Search Engine Marketing is vital today. So we now need to look carefully at where the commercial market-place is going. Any service or product related company must have a website – that’s a given. But a web presence by itself won’t bring results. Purchasers won’t necessarily be able to find you.
Look at it this way – imagine a retail enterprise with new premises: Stock has been bought, and the overhead is high. The staff are all poised – And discover they’re in a tiny backstreet, 3 miles out of the city centre on the 4th floor, and the road outside is closed due to a diversion. Worse still, no thought has gone into promoting where they are. Can you see a fundamental flaw? And so it is for most websites.
The World Wide Web has caused a paradigm shift in marketing. Around the time of the millennium, it was thought that having a website was everything. Vast amounts of money were spent on all singing/dancing web sites. This trend was cheerfully encouraged by on-line design companies, who relished the business! But just the existence of the site didn’t bring in the customers. They’d thought that simply having a site on the web meant customers could see them. In fact, this wasn’t the case at all.
A traditional approach to marketing breaks down on the web. Off-line marketing people would suggest your website is like a sales brochure. Consequently they’ll recommend the time-honoured promotional methods of newspaper advertising and the media. Really just assuming websites need the same treatment as everything else! First they make a nice looking catalogue. Then they utilise various marketing methods to get people to look at the catalogue. Yet in the web economy, this approach is way off the mark!
The World Wide Web isn’t simply a passive display board. It’s a vast interactive tool for people all over the world. We can discover in-depth information, research products and services and chat with others before we buy. The Search Engines – such as Google and MSN (now Bing) – have made this easy for us as customers. They’ve put together massive directories to guide us. Yellow Pages would be a nightmare if it wasn’t indexed properly. How would you ever find what you wanted?
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 give all companies a chance to be on the first pages, the Search Engines came up with a new form of paid advertising. You only pay when someone actually chooses your advert – hence the name ‘Pay-Per-Click’. This caused quite a storm when it happened. Basically, the only time you now paid was when someone who was already interested asked to look at your site. This is an incredibly targeted way of advertising, and done properly, can yield some exceptional results.
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.
Have a go at this – Go to Google or Bing RIGHT NOW and type in a few product or service keywords. Can you see your website on the 1st three pages? It’s very doubtful. So you might as well not be there at all! If it is there, would clients really use those keywords?
You may have some successful experience of PPC advertising. Can you be sure you’re working it as efficiently as possible? Is your ROI satisfactory? Have you got an eye on the stats that measure your results? It’s important to split test your campaigns – are you doing this? If you don’t know what your stats are, then guaranteed you’re not getting the best results for your money.
Sales statistics are now clearly showing that both UK and worldwide commerce is undergoing a paradigm shift towards online sales and marketing. Companies must acknowledge this, to survive and flourish in today’s economy.
(C) Jason Kendall SEM. Visit EvolveSEM.co.uk for clear business tips on SEM Experts.