too late to start.

The bad news is: Nothing will happen until you make it happen.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is part science and part magic. Blend both parts together and you instantly raise your chances of survival in an increasingly hostile market where SEO-savvy competitors are all too willing to use the Internet against you.