We are now far enough from the dot com explosion of the early 90’s that most businesses have invested the time and money into developing a company website. Despite this fact, many people mistakenly hold the belief that designing a website is the end of a process. The true realization is that a company website will never reach its full potential to drive sales and acquire new customers without the help of a strategic online marketing campaign.
Without an online marketing strategy, there is the distinct possibility that your website could sit idle, seeing few visitors and providing no benefit to your brand or your bottom line. There are three ways that users can be directed to your website:
* Direct Traffic - Typing in the URL of your website into a browser.
* Referral Traffic - Clicking a link from a referring website.
* Search Engine Traffic - Clicking a link from the results of a search engine query.
The goal of online marketing is to increase all 3 types of traffic and is best done so by utilizing two tactics, search engine optimization and search engine marketing.
Search engine optimization describes the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the organic search results. The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is for your website to show as the #1 result for specific keywords of interests. Online marketers achieve this goal by perfecting 3 techniques:
* The editing of a web page’s content (words and HTML Code) to increase its relevance for specific keywords.
* The elimination of barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
* Increasing the number of referring web pages that link to your company’s site.
Making the Case for SEO
SEO is the backbone of any good online marketing strategy for a number of reasons. Your typical American may watch 2 hours of TV a day, listen to 1 hour of radio, and read 2 magazines per month. That isn’t a lot of time for advertisers to make an impression. In the age of modern technology, where nearly everyone is in possession of a smart phone, your typical American has access to the Internet nearly 24 hours a day and virtually from anywhere (with the exception of maybe elevators and basements). This affords businesses who utilize online marketers the unique opportunity to interact with their customers at all times throughout the buying process.
Another benefit of search engine optimization chennai is its longevity. A website that is properly optimized will continue to perform long after SEO efforts have stopped. It is literally the gift that keeps on giving, directing highly relevant, and highly targeted traffic to your website on a continual basis. Businesses in extremely competitive industries may suffer slightly, but dollar for dollar, it is the most efficient use of a business’ marketing budget.
If you aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid just yet, have a look at some search engine stats. In December of 2009, people across the world performed 131 billion search queries. That equates to nearly 1.5 trillion searches a year worldwide. With a growth rate of 46% in 2009, we can expect 2010 to result in an estimated 2.2 trillion searches.
Numbers this large can be hard to wrap your brain around. Let’s try and put things in a bit more perspective. The latest estimates show that there are approximately 1.97 billion people in the world that have access to the Internet. Factoring this population in with the estimated number of annual searches, means that on average, an individual with Internet access performs 3 searches per day. While this number may not seem all that astounding, see if you can name another service that gets utilized 3 times a day, every day. The benefits of ranking #1 for top keywords related to your business are clearly evident.
The other half of the equation to a successful online marketing campaign is a strategic search engine marketing plan. Search engine marketing is also known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising or Paid Search advertising. Paid search results typically show up at the top, bottom, and right side of the search results and among the websites included in each search engine’s respective content network. PPC differs from search engine optimization in that advertisers are able to increase the visibility of their website in the paid search results by adjusting the amount they are willing to spend per click that brings one visitor to their website.
The preliminary stage of a search engine marketing campaign is to compile a list of keyword phrases that are relevant to your business. Some examples of keyword phrases relevant to the manufacturing industry may be “pallet racking equipment” or “industrial hopper”. After gathering a large list of keywords, it is then up to advertisers to decide on the financial aspects of their campaign – ie. What their daily budget will be and how much they are willing to bid for each keyword in their list. Once your daily spend is reached, your advertisements will stop displaying, ensuring that you don’t exceed your marketing budget.
Making the Case for SEM
SEM is the cash cow of the search engines, resulting in ad revenues of $13.5 billion in 2008. Paid search is popular because of the unique opportunities it offers advertisers. No other service can offer advertisers the ability to reach more of the population. Google’s PPC service, appropriately named Google AdWords, is available in 38 different languages and over 250 countries.
Another benefit of SEM is the customization. The simple PPC interfaces developed by the search engines allow advertisers to target their ads geographically (as specific as individual zip codes), topically (on websites relevant to your business), and hourly (tailored to the peak hours of your business). This results in extreme targeting, with the PPC networks only showing ads to potential customers when they're actively searching for what businesses like yours have to offer. There are also several options as to how the ads are displayed. Advertisers can create text ads and banner ads in a variety of shapes and sizes.
Lastly, the paid search networks allow for the unique ability to track results and improve your Return on Investment. Using online tracking tools, advertisers can glance over the performance of their campaigns and make educated decisions as to how to maximize their investment. This aspect is completely impossible to do when using traditional marketing channels. You could possibly infer results from T.V ratings of the program during which your commercial ran, or by the magazine’s circulation that your ad was printed in, but these are nothing more than estimates. Paid search allows you to see, to the cent, how much revenue your PPC campaign has made you.
Spelling out all the benefits makes this decision fairly cut and dry. It costs nothing to develop PPC ads and there’s no minimum spend. You pay only when consumers click on your ad to go to your site. And you can adjust, pause, or resume your ad at any time. This makes PPC a grea
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