Search Engine Optimisation Blog

The Internet presents limitless opportunities for mid-sized businesses that want to compete in the larger market.  Thanks to affordable online marketing options, it’s possible for a medium-sized business to carve a place in their sector and contend with the bigger companies.  The problem is finding or choosing the most suitable way to market your product or service online.

There are a number of options for businesses to choose from when considering cost-effective or affordable Internet marketing solutions, although the combined method or blended mix of marketing might better serve as the best approach.  This blended approach is made up of the five most effective and affordable ways to market your business website online.

SEO

Although SEO, or search engine optimisation, appears to be a rather simple way to increase your share of online traffic, the Natural Search results that it yields are powerfully impressive. SEO is the process of engineering your website so that it most effectively responds to the way that potential customers search for your business online.

Many people believe that SEO is something that can be done by just about anyone, but it takes a professional SEO expert to glean dynamic results without causing some of the very damaging errors that amateurs easily make.

Always choose to work with a professional SEO in order to get the best out of your website’s SEO potential.  The cost of an SEO expert is nothing compared to the potential increase in revenue from having your website optimised.

Articles

The Internet is a word-based medium and very much search driven.  Including articles on your website has a multiplicity of benefits, not least of all providing your customers with up to date expert advice.  Other benefits include:

• Increased credibility
• Improved SEO results from keywords in the articles
• Expanded web presence

You don’t need to be an expert author, there are lots of highly competent and affordable writers that can provide any number of quality articles for your website on any topic.

PPC

PPC, or pay per click, is one of the best methods of bringing traffic to your website and converting it to sales.

Imagine advertising that is read directly by people who are already interested in your product or service.  That’s exactly what PPC offers!  When a potential customer is interested in your ad, they click to find out more.  You only pay for the number of clicks that your ad receives and you can set your budget accordingly.

PPC represents a highly customisable and a truly affordable method of advertising.  Unfortunately, this has been one of the reasons why so many people have attempted DIY PPC, resulting in some quite catastrophic wasted opportunities.

Online PR

Your reputation online matters because it’s easily raised and easily damaged in the same measure.  Online PR can be used to fire fight problems but can also be used to announce important product news, service changes, sales, launches and make the best use of all profile raising opportunities.

Video Marketing

Still relatively in its infancy but drawing increased interest and attention, online video marketing can offer a stunningly effective alternative to television advertising. Many people have found that they can obtain dramatic results from very simple videos.  In the increasingly competitive online market, this is one approach that cannot be ignored.

By using these five methods together, you will create a powerful yet affordable website marketing campaign for your business.

If you feel you need help with any of these areas and would like to work with a professional UK based search marketing agency, please refer to our search engine marketing services page.

The value of video marketing is growing at a pace that businesses cannot ignore.  In the past, television advertising was priced out with the budgets of most SMEs but online video has opened a huge window of opportunity for SMEs that never existed before.  Online video makes video advertising affordable to all!

If you’re wondering what video could do for your business, consider the following cases and see how the use of video in each created an online buzz that has boosted their brand, product or service into a web-wide phenomenon.

An excellent example of how regular genuine blogging combined with the use of video can transform a small family business into a national name is Gary Vaynerchuk and his wine business, WineLibrary.com.  He went from anonymous Russian immigrant to the youngest winner of US Market Watch Magazine’s ‘Market Watch Leader.’  Using a combination of expert wine knowledge, simple web video technology and marketing know-how he became a household name.  Just one man, his product, and some video.

Vaynerchuk was recently interviewed on Ellen and Conan O’Brien. By drinking wine and talking about it online video, he not only skyrocketed his profits, but also become a major A-list media celebrity in the US.  Vaynerchuk claims his success was caused by ‘fresh and current’ content.  In his case, that means spending five days per week in front of the camera.

You’ve got an exceptional blender, but how do you make an impact in a market awash with good quality blenders?  Blendtec came up with a novel way to punch into the market.  Take a respectable looking science guy; take the Blendtec blender and an iPhone.  Now drop the iPhone into the blender and switch it on.  The blender totally destroys the phone, grinding it into a fine powder.  One simple video and the Blendtec blender is an international name, flying off the shelves. They keep the content fresh by changing the object destroyed in their new videos.  More than eight million people have viewed the videos. A great product, a novel idea, lots of video, and dramatic sales volumes.

In a market saturated with beauty products, how could ‘Dove‘ make an impact on its key customer, the average woman?  They created a viral ad that showed how an average looking female could be transformed into billboard model using stylist tricks and photo editing.   Again, a clever idea turned into a time lapsed video, was virally spread the video ad across the net.  This ad spoke to their key customers, it may have started in Canada, but women across the world now have a feeling Dove stands for them.

The success of the examples discussed above give the strong indication that viral videos massively boost traffic and increase sales, leading to the question, how could video help your business? If you think there may be a fit with your business, take a look at our video marketing services page and get in touch for a no-obligation discussion with our Sales Team.

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.

Online video views in the UK went through the roof  in June 2008 with 3.2 billion videos being viewed online by 27.4 billion UK Internet users according to comscore.

That works out at 78% of the UK’s Internet audience watching video online at an average of 118 videos viewed per viewer. That means that each viewer is watching an average of 4 videos online every single day.

If you would like to get your video out to the masses then why not look at our Video Marketing Services and see how you can increase your online visibility through the use of online video marketing.