Speaking on all things Digital Marketing at the DJ Expo for the past three years now has been an eye-opening experience for me personally.
Seeing old friends from the time when was in the DJ business is great — I highly recommend Angeloni’s II for dinner, thanks to Derek P from Rhode Island for that intro at DJ Expo 2017 — and making new friends after my seminars is also positive as well.
What is not positive is the state-of-affairs of some of the websites that DJs are using today. Guys, it’s about to be 2020, and some of you are trying to showcase your business with outdated websites that are actually hurting you instead of helping you close more gigs. How’s that? Let me explain…
Websites serve multiple purposes. For my preferences, these four stand out for the DJ world.
- The “online flyer” that is seen when a potential customer is doing research on you and your company. Simply put, your website is a digital representation of your business. If it’s behind the times, then you don’t look as good as your competitors.
- The “time-saver” aspect of not having to repeat the same portions of conversations over and over again by creating content that can be pointed to. From Blogs to Videos, you can avoid having to make the same speech time and time again by putting up the subject matter on your website, and pointing the customer to said content.
- The “customer-service” aspect of funneling potential customers to your website in order to service them. Use “buy pages,” song-request forms, live-chat widgets and more to bring not only your customers back to your site, but also their event guests… enabling a possible viral campaign.
- The “search factor” that is invoked when Google crawls your site and assigns a ranking.
The first three purposes are self-explanatory. It’s this fourth and most important factor that requires an article such as this, as follows:
Websites and SEO
Back in the 1990s, the only site we had that resembled anything like a search engine was Yahoo. However, Yahoo wasn’t really a true search engine, but rather more of a glorified directory. A company still had to manually submit a company URL for consideration to get listed in Yahoo – a manual process, to be sure.
At the turn of the century, though, Google launched with an offering that represented one of the world’s first true search engines, based on the famous Stanford thesis from Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That thesis gave rise to Google, and over time has led to a truly automated way for the “Googlebot Crawlers” to index the web.
Accordingly, this automated indexing process has led to what we now call Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Today’s world uses Google almost every time something is being sourced, and so we as brand owners (in this case, DJ companies) must pay attention to how Google indexes our websites.
So, what does that mean in plain English? Translating this into everyday work-speak, here are the things you have to pay attention to:
- How many backlinks are on the web and suited for your site?
- How often are you blogging, both for your site and elsewhere on the web?
- How many directories are you listed in on the web?
How often do you check the code on your site for SEO errors?
Backlinks
When a link exists on other sites that brings a user to your site, that’s a backlink in your favor (the url “links back” to your site). According to the Google thesis, the more backlinks your site has, the more popular your site is — and the more deserving your site is of a higher ranking. Simply put, having more backlinks equals a higher ranking. There are some who have written that backlinks are dead – but don’t believe them. I use backlinks every day, and they do lead to higher rankings.
Here are some pointers…
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