Impact Media's SEO Blog

In a recent study commissioned by the European Union suspicions have been confirmed that internet users don’t want to pay for content.

It would seem, contrary to what industry executives have been saying that consumers’ behavior has nothing to do with peer-to-peer technology (P2P). The report shows that many people claim they would not pay for online content even if all other free options were taken away. More…

An excellent article has just been published by eMarketer which summarises the output from the recent DDB conference held in London.

Highlights include the fact that Google is apparently the 8th most popular UK TV channel based on audience attention. Even more scary (if your surname is Grade) is that Google’s revenues are 30x per hour more than those of ITV. Numbers for Setanta were not included…

All in all, a fascinating insight into how the Internet continues to eat in television revenues and how the various players in this competitive market are taking steps to respond.

Read eMarketer’s Delivering Digital Marketing article in full.

The Internet has completely changed the way that customers look for and get what they want. It has also changed where they search for and where they buy goods and services. Consequently, those businesses that wish to remain profitable are changing their marketing methods to respond to this transformation in their customer’s buying habits.

Traditional forms of marketing such as newspaper and television advertising, direct mail and cold calling simply do not integrate well with the powerful medium of the Internet and have become less and less effective as a result.

One of the most beneficial ways that the Internet has changed marketing is the dramatic reduction in cost. With direct mail for instance, someone has to be paid to produce the materials that are sent out. This involves designing, writing, editing and printing costs. It’s an expensive way of connecting with a limited number of potential customers and its difficult to measure the success of direct mail. In comparison, email marketing can be performed by anyone with rudimentary marketing skills and a computer.

In the past, a company in Southampton could not easily market their products/services to potential customers in Australia without great cost. Yet the Internet has no geographic boundaries and whatever marketing is prepared for Hampshire can easily be tailored for Queensland. Internet marketers can target customers anywhere in the world and anyone with a computer can respond to their advertising/marketing and purchase goods or services with the click of a button.

With the vast increase in popularity of the Internet, the speed of marketing has changed. Customers can be immediately responding to advertisements that were posted only seconds ago. These adverts can be changed with equal speed to respond to need.

The Internet is driven by information or content. The more high quality content you can provide a potential customer with, the greater your credibility and the increased chances that they will spend their money with you. Both building and web-based businesses need to address this issue and provide potential clients with the information they need to make the decision to buy from you. Again, the production of content is time consuming but not a costly activity, allowing companies of different scales to compete with each other.

Through social marketing, word of mouth or buzz is instantly created around products and brands. Again, social marketing is a low-cost/high benefit method of marketing online. Traditional marketing cannot possibly compete with the efficacy of Internet marketing for speed, accuracy of qualified leads and low costs.

Traditional marketing has been badly affected by the change to Internet Marketing. One only has to see how the commercial television stations have incurred massive debts associated with rapidly decreasing advertising revenue.

In the past 12 months, the traditional marketing department has all but died. Any company that wants to succeed in the new Internet-changed marketplace must create an integrated approach, a strategy for marketing that fuses together limited traditional methods with the multi-faceted approaches of Internet marketing.

In the past, Internet marketing has been ignored, labeled a ‘fad’, a phase that will eventually pass. Those businesses that do not want to disappear in the global recession can’t afford to share this outdated viewpoint.

During a recession, everyone has two objectives: save money and make more. Internet marketing is an effective way to achieve both objectives and here are 5 top tips for marketing during the recession:

1. Smart Spending

Experts at Harvard Business School conclude that spending on marketing and advertising is one of the best ways to beat the recession. But you must get the most for your money. Internet marketing has many advantages over traditional marketing, but the most obvious is the low pricing structures. Internet advertising and marketing are a fraction of the phenomenal sums charged by traditional marketing and advertising agencies.

2: Precision Targeting

Internet marketing helps you connect directly with your potential customers. This is a significant advantage during a recession. Instead of widespread blanket marketing (the expensive kind), you can target your market by the area they are in and precisely how they are choosing to word their searches for your products or services.

To ensure a smart spend, you can target your marketing to a geographic area and set a budget that you can afford. Once you’ve had time to analyse the results, you can make smarter spending decisions.

3. Measure It

To ensure the cost effectiveness, you must be able to measure the success of your marketing. This has traditionally been very difficult to gauge from a television advert or billboard. But online marketing is fully measurable. This means you can analyse how effective your various campaigns are and drop the ones costing you money but not delivering desired outcomes.

Google AdWords is one of the most effective marketing/advertising weapons in your contemporary marketing arsenal. It allows smart spending, precision targeting and measurable results.

4. Give It Away

You may have less money, but you still have another valuable resource, time. Marketing effectively during a recession means building credibility. This involves giving away your expertise for free.

If you sell “Red Widgets” and every time I’ve got a question about my current Red Widget, I find the solution on your website, then I’m much more likely to buy my next Red Widget from you when the time comes. Blogging and article writing are marketing activities that cost only time and build credibility, loyalty and a relationship with your potential clients that begins long before they make the decision to buy from you and continues long after they’ve given you their money.

5. Change Your Story

Your customer tells themselves a story when they consider buying your product. They imagine themselves using, and they tell themselves a story about the benefits that it will bring. Whether it’s new office equipment, a motorbike lift or a piece of software, they tell themselves stories.

But during a recession, the customer’s behaviour changes, the story changes and focuses on security and stability, but also a tiny sliver of hope that they can return to spending freely. When your customer’s story changes you must respond by changing the elements of your business that your customer uses to construct their story.

Even during these recessionary times, Impact Media’s search engine marketing services still offer a cost effective to promote your business online. Find out more and if you’d like a no-obligation proposal as to how we could help, contact us to get full details and a risk-free SEO analysis of your site.

These days, when someone has a problem, they go to the Internet for the solution.  Smart Internet marketers have learned to offer their products and services in the form of solutions to those problems.  Nothing could be truer than the area of health and healthcare.  These days, before they even think of calling the Doctor’s Surgery, many people Google their symptoms to see what they can find out.   Even when they’ve been to the Doctor, people still search for more information around what they’ve been told by their physician.

UK Healthcare Spend Continues to Rise

The average family in the UK now spends £1200 per year on private healthcare.  Where do those families look for details of private healthcare providers? The answer, of course, is the Internet and the companies that appear on the first page of Google for the search term they used when looking for their solution.

In the past few years at Impact Media Ltd, we’ve seen an increase in companies looking to us for help in marketing their healthcare products and services online.  Why? Because quite rightly, they want to share in the £15 billion spent each year on private healthcare!

Marketing Healthcare Online Works!

Many of the big companies have already got their Internet marketing organised, and by people finding them first when searching online, they’re taking the lion’s share of the healthcare target market online.  But SMEs don’t have to sit back and take their meagre leftovers! Many smaller and medium-sized healthcare businesses are fighting back, using the latest Internet marketing techniques that can really help them compete with the big boys.

There’s no point signing up with a company that’s offering you quick success.  First of all, there’s no such thing.  Guarantees are worth nothing when it comes to Internet marketing; what counts are the results.  Always look for a company that allows you the time to assess results and doesn’t tie you into a lengthy contract.

Even if you’re confident about designing and building a website and selling from it, you might not have the knowledge to promote your business effectively online.  Traditional marketing techniques need an overhaul when applied to the Internet and specialist skills and knowledge are now required.  What you need is month by month support and assistance in building your company’s online presence and very soon, you’ll start seeing results: Increased Google placement, improved traffic to your website, new sign-ups, orders and sales.

Whether you want to start off just improving your natural search results, or start paying for online ads to massively ramp up the flow of traffic to your site, an online marketing agency can meet your needs at each stage of development.

The best approach to Internet marketing is a blended one.  By combining SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for a higher Google ranking, plus carefully crafted keyword targeted AdWords for an increased supply of qualified traffic, you’ll see more and more customers arriving at your site.  Of course, this means your company website needs to be ready to handle qualified traffic from people interested in your buying your product or services.  So, now’s the time to update your site if it isn’t ready!

If you’re a marketing professional looking to promote a healthcare business online, take a look through some of our SEO case studies to see how we could help your business attract more qualified leads.

With the rise of the Internet as the most powerful business tool created, there has never been such a need for words. Regardless of developments in Internet video, the World Wide Web is still a text-driven medium. With blogs, articles, advertising and website text all needing words, copywriting has taken on a new importance in the battle for online presence. Words have always had great power, now they’ve taken on a vital significance for all companies that do business on the web.

But copywriting for the web is not like copywriting in the traditional sense. The requirements of Internet copy and the psychology of the Internet readership are very different from those involved in print copywriting. What’s more, SEO copywriting, the craft of creating copy that appeals both to human readers but also exploits SEO principles to attract higher Search Engine Rankings (SERPS) is an entirely different game.

The SEO copywriter needs to constantly balance the needs of their human reader with the need to maintain strong connections to Google and the other Search Engines. Writing for the Search Engines requires an awareness of what they are looking for. Ensuring that the article is topical, entirely original and contains the important keywords at an appropriate density is only the starting point of SEO copywriting.

The trouble is that even inserting the keywords is enough to flummox the average amateur copywriter. Sentences stuffed with keywords make little sense and the human reader clicks away to another page immediately.

Instead, SEO copy needs to appear like any other form of copy, well written, informative and engaging whilst retaining the highest possible optimisation factor. This requires expert writing skills to blend the SEO into the already tight copy.

Web copywriting is about grabbing the attention of the human reader who is already distracted by images, offers and enticements. Maintaining their interest with relevant and topical content known as ‘web copy’ is the next essential element of successful web copywriting. Web copy should differ from traditional written English because it is more accessible, less formal, and closer to the way that we speak.

The next stage is to lead the reader to the point of making a decision. The original meaning of the word ‘decision’ means to cut oneself off from all other options and choices. The persuasive copywriter invisibly removes all objections and concerns whilst leading the reader to the point of making the decision to click.

The aim of good web copywriting is to hook the human reader into staying at the website long enough to make that all-important click, to compel them to take action. This is the final stage of web copywriting.

Above all things, SEO copywriting creates crisp, attractive text that moves the reader towards the point of action. At the same time, it blends in optimisation techniques that ensure that the copy gets read. Without the SEO element, no matter how good the copy, if no one can find it, they cannot read it.

Excellent website copy is the correctly judged balance between highly compelling copy and expertly optimised text. If you need SEO copy, use SEO copywriting services.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt has sparked controversy by claiming that the Internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” of information according to an article published yesterday in Adage.

There is no doubt that the Internet is indeed awash with junk; many of these pages no doubt being served up for no other reason than to allow the Webmaster to make money by selling third party advertising.

It will be interesting to see what steps Schmidt and Google take to clean up their own part of this information mess. Perhaps we can expect to see many Adsense accounts closed in a display of putting money where their rhetoric is?

Back in the Nineties, if your website had really made it, it was found on Yahoo.  But since its development and massive expansion, Google has been the be-all and end-all of Internet Search Engines.  As Google has expanded their silent monopoly they have changed the way that companies think about advertising and inevitably changed the way we all go about the process of planning on and offline marketing strategies.

In the past 8 years, Google have dramatically influenced or changed:

• How we advertise
• Where we advertise
• Who is advertising
• What we pay to advertise

Google began experimenting with online CPM (Cost Per 1000 clicks) advertising back in 1999. Unlike the then ubiquitous banner ads, Google’s ads were designed to be unobtrusive text ads based on search terms and kept separate from the main search engine results.  At this stage, you bought your ads from a Google Ad Sales Rep, like the traditional offline ads.

In 2000 the Dot Com bubble burst and online advertising briefly vanished.  When Google bounced back, they turned their Search-based Text Ads into the forerunner of the self-service PPC/CPM system we have today.  Google essentially invented PPC or Pay per Click advertising.  Now we bid to hold the primary position for certain search terms and customise our ad campaign to hit matching searches within specified geographic regions.

Google’s Search-based advertising changed the way advertising works online.  For the first time it specifically targeted people who were actively looking for the product or service advertised.  This creates uniquely cost effective advertising and every click has a potential sale attached to it.

Google put the power to design and orchestrate commanding advertising campaigns directly into the hands of anyone with a credit card. Since you can advertise on Google for a price within any budget, you can reach millions of customers across the UK for only a tiny fraction of the cost of television, radio or newspaper advertising. PPC and CPM allow us to set our own budgets and bid for the top advertising spots on the Internet.

Google have changed the way that we all think of advertising and how we use it.   Now a small greengrocer in London can compete for attention with the big high street supermarkets.  Now a small home IT business in Southampton can compete for new business with a massive corporate IT business in Edinburgh.

With 69% of the UK’s population regularly using the Internet, and 87% of online searches using Google, when your potential customer wants to find something, they look to Google.  This has made Google the most powerful advertisement placement position ever.

As Google Pay per Play Video is rapidly advancing and online video advertising overtakes offline video advertising in terms of amount spent, experts believe that Google will strongly influence and change advertising habits on and offline in the future.

Google’s influence is so strong that we no longer ’search’ for something, we Google it, the brand has entered the popular lexicon as a verb and that’s advertising that can’t be bought!

On the Internet, the written word has always dominated.  Whilst a picture may be worth a thousand words, the word holds pride of place in online marketing and advertising.  However, since the development of fully proliferated wireless access and high performance video technology integrated within the World Wide Web, the power of Video has really come into its own and it’s already becoming a multi-billion pound phenomenon across the globe.

The obvious example of the explosion of video on the Internet is from YouTube.   The most popular video site on the Internet is owned and run by Google, the most powerful search engine company on the planet.  If you want to advertise with a video on the front page of YouTube for a day, it will currently cost you a minimum of £25,000.  Cheap enough if you’ve got that kind of budget.  But what if you haven’t?

Internet analyst David Hallerman suggests that while Paid Search is very effective for direct marketing, nothing grabs the surfer’s ‘heart and mind’ like video advertisements.

Video Advertising is now considered an excellent choice if you want to drive brand awareness and sales.  Research has shown that web users have higher levels of interaction with video than they do with traditional online image ads.  The average surfer will click ‘Play’ on a video far more easily than committing to the click on a Paid Search ad.

Google have recently brought together the idea of PPC (Pay per Click) with Video Advertising in attempt to make the most of these rapid changes in the online advertising market.   Like their PPC campaigns, marketers bid the maximum that they would pay per CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions).  Google claim to offer a guarantee against overpaying by reducing the cost you actually pay to one cent more than the nearest next bid.

There are alternatives to the YouTube/Google monopoly, if you want to use Video Advertising as part of your marketing campaign.  Many video advertisers charge via CPM.  This type of advertising has exploded in the US, where sites such as MySpace offer a short 5 second video display at a cost of $25 per CPM.  At the other end scale, the Wall Street Journal charges $90 per CPM.

In the UK, local search site SCOOT already offers video advertising deals.  By building on their relationship with media group ITV, they offer localised video ads around online television programming.  With SCOOT, 25,000 plays is just £500.  Other companies offer more bespoke services and are therefore reticent to publish prices.

Recently, the Guardian predicted that by 2009, Internet Video advertising would outspend traditional television advertising for the first time.  By 2012, it’s considered that £361 million will be spent on Internet Video advertising in the UK alone.

By 2009, to actively compete in the global marketplace, Video Advertising is an area of your online marketing campaign that you simply must factor into your budget.  Whilst the costs are currently high with the most obvious main providers like YouTube, more cost effective video advertising services are being made available from smaller sources all the time.

If you can see video forming part of your marketing stratagy, take a look at our Video Marketing Services to evaluate whether we can help you.

Two recent snippets of news should bring some cheer amongst the incessant reports of recession and predictions of doom that seem to dominate the press at the moment.

Google announced yesterday that their revenue for the second quarter of 2008 topped $5.37 billion. This is an increase of 39% compared to the same period in 2007 and a small increase over quarter one of 2008.

Perhaps more importantly is the fact that within the UK, online shopping spend has increased by 38% in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2007. The total amount spent online was £26.5 billion, according to findings recently published by IMRG and Capgemini.

UK shoppers now spend 17 pence in every pound online, almost 20% of total retail spending.

This could, of course, just be down to the fact that with many households feeling the squeeze they are turning online to ‘bag a bargain’ but hopefully the buoyant trend of Internet shopping will continue.

Hopefully we’ll be reporting more good news soon, including how rival London gangs have turned to hugging each other in a ‘love off’ and how Team GB are confident of winning at least one bronze medal in the Olympics*

*London, not Beijing

When it comes to tracking and recording business website statistics, you will find that most web hosts will provide some kind of statistical package as part of your hosting arrangement.

However, these vary in quality and very often only give a superficial level of detail. If you’re a small business and serious with your Internet marketing efforts, be it search engine optimisation or pay per click, then you will want (need) to have a professional analytics package. There are many solutions out there, such as the brilliant Clicktracks Analyzer, but these solutions are often out of the reach for many small business owners.

More…

With the ever increasing popularity of the Internet, it comes as no surprise that more and more people are finding a new career in search engine marketing.

The problem, of course, is how do you explain to someone else what it is you do exactly? Perhaps you shouldn’t worry? For my part, I just ask if they use a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo, and then explain I help people with websites get their site listed higher in the search engines so that their products or services get seen by targeted visitors.

With that out of the way, would you want a job in search? Is an online marketing career something you’d be proud to do and enjoy at the same time? Of course, the answer is ‘it depends’ but generally speaking, a career in the fast moving Internet industry can be both exciting and rewarding at the same time. If you find yourself working in the right search marketing company then you’d be hard pushed to find a job that offers as much scope for change as a career in search marketing. Add to that the feel good factor of knowing that you’re contributing to another company’s success and you’re on for a really good career.

At Impact Media we’re a fast growing, UK-based search marketing company always on the look out for the right people to join our team. Attitude is more important than experience. We work hard but believe in having fun at the same time.

Our offices are located in Hampshire, about midway between Portsmouth and Southampton. If you have some search marketing experience, either in SEO or Pay Per Click (PPC) or are an enthusiastic individual who can demonstrate a keen interest in the Internet and willingness to learn, why not contact us or review our current jobs in search marketing.