A frequently-made mistake when launching a new website is to ask “how can we get to the number one spot in Google,Yahoo! or MSN?” A more salient question is “how can I get traffic to my website?” and perhaps more importantly, “how can my website generate business for me?”
It is a common misconception to believe that search engines have the first and last word on how successful a website is. This, however, could not be further from the truth: search engines do not popularise indexed sites; they index popular sites. The difference, of course, being that a website does not need to be indexed straight away to gain a readership, and it will not live and die by its position in the search engines. The fact is, using search engines as your only means of marketing isn’t just ineffectual, it could result in disaster for your website: search engines rely on their ability to update and adapt in order to provide the most relevant results to their users – any site can benefit from this, and any site can be left out of the index, seemingly inexplicably, without notice.
If your only source of advertising in the real world dried up on occasions, without any warning, and there was nothing you could do about it and no way to adapt to it, your first inclination would almost certainly be to find a more reliable source of marketing: fortunately, the Internet isn’t short of these, and almost all of them are more effective than simply hoping for the best in search engine listings. Advertising online exists in traditional forms, such as ‘print’ advertising on websites and directories, and more unusual means like discussion forums, content syndication networks, blogs and more. The extent to which you harness both of these types of advertising also governs the extent to which you will succeed, as a healthy mix of conventional and unconventional advertising is needed in order to maximise your return.
For instance, advertising on a discussion forum is an ideal way to attract visitors to your site with a unique interest in your product or service, as discussion forums are normally identified by a singular field of interest such as Engineering, Real Estate, etc – your target market, distilled into one easily reachable group. Advertising on a directory, or using syndicated text-ads such as Google Adwords allows you to tailor your advertising to specific audiences searching for specific phrases.
Whereas your advertising campaign in the real world might only be relevant to a minority of those who see it, with online advertising it is possible to ensure that only members of your target demographic see your adverts. This will ensure you maximise your ROI, as advertising online is usually based on a “Cost Per Click” (CPC) model: you pay nothing to have your adverts appear (or perhaps a nominal fee), and pay a small charge for every click on your advert a user makes. A great feature of online advertising is that you can actually track where you are getting the most results from: for instance, if you are running four advertising campaigns and a weblog featuring content which you syndicate across several websites, you could see that two of your four advertising campaigns are ineffectual in comparison to the weblog, and decide to devote more time to writing content. Or, you could find that although you receive more clicks from one particular method of advertising, you actually have a greater conversion rate (ie. Actual sales) from a different source, so you know when to scale up one budget and scale down another.
Online advertising has transformed the way in which traditional advertising agencies must work, because it is now possible for anyone with the time and inclination to run their own advertising campaign and keep track of it using off-the-shelf software and free online tools. As more and more businesses move away from traditional methods of business to compete with online retailers, it is important to recognise online advertising as a key area in which businesses can get a big head start.
If you have found yourself asking the question “How can we do well in the search engines?” recently, then the chances are you are marginalising your business online. With a little time and thought you can easily transform your web strategy from one that relies on search engine placing to a strategy that is not only manageable and can be monitored easily, but one that is also ten times as likely to produce results.
If you want to maximise your business online, or just talk to someone about why you need a strategy to do so, get in touch with Inventive Web Solutions today.
