Impact Media's SEO Blog

No Marketing Manager can expect their company to survive these days without a comprehensive knowledge of Online Marketing. Whilst marketing on the Internet involves very similar principles, the means and methods are different and so we’ve produced this simple guide to introduce you to the basics of online marketing:

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a way of promoting your business online by optimizing your website and its content for the Search Engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. The companies that rank highest for certain search terms or ‘keywords’ get the greatest number of visitors. Clearly, there is immense competition for certain keywords but legitimate SEO techniques can help you outreach your competitors. Part of the SEO process is developing a great number of inbound links, these are like tiny testimonials from other relevant websites and the Search Engines see this as a sign of your credibility and boost your rankings.

Paid Search (PPC)

Using Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, you can immediately begin advertising your products. But the important benefit of online advertising is that you are only marketing your goods or services to people that are looking for them! This vastly cuts your advertising budget immediately. What’s more, the response time from ad to sale is dramatically shortened, allowing you to see faster results.

Article Marketing/Press Releases

Article Marketing is a very cost effective way of getting people to visit your website. It means placing high quality, relevant, well written articles on your website or submitting them to the best article sites. Articles are keyword rich, which means they attract people searching for your product/services. Articles serve two further purposes. First, they build your credibility online by demonstrating your expertise. Second, they provide lots of the inbound links we wrote about above.

Press Releases are similar, they are keyword rich, they provide inbound links but they also raise online profile. Just like offline PRs, don’t release unless you think it’s newsworthy.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is often wrongly called ’spam’. A well-written and thoughtful email marketing campaign should be aimed only at people that want to receive your messages. Like articles, fill them with informative and relevant content and keep the sales pitch gentle. Build credibility and rapport by offering something of value. Sending thousands of these messages costs nothing, which means that you can afford to pay for a good copywriter to create your emails for you.

Social Media

It’s not a phase or a fad; Social Media Optimisation is the latest place to begin developing your online marketing. Facebook and BEBO allow ads, but better than this, you can give a face to your brand. Loyal customers can interact with you and offer direct feedback without the need for focus groups.

Blogging is a less formal way of article marketing and a great way to build a following. YouTube is a very popular way for people to communicate to thousands of people with a simple video. Releasing your ads on YouTube can cause them to spread across the world, so whilst you still pay production costs, your distribution costs rapidly shrink. Video Marketing is one of the latest and fastest growing sectors of the online marketing industry.

Blended Approach

As with any good marketing campaign, your approach must be a blend of off and online marketing strategies. Combining all of these different parts of the online marketing picture will allow you to develop a dominant position in this new marketplace.

If you’re a Finance Director, you probably don’t think you have much to do with the online marketing of your company. However, online marketing is the answer to many Finance Director’s prayers during this time of economic trouble. Online marketing is a straightforward and effective way to immediately begin reducing costs and dramatically increasing profits.

Advertising
How much does it cost to put a 30 second advert on commercial television? In the UK, the average cost is £140,000. That’s for one advert that airs once. For that cost, you get blanket coverage of a particular broadcast region. But how many of those people seeing the ad would actually want to buy your product? And what if the people who would respond positively to that ad were at work or making a cup of tea during your commercial? With Online marketing, you can target your market directly.

Pay per Click
Using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you pay only for those potential customers that actually click on your adverts. It’s competitive, so you bid to compete with other companies for the keywords in your ad. But with £140,000 and a professionally managed PPC campaign you could receive many more leads or sales due to the highly effective targeting of PPC. What’s more, the ads appear any time of the day or night and for whatever period you set. And there’s a certain commitment involved in clicking an ad that isn’t achieved through simply viewing a television commercial.

In the next two years, Internet advertising will take over from all other forms of traditional marketing. Why pay more and receive less?

SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is another way to ensure that people looking for your product find it and spend their money with you and not the competition. The Internet is a competitive marketplace and with billions of pounds of consumer’s money at stake each year, getting a high placement on Google really matters. SEO is a specialist craft and requires an expert but again the cost is very little compared to other forms of traditional marketing.

People go to the Internet to find the things they want to buy. When your website comes up top on Google, you get most of the attention and most of the business. This is a very cheap alternative to traditional advertising and could save you tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds.

Website
Your website is the new place to do business. The website is now your marketing pitch, your point of sale and your customer service centre. It’s your public face and it comes at the fraction of the cost of maintaining buildings, paying the wages and travel costs of a sales force, investing in tradeshows, printing expensive glossy brochures, engaging in costly direct marketing or cold calling campaigns. Your website is the greatest tool in reducing your costs and increasing your business.

Britain’s recession is causing many Finance Directors to force more and more cut backs. Businesses need to tighten their belts, even those that are currently in a growth period. As the Head of Finance, you have two choices, continue with these devastating cut backs, redundancies and wage freezes or make real savings by transforming your costly offline marketing into a cheaper, streamlined and dynamic revenue source.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of making your website (and therefore your product or service) appear in a prime position on search engine pages.  Of course, this is a highly competitive business, with thousand of businesses not only competing for primary positions on web SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but also thousands of businesses competing for the job to achieve these positions for businesses in the UK.

As a Marketing Manager, you can’t ignore the massive power of the Internet as a marketing tool.  E-Marketing has taken the basic traditional marketing strategies and exploded them.  Now, without SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Paid Inclusion and Paid Placement, your product or service will have zero product positioning on the Internet. So what should you do?

Let’s look at the three different areas of SEM:

SEO
Search Engine Optimisation involves optimising a website and its content for the best search engine results when the search engine’s spiders crawl the website each month.

This involves hundreds of potential tweaks and techniques that can be used to increase or improve your results positioning.  You should only use techniques that are approved by Google and the other search engines, otherwise you run the risk of having your website banned from them altogether!

The use of keywords and phrases within the content of the website and within meta-tag areas help the spiders to work out what your website is about and where it should fall in the rankings.

Paid Inclusion
You can pay the search engines to include your website in particular indexes of result listings.  This is essentially buying your ranking for a yearly fee, although you only usually get a single page for that fee and then there may still be charges per click.  There is a thin line between Paid Inclusion and PPC.  Paid Inclusion is particularly useful where traditional SEO techniques might not be able to help the website, such as when the advertiser wants to use dynamic pages that do not show up well on Google spider crawls.

Paid Placement (PPC)
Pay per Click, or PPC as it is known, is a marketing method whereby the advertiser only pays when a user clicks on an online advertisement.  This click takes the user to the advertiser’s website.  PPC Ads can be placed on websites, within search engine results pages, on company blogs and social media sites.  Google AdWords is the most successful example of this type of advertising although these days, many other companies use this method of advertising.

Advertisers using PPC generally bid for the most frequently used keywords for their product.  These keywords are used within the search terms that a user might type into a search engine.  The highest bidder for the chosen terms gets the best position or placement.  On Google, these ads appear above the normal SERPs listings and down the right hand side of the page too.   This method of advertising is referred to as ‘Sponsored Links’.

No one SEM method will work above the other.  To get the best results, a combination of all three methods is advised by SEM experts.

At Impact Media, we can create a tailored package of combined SEM methods that would increase your web visibility and give you the kind of presence on the web that would cost thousands more in the traditional off-line marketing arena. Review our search engine marketing services page for details of how we could help your business grow online.