Impact Media's SEO Blog

Search Marketing Careers offer great opportunities during a terrible economic period. Whilst many sectors of business are making people redundant, the growth of the search marketing field offers a range of opportunities now and in the future. Universities and other training institutions are beginning to offer more specialised search marketing education to produce graduates that can make the most of this rapidly growing area.

The Internet marketing field has developed quickly and strongly, responding to the need for high quality, targeted marketing with lower costs than traditional marketing and advertising agencies could offer.

So what kinds of career opportunities exist within the Search Marketing field?

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation Specialist
Optimising websites, performing research and selecting keywords for clients. The role requires someone who stays ahead of the game and is completely up to date with changes in Search Engine policies and procedures. SEO specialists know how to fix website traffic problems and make positive suggestions to clients.

Web Article Writer
Writing content for websites to be used for increasing traffic and backlinks. Good knowledge of SEO and Keywords helps to create articles with great search potential.

PPC – Pay Per Click Specialist
Devises PPC strategies for clients, picks keywords, creates PPC adverts and analyses traffic and conversions.

Online PR Consultant
Public Relations has now strongly moved into the sphere of the Internet. A company’s reputation and credibility are built on what people think of them. This job is about using the Internet and Social Media to promote the company positively online.

Web Analytics Specialist
An important player in an Internet marketing team, this expert uses their analysis skills and those opportunities provided by software systems to improve their client’s web traffic and conversion rates. As well as having strong analysis abilities, they also need excellent communication skills to inform the client how and what changes are needed to develop their site’s potential.

Social Media Maven
This is one of the newest areas for exploiting the Internet for marketing purposes. Social Media includes the well-known social networking sites such as BEBO, MySpace and Facebook, but also includes YouTube and Blogging. Social Media experts know how to exploit the benefits of Social Media to benefit their client’s business.

Link Builders
To obtain a good relationship with Google, a website should have lots of quality incoming links. The quality is more important than the quantity, so merely signing up for thousands of link directories is not enough. Link Builders negotiate with individuals and companies to ensure that they source links that benefit their clients.

Bloggers
Bloggers are writing experts that can develop short pieces of writing aimed at building reputation, backlinks and SEO possibilities. A good blog can massively benefit a website and bring potential customers and clients from all over the world to your site.

As the Internet continues to dominate business sales and marketing, more and more recession-proof jobs will come into existence. Internet commerce is growing stronger and stronger each month and without people with these skills, businesses will not prosper in this new business environment.

Impact Media are always interested in hearing from talented individuals with a passion for search. If that’s you, get in touch if you’re interested in developing your search marketing career with a leading UK SEO agency.

Social media is an instrument that businesses in the United Kingdom can benefit from. The Internet is a powerful tool for marketing your business and more companies than ever throughout the UK are turning to social media to make a connection with their potential and established clients/customers.

What do we mean by social media? It’s an overarching term to describe websites and web tools that allow user communication and interaction. A social media site or tool allows all to participate in the creation of content. Great examples are YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Twitter. It offers users the ability to connect, communicate and feedback on topics. Social media has many applications and benefits for business.

One of the simplest and largest benefits to any UK-based business using social media is what you get for your money. It’s a very low risk enterprise and the outlay is often minimal and much more effective than traditional advertising methods. You get more for your money.

Another strong benefit is the ability of your customers to provide you with immediate feedback. There’s never been such an immediate and effective way to receive feedback from your client base. Now you can know immediately what they think of your latest update, your newest product or a change in your policies. Whenever Facebook changes a feature, its users immediately begin to discuss it and it makes the International news. Social media is a source of publicity good and bad, but it all creates a buzz around your business.

A further benefit is that you can choose which social media site or tool works best for your business. If you want to update your customers about your latest range of products without much effort, you can use Twitter, a micro blogging tool. However, if you want to speak directly to a large amount of the general public, you can use YouTube to get your message out across the entire world, simply and at low or no cost at all.

A very possible benefit offered by social media is the opportunity to allow your potential customers and clients to get to know and trust you long before they purchase from you. They come to think of you as part of their sphere, they look to you for knowledge, advice, they may even attempt to connect directly with you and this offers them a greater sense that you are a credible and trustworthy source. Then, when it’s time to buy a product/service that you offer, they’ll think of you.

Are you unsure about something in your business? Do you need to know what your customers think before you make a decision? Bingo! Just ask them directly and they’ll give you their honest opinion. You no longer need to make decisions based on luck, you can connect with the people who already buy what you sell and they’ll offer you their truthful opinion. Businesses never had this level of connection to their customers before.

Take advantage of social media marketing, it’s low cost and highly effective, businesses can no longer afford to ignore it!

Further Reading:

Marketers Moving to Social Media (eMarketer)

Business South 2009 proved a big success for Impact Media, so much so we have already re-booked our place at Business South 2010. The exhibition, run by JobServe Events Ltd, is to be held at The Rose Bowl in Southampton.

Impact Media’s experts will be on hand to answer all of your Internet Marketing questions and recommend the most effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy for your website.

If you cant wait until the exhibition to see us why not Contact Us Now or pop along to our offices for a chat?

See you at Business South 2010!

Alexander Hadleigh are specialist Wine Merchants and Importers, seeking expert Link Building Services to help improve the Link Popularity of their website.

Having taken the award for Best Link Popularity Company from TopSEO’s in March 2009, Impact Media were the first choice.

To read more about how we can help you please visit our Link Building Services page.

First Class Sailing is a leading RYA recognised sailing school, with classrooms in Central London and yachts operating in the Solent from Shamrock Quay, Southampton.

We were approached by First Class Sailing to implement their Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, which will see us utilising both Natural (SEO) and Paid Search (PPC) to maximum effect.

Please visit our Search Engine Marketing page to read more about or range of services.

Smile 4 You are the UK’s only official retailer of Dr George’s Power Teeth Whitening Kit. The company require professional Pay Per Click (PPC) Management to ensure that they get maximum return on investment from their Google AdWord’s campaign.

We are delighted to have been selected to manage the Smile 4 You account and look forward to working with the company and delivering results.

To find out more about our services please visit our Pay Per Click Management page.

1: Use a Good SEO Agency
If you’re not an SEO expert, you’ll need to hire a top SEO agency, to deliver results and avoid the many costly mistakes that amateur SEO tinkering causes. A good SEO agency will have a proven track record and not be bashful about their successes. A great agency understands how to segue SEO into your present marketing plans and develop your online marketing in tandem with your current strategy.

It’s vital that your website includes optimised content and copy, but an excellent SEO agency will know how to select and place your target keywords throughout the site copy without killing the readability of the site or the experience of the visitor.

Great agencies know that the long way round is the shortest way home. They avoid short-cuts, automated submission and quick fix solutions.

2: There are no Guarantees
It’s vital that you understand in the world of SEO, there are few absolute guarantees. People that offer them are looking to earn quick money. A good, solid, blended approach to online marketing with SEO is the only way to deliver results, but the delivery of exact results such as the Number 1 position on Google is not something that can be guaranteed. Positions can be improved, traffic can be increased, but don’t listen to false guarantees.

3: Blend SEO into your PR Strategy
Slowly but surely SEO and PR strategies are merging. It’s no longer possible for you to plan a future PR strategy without considering SEO. The success of the Internet to reach the widest public audience means all of your online PR material can be optimised for Search Engines. Anything that’s published on the web becomes a way to interest customers. To survive in an increasingly competitive market, marketing managers will also need to begin using SEO with Social Media tools such as blogging, Squidoo, Twitter and Facebook to keep up with the competition.

4: Content is King
Relevant, fresh and original content is king. By keeping your website up to date, by publishing helpful articles and a daily blog, you not only attract frequent recurrent visitors, but also help increase your flow of visitors. Encourage your visitors to comment, debate and discuss your product/service with you and others and you’ll develop a community around your brand. This community can be instantly accessed to test new ideas and receive immediate feedback from.

5: Avoid the IT Crowd
IT specialists may be able to design and build your website, they may even be able to cobble together a bit of optimisation, but SEO is one of the core marketing activities that you should be undertaking. If you don’t have the expertise, then passing it off to your IT people is like passing off some of your most important offline marketing to your accountant. Poor SEO choices can have a dire effect on your online success.

Effective SEO for Marketing involves tracking leads, analytics, conversions and sales and adjusting your online marketing accordingly. Your team needs to make all of the SEO decisions, particularly content and copy generation and how to factor SEO into your overall public relations strategy. That’s why expert knowledge or advice on SEO is essential for all marketing managers.

Recently the Government announced their plan that every home in the UK would have broadband by 2012. By that date, marketing experts project that the Internet will have overtaken all other forms as the dominant advertising source in the market. The result is that any retailer that doesn’t adjust their approach to the changing marketplace will sink – like Woolworths.

The marketplace has already changed, the rules have changed and companies that do not rethink their approach to marketing will simply disappear. The traditional approach to marketing is to sell an average product to the average person through mass marketing. It requires huge amounts of money aimed at interrupting enough people with regularly placed television, radio and newspaper adverts. It’s a numbers game, interrupt enough people often enough and they’ll buy your product. (You hope!)

But times have changed. Companies that have embraced the new marketing approaches are succeeding because their attitude to business has changed too. The entire company has embraced the change in the marketplace. The market doesn’t wait, it wants it right now. The market wants specifically what they came looking for, and if you spam them with general adverts on television or email, they’ll fast forward or press delete.

Let’s look at two old marketing approaches:

Take Direct Mail Marketing. Imagine you send out a marketing letter to all of the people on your mailing list in London. Paper, envelope, printing, and postage – all costs. Statistically, you will get a 1% response rate. So oftentimes, your sales division is working hard to cover the costs of marketing to 1% of your customers.

Take television advertising. The most expensive form of old-style advertising. Its aim is to interrupt and influence people’s future decision-making. Yet, research shows that only 7% of people could remember ads and which company they were for. Well, 7% is better than 1%, but at what cost?

Now consider the new approach to marketing, online or Internet marketing. What’s so good about it? It’s cheap, it’s quick and it’s without boundaries. These days people want to pay less and they want what they’re looking for immediately. If I want to purchase some vitamins, I want them now. So I go online, read about them, see who has the best brands at the best prices, and order them so that I have them tomorrow. People go from interest to ownership, prospect to customer within minutes. You’ve cut out time for indecision, you’ve cut out time to forget the advert and you’ve cut out the fast forward button.

The distance between company and consumer has reduced, the distance between advert and action has been compacted – speed has become essential. BUT – speed means we’re less patient. Tell us what we want to know now, or risk deletion, so when someone makes it to your website, or reads your permission-given email, you better be prepared, or you’re going in the trash.

Woolworths are re-emerging; they’re going to operate as an online store. But if Woolworths try to run their new business using their old business marketing tactics, mark our words, they won’t last long.

Impact Media have just returned from a very successful 2 day exhibition at Business South. We got a chance to speak to some of the south’s businesses about their search marketing activities and how they could better the results they were getting online.

Business South 2009

The exhibition gave us a good opportunity to catch up with some existing clients and partners, as well as provide many new prospects with the information they were seeking as to how they can benefit from our professional search engine marketing (SEM) services.

If you didn’t manage to make it down to the exhibition please feel free to Contact Us Now to find out how we can help you generate a higher return on investment from your Internet marketing spend.

Clearly you need to be talented to work at Google. Sometimes though, this can lead to a superiority complex and following hot on the trail of Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, calling Twitter a “poor man’s email”, it’s now been reported in MediaPost that their analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, has made a comment that “hits”, far from being a way of measuring online success, is actually an acronym standing for “How Idiots Track Success”.

Whilst there may be a degree of truth in the point, the way the message was delivered could have been delivered more subtlety.

In terms of success criteria, he does goes on to make a valid point that bounce rate is a more meaningful measure of how successful your site is performing. Obviously, there are many ways to drive traffic to a website but if visitors aren’t finding what they want when they arrive, why bother spending time and money on getting them there in the first place?

Yahoo! announced on Friday another change to his search engine rankings algorithm. This comes soon after the last update in January.

Expect to see some movement in the natural results. It also serves as a useful reminder that having a position in the search engine results is not a right. SEO is about setting your site up to be seen in the best possible light by the search engines but cannot act as a cast iron certainty that you will get the positions you desire.