This is relevant to just about all web marketing. So we have to look at updating our modus operandi. We all know it’s vital that all commercial organisations are on the web. But that’s not the answer to the problem. Your clients need to know where you are.
Picture a new retail premises opening up shop: It’s taken time, money and expertise to get to this stage. It’s opening time, and they’re looking for clients… Then they look outside and find they’re in a rural outpost! Nobody will know how to reach them. What kind of sales do you think they’ll manage? The vast majority of business websites have just this problem.
The shape of modern marketing has radically altered. Ten years ago, as everyone was getting on the bandwagon, there was an idea that everyone needed a website. It wasn’t uncommon for businesses to spend huge amounts getting all the fancy bells and whistles on their site. (To the great delight of web designers, of course). It started to become obvious though that these sites weren’t receiving any traffic. People had thought that if they had a big website, it would be easily spotted. Alas it wasn’t so.
Web marketing needs a whole new approach. Traditional marketers would say your site is an advertisement of your products or services. And so to get people to visit the site, they’ll promote it in the press and media, and on TV and radio. Basically keeping it within their frame of reference. They produce the pretty brochure and then market every possible avenue to generate enquiries to send that brochure to. However, this process illustrates an absolute misunderstanding of website marketing.
This process only utilises the web as viewing gallery, which is quite wrong. It allows us to search and research – to discuss ideas and interact with others. It’s completely interactive, bringing massive choice to billions of people. We can find the sites we’re looking for because Google, Bing and Yahoo etc. have formulated huge site directories to simplify the task. Can you imagine trying to find something in Yellow Pages if there wasn’t an order and an index? We’d be forever frustrated and disappointed.
The Search Engines solve this dilemma. And so marketing is forced to move on. If you want customers to find you on the internet, indexation by Google etc. is paramount. Yet if you only show up a few pages in, you might as well forget it. By the time you get to page 5, you can forget it, unless you’ve got a very detail-oriented and persistent customer!
So to bring in more profit and give all sites a chance to be top dog, the SE’s gave businesses an ingenious paid facility to promote themselves. It’s known as PPC, or Pay per Click, because you’re only charged when a user opts for your link. It was revolutionary. Fundamentally, you were now only charged when an interested party looked at what you had to offer. Pay per Click is a very well targeted method of marketing. With the right knowledge it can produce a good return.
But Pay-Per-Click is heavily over-subscribed now in most sectors. Costs per click have been heavily driven up, mostly by inexperienced marketers bidding too highly. We’re now experiencing some costs per click that make profits unattainable. Especially where large volumes of clicks are required to make a sale. And so the alternative approach of optimising sites to organically move them up to the front page is now more interesting to many companies.
To illustrate the challenge: Visit Google now and search for some of your company’s keywords. Do you feature in the first three lists? Most likely not. In other words, you’re no-where to be found. If the answer was yes, are those terms actually being used by customers?
You could be relatively happy with PPC. But are you professionally managing your campaign? What kind of returns are you getting? Do you measure the quality of each campaign and draw up accurate statistics? Without testing and measuring, you can’t be sure what works best. There will always be an element of guesswork (and consequently less than perfect results) without accurate stats.
It’s very evident today that both global and local commerce are moving swiftly onto the internet. Make the most of this trend. Unless you embrace the internet and utilize all of its advantages, your business will become a dinosaur.
(C) Jason Kendall SEO. Hop over to EvolveSEM.co.uk for logical ideas on SEM Consultants.
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