Industry Portals: are you providing portals to your business?
If you want to be noticed in your industry, you should be looking to turn your website into an invaluable industry hub. Search engines want to present the most comprehensive list and range of information in response to any search. Therefore, Google and other search engines want to present users with sites that are rich with relevant features and information on a given topic. A great way to meet this need is to create an industry portal; just the sort of site we at Engage Web know how to build and promote.
What are industry portals, you ask? Although ‘portal’ usually refers to a doorway through to something, industry portals are more metaphorical passages into an industry or topic. These pages, which feature news, anecdotes, gossip, video, images, web tools and more, offer a distillation of what’s going on in a particular industry. They can be incredibly useful for Internet users, which makes search engines love them and makes them incredibly useful for business owners as well. Not only can industry portals bring you lots of traffic, but they can allow you to gain greater control over your online advertising and traffic than you would have thought possible.
A history of portals
Portals were popular at around the time of the dotcom boom. Some examples of portals that sprung up around this time are Yahoo and AOL, which featured all sorts of goodies on their homepages. The traffic drawn to these pages generated revenue through advertising, and advertisers couldn’t get enough coverage on the more popular portals at the time.
Like everything else connected with the dotcom boom, industry portals suffered when the bubble burst. Advertisers scurried away and the work on an industry portal simply didn’t seem worth it any more.
The advances in technology since that time have meant that now anyone can easily run an industry portal, but few know how to take full advantage of them. This means that there are still huge gaps in the market for any site owner wanting to get ahead in their industry.
The advantages of portals
It should be pretty clear by now that we’re enthusiastic at Engage Web about industry portals. This is because we’ve seen them work so well. A quality industry portal can not only get you seen in the search engine results pages, it can get others in your industry begging for your attention.
- Google loves portals. Google loves sites that offer accurate, up-to-date, relevant information. Industry portals tend to rank well because they provide many types of information on one subject
- Own your industry’s search pages. Industry portals tend to rank well for long tail searches, because their wealth of information promotes long tail keywords. With this, you control multiple places in the SERPs, as well as the places taken by your own website. With the right SEO tactics on board, your industry portal can turn into the kind of popular site that you and your competitors would normally pay to advertise on. The difference is, you own it
- Generate business leads. With an industry portal, you have access to a wealth of industry information and more control over how it appears to others
- Get into Google News. Industry portals can become verified Google News Publishers, giving you even more power on the net
- They can build to critical mass. Really well thought out industry portals can attract so much attention and participation that they feed themselves. When your industry portal becomes a must for your field, all of the participation and promotion others do can do the work for you
With the right strategy, you can occupy multiple places on the first page of Google. Do you rank for search queries – or do you control them?
Talk to us at Engage Web about building SEO-friendly industry portals.
