An increasing number of farms and agricultural business have websites.
Such sites can raise the profile of a company and provide a valuable base of information, but are helpful only if people can find them.
Corey Gault of Web Trends and Web Position in Portland, Ore., said all marketing tools, from newsletters to business cards, should include the company’s web address or URL.
Web search engines such as Google also drive traffic to a farm or business website, said Gault, whose company offers a host of programs aimed at analyzing and tracking on-line business activity.
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“More than 80 percent of traffic on a typical commercial website comes there via search engines,” he said.
Gault cited two main ways to increase traffic from search engines.
Key words central to the product and company should be featured as often as possible in the website to increase the chances of the site getting picked up by a search engine.
A second way is through page search service where a fee is paid to companies like Google for the use of relevant key words on a per click basis. These key words can help improve the website’s ranking in the final list of search results.
Gault said it is important to examine how the website is ranked because there can be a huge variation, determining whether a website appears on the first or the 10th page of search results.
“The trick is to get your website ranked high for the various search engines on related key words to your business.”
He said Web Position Gold, software popular with small business, provides ranking reports on where a site falls in the search results for the various key words. It also offers suggestions on what can be done to boost the rank higher for each of the search engines and how the page is displayed or the way the code is assembled.
Gault said there is an emerging trend on the web toward localized searches for goods and services. For example, people are going to their computers to locate organic lettuce in their home towns.
Analytic programs can also help track the paths users take, the links used and how successful marketing efforts were in driving traffic to the site.
“Like using the yellow pages, you want to know that people call because of those ads and actually do business with you,” he said.
Such software can be installed to do the job, or services are available that will do the search and investigations for a fee.
A paid service can add tags to web pages to track what a company wants to know such as how long users are on the site, the paths or links that directed them to the site, the search engines used, the paths that were taken within the site and the marketing efforts that brought them there.
One producer has found it does not pay to buy too many services.
Melanie Boldt of Pine View Farms at Osler, Sask., has tried to increase traffic on her all-natural meat company website by seeking out as many free search engines as possible.
“People manage to find us,” she said, noting it helps that their company name is part of its website address, www.pineviewfarms.com. Pine View places its URL on all its promotional materials and advertising, she said.
The website posts prices and product lists, provides general information for customers and is a huge convenience for people increasingly using the internet, said Boldt.
“It’s our image on-line. It helps people feel more comfortable about coming out (to the farm),” she said, noting the site does not handle sales orders.
“It all contributes to the image of our business and looks professional.”
Boldt created the company’s first website from templates but has since invested more than $1,000 to create a professionally designed and maintained website.
She is content with traffic on the site, saying it generates about five new business inquiries each month.
“More and more people are using it before they contact us,” she said.
