In these uncomfortable financial times, it seems that more and more people are moving towards the internet for purchases and away from traditional high street shops. But does every business need to have a web site?
There will be those organisations that most likely do not need a web site, such as a small food supplier who may well have stock that is only on the shelf for a few days at the most and so does not lend itself to online marketing. Maybe the best option for businesses such as this is to have an entry in Yell.com or another of the local listing websites, so that anyone looking for a local organisation will locate them there. They will also be able to get basic details such as opening times, telephone number etc. This should prove enough for such a business.
The large supermarkets all have web sites that can be used for Online Marketing and have well organized delivery services to ensure that groceries arrive quickly. However this sort of service may well be beyond the resources of a small local greengrocer, or the like and is most likely unnecessary.
A lot of marketing teams within organisations that are selling on line think that they know how future customers will search for their goods or services. Unfortunately their ideas are often clouded or prejudiced by the rest of their industry and the keywords they choose may be way off the mark. So although they could well attain a page 1 Search Engine Placement listing for a certain keyword, the fact that no customer is searching for that word means that the page 1 listing is valuless as no traffic will flow from it to the business website. We say “no” traffic at this point, the chances of absolutely no one using a certain word or phrase is doubtful, what we mean here is that the vast bulk of customers all use other words to find the products online and if the organisation is to make good money from internet sales this is what it should tap into.
Some companies have recognized this fault in their Online Marketing and have tasked the appropriate team to brainstorm the whole product line trying to come up with the layman’s phrases for all of the things they offer. This is a step closer to getting a much more useful list of keywords, although here there is still a inclination for the chosen words to come very much from inside the industry.
Asking customers what they did to find you is a ideal way of seeing things from the other side of the fence. On the other hand it can be quite time consuming and sometimes a little frustrating for the customer, who merely wants to make his purchase and leave the site, rather than filling in even the smallest of questionnaires. The other problem with this sort of selection is that it will take a large amount of time to get the amount of information needed to make an informed choice.
A Look At The Reasons For And Against Trying Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization For Your Website Marketing
Looking at two of the ways of promoting your company using Online Marketing in terms of their positive and negative aspects may help you to select which method to use for your own company.
Firstly we will consider the pay per click method, a way of making sure that you are visible to the people searching for your chosen keywords by paying for a Search Engine Placement in the sponsored links portion of the search results page. This system has a number of positive attributes. The biggest is the speed at which results are produced. To set up a campaign like this takes less than an hour and within seven days you will have some very valuable information about how it is going. Visitors to your site will increase immediately and as long as you are selling what the searcher understood that you were selling from your pay per click ad your sales should follow not far behind.
Another great part of the pay per click method is that if you do happen to get something wrong, say in the picking your keywords, it is clear very quickly. You can identify in a matter of days that although you are getting loads of clicks through to your website no one is buying anything. This will prompt you to review your campaign before too much money has been poured down the drain. It is possible with pay per click to specify your budget and therefore plan financially knowing that you will pay no more that the maximum you yourself have chosen.
Online Advertising Using The Skills Of Search Engine Placement With The Help Of A Search Engine Optimisation Organisation
Online marketing; how can it be achieved and how does one go about it? These are questions that are regularly asked in regard to the online business marketplace. To answer these questions we must first describe the vocabularly.
Online Marketing: Advertising for your business so as to draw new, and keep existing, “customers” using the internet.
Pay per click can be a great way to start your Online Marketing campaign. However it is easy to get into a difficult situation if you are new to the system or if you do not keep a close check on the statistics that will be produced by your pay per click provider.
The concept is straightforward, you commission you provider, normally a search engine company, to display your advert in one of the non organic areas of the Search Engine Placement listings ie the search results. You tell them to only display the advert when certain keywords or phrases are typed into the search by the searcher. The beauty of the deal is that there is no spend for that advert until a customer actually clicks on the advert to take them right to your website. So in theory you are only being charged for customers who are really interested in your goods or services.
The first issue to be extremely careful about is which keywords or phrases you go for. Too broad a choice of key words may give you hundreds of clicks (and therefore a massive pay per click bill) but hardly any sales, as only a small percentage of the searchers using those words and phrases were either interested in your exact product, or ready to buy right now. The trick therefore is to be as explicit as possible with your keywords. If you only supply pens it would be far better to have all the searchers keying in “pens for sale” see your advert than it would to have the much bigger category of searchers who would input just “pens” or even “stationery for sale”. With “pens” the searcher could be looking merely for information on pens, when they were invented, different kinds, reviews etc. They may all click through to your site, costing you money but not with any intention of actually purchasing one! With “Stationery” of course you will see a large number of people searching for the word but only a percentage of them will be looking to buy a pen. So the advert may be listed often but have a small “click through” rate.
In the present difficult financial climate those organisations which use Online Marketing for their products or services should have it in their best interest to be easily found by hopeful web searches, carried out by current or potential clients.
Recently some organisations have failed due to the financial downturn and there have been many shops going under, notably Woolworth, who had a large retail presence across the UK, which has had an effect on both other organisations and consumers alike.
It would not be unknown for landlords of High Street location to try and compensate for lost revenue from failed organisations by increasing the levies for those who are still there.
It would be wonderful to choose a search engine optimization company, set them to work on your webpages safe in the knowledge that after 3 months you would have all 15 of your selected keywords on page one, position one of the Search Engine Placement listings. Unfortunately this is not usually possible, unless by some stroke of luck you have no competitors at all and in this position you’d be silly to spend money on optimization at all.
So what can you hope to achieve from the services of a Search Engine Optimization Company? Well that depends on whether they are performing ethical or natural ideas or techniques that have been planned to simply push any sort of traffic to a site. Of course the outcome for the company is much more valuable if natural methods are used even though it may not look as striking in the initial stages. Working from the company side of things, natural optimization will begin by reviewing what types of products or services the company offers. The idea is to identify how users of those products or services in fact describe what they are looking for in search engine searches. A lot of companies really believe that they know how their customers do this, however a lot of the time they can be misguided. Once this research produces the pertinent terms and phrases these are interspersed on applicable pages, in coding and in titles so that the search engines have the best possible chance of firstly identifying it and secondly understanding what it is about.
Once this is complete, online promotional activity is carried out by the SEO Company to compound the work done to the site. The idea behind this natural advertsing is that the Search engine is assisted in it’s task, which is to match the searcher with applicable websites. From this type of searche engine marketing it is definitely possible to make certain your keywords attain page one Search Engine Placement listings, and potentially, depending on the quantity of promotional work you are willing to pay for, it is possible to get to position 1 too. In reality however most businesses find that somewhere in the top half of page 1 for their selected keywords is good enough, bringing in vast amounts of trade compared to the amounts the website generated prior to the optimization.
If you have made the decision to take up the services of a SEO Company you have in all probability done this with a view to increasing your internet trade. So it would seem obvious that you need to ready your workforce for an increase in this area and make sure that you can maintain the additional sales.
Ideally the SEO Company will have given you an estimate of the number of “hits” you are likely to get once the method achieves it’s goal of getting you a good Search Engine Placement positioning, but clearly these will not all come straightaway. As the position increasingly improves so do the visits to the website. So in fact you will be able to steadily increase the number of sales that you accomplish over a period of approximately two months. This should give you plenty of time to adjust production for example to meet the growing demands. It will also allow for any issues that arise to be ironed out whilst demand is growing rather than the difficult transformation from low level sales one day to a deluge the next.
That said this comparatively gentle improvement can, over the two months, have a incredible affect on your business. While you have been intent on the immediate issue of ensuring product goes out of the door it is probable that other areas also needing attention will be overlooked. Your supply chain may be one of those areas. If you swiftly and without warning, double the amount of raw material you order from a supplier will they be able to meet that demand? If they can, will the delivery times be affected? It may be a good idea to have consultation with members of your supply chain to let them know your strategy and forecasts and ask them to point out any potential issues at the start of the process. Obviously there is no guaranteed order and the discussion may allow latent problems to be overcome.
During a era when every penny counts for businesses, Online Marketing has become much more popular. Of the different types of advertising on line, search engine optimization (also known as SEO), is by far the most used.
Use of a search engine optimization company can help companies to improve their search engine placement to a place which ensures prospective clients, who are really searching for the products they supply, are likely to discover them.
Unlike some other forms of advertising, the people who reach the company through search engines are actually looking for a definite product and are therefore much more likely to buy, giving a much better return on their investment than, for example, a TV advertisement may do.
Search Engines want to do a proper job for the masses of searchers that use them weekly. Doing a proper job is rather simple, it involves getting that searcher to a website that will satisfy their need, i.e. the keywords they chose to enter into the search. If the search engine can do this and the searcher has a successful visit to one or more sites offered at the top of the Search Engine Placement listings then it has done it’s job well. The searcher is happy and will use the search engine again, and it maintains it’s traffic which means that advertisements placed on it can demand a good price.
So it is obvious why the search engines do not like to be tricked into offering a searcher a website that does not answer their question. After a few experiences of irritation caused by a search engine listing irrelevant sites the searcher may well use an alternative engine, convert to that engine, and the business is lost. The search engine companies are therefore very keen to stay ahead of the unethical methods of Online Marketing. The likes of Google, Yahoo and Ask obviously have massive resources and a good amount of these are used in combating the trickery. They will keep up with the scams and will basically not list any sites which are promoted in this way. Not good news for the business as they may be wholly unaware of the processes being used, but will unavoidably suffer the most from the “punishment”.
So trying to con the search engine is a waste of time, although it may bring in income for a SEO Company in the early stages, these will quickly melt away as either the client realises that the business brought to his site via the Online Marketing is useless or the search engine spots the trick.
