A Review Of The Positives And Negatives Of Using Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization For Your Internet Site Advertising
Dec0
Looking at two of the methods of advertising your business using Online Marketing in terms of their positive and negative features may help you to pick which method to use for your own business.
Firstly we will consider the pay per click system, a way of making certain that you are visible to the people searching for your chosen keywords by paying for a Search Engine Placement in the sponsored links portion of the search results page. This system has a number of positive attributes. The biggest is the speed at which results are produced. To set up a campaign like this takes less than an hour and within 7 days you will have some very useful information about how it is going. Visitors to your site will grow immediately and as long as you are offering what the searcher understood that you were selling from your pay per click ad your sales should follow not far behind.
Another great facet of the pay per click method is that if you do happen to get something wrong, say in the picking your keywords, it is noticeable very quickly. You can spot in a matter of days that although you are getting a lot of clicks through to your website no one is buying anything. This will prompt you to check your campaign before too much money has been chucked down the drain. It is possible with pay per click to quantify your budget and therefore plan financially knowing that you will spend no more that the limit you yourself have selected.
On the down side it can still work out very pricey as enquiries (clicks) go up, so too does your bill, whereas the payment for other forms of advertising stays constant no matter how many customers it draws. Also there is proven data that shows that organic Search Engine Placement listings draw ten times the number of clicks that pay per click do, suggesting that a lot of searchers would prefer not to use them.
Now turning to Search Engine Optimization we can see a much slower method. As it is organic or natural it usually takes a matter of weeks before any improvement is made and then as the clients website slowly climbs to page 1 the sales start to increase steadily over a subsequent period. This is absolutely no quick fix. Another problem with it, unlike pay per click, is that due to it’s speed, if you do get the keywords incorrect at the start you will have wasted a lot of effort before you actually notice the mistake. This is one of the reasons why getting some professional advice from a SEO Company may well be a cost effective way forward.
On the plus side if you do have an ongoing sales business the effort and the wait is definitely worth it. The charges from the search engine optimization company, after an upfront fee are normally a small amount, say ?15 per week for every keyword that achieves a search engine placement ranking on page 1. Bearing in mind the increased number of visitors to your site from the organic listing this works out far far better than pay per click.
So overall it seems that pay per click is brilliant for immediate business and for one off sales. Whereas Search engine optimization would appear to lend itself to the online marketing of steady medium to long term business.
A Review Of The Reasons Why Search Engine Marketing Is Being Used Instead Of Conventional Advertising
Dec0
Conventional advertising is made up of adverts in such areas as: newspapers and magazines, on television, leaflet drops to homes, billboards and hoardings in public areas, on the outside of busses and lorries, on parking tickets, and or course Yellow Pages.
These can be costly to produce and then update as business changes require, and so the increasing use of the internet and specific company web sites has brought about a different way that is a more sustainable option for a firm to market its products or services.
A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that Online spending grew 4.6% to ?1.752bn in the first six months of 2009, while TV spending reduced 16.1% to just over 1 ? billion. They then go on to grade the following methods as online advertising; E-mail promotions, classified adverts, display ads and search marketing.
This illustrates that some companies are identifying some of the benefits of online marketing, perhaps on a cost outlay basis or perhaps because it can be easier to keep an eye on the success of online advertising, e.g. by the number of website visits or email replies.
Most newspapers also have web sites where they can showcase news items and sites such as CNN and the BBC can show latest news from a range of sources. The use of RSS feeds for news can send this directly to a person’s mobile phone that is web enabled. The knock-on effect here is that sales of newspapers have sunk and so fewer people are seeing printed adverts therefore their value to the advertiser is much less.
Those organisations who use Online Marketing as part of their business tactics and want to have their web site optimised for search engine usage will want to be sure that the percentage of their marketing budget spent on this is bringing in business. So they will need to be confident that the search engine ranking for their web site will be on page one of the organic results of an engine like Google when a user enters pertinent keyword(s) in the search.
In order to make this a long-term part of the company’s sales volume it is essential that they use an ethical Search Engine Optimisation business for the work, otherwise they may not get the results they want. Or worse still, may get a good Search Engine Placement in the short term but then find themselves banned by the search engine company for using unethical or Black Hat methods.
There are a lot of ethical Search Engine Optimisation companies who can offer this service all are staffed by a teams of ethical associates who have improved the web sites of many clients so that their search engine listing in on page one long term. They will not promis to get a client onto the first slot as this is not always possible depending on the competition.
Treat SEO Companies With Respect, most Are Professional, Hard Working Businesses That Can Add Real Benefit To Your Organisation
Dec0
Like all fresh and expanding professions Search Engine Optimization Companies seem to have gained a bad name. Whilst is it right to say that, as with any other industry, not every firm in it is thoroughly ethical, the majority of organizations offering Online Marketing services are competent and offer an invaluable service providing good Search Engine Placement positions.
Indeed, those not complying with the ethics of the industry are policed and handled by the very organizations they are trying to con, the engines. So as long as a search engine optimization company has been around for a while the chances are it operates ethically and offers definite benefits to it’s clients.
That being the case, their customers should accept them as the newest profession and deal with them as they would any other service industry, such as accountants, solicitors etc. The Search Engine Optimization company must have skills in many areas in order to perform well. They need to have the established marketing skills to understand buyer actions but also need to be able to transform this to the new medium of the internet. They need to have enough technical knowledge to be able to assess the clients website and potentially offer up modifications to the site that will enhance their visibility to the search engines. On top of all that they should be capable of the business skills to allow them to discuss all of this with the business owner in a way which is suitable, ie no jargon.
As can be seen the skills needed are multiple and span other professions, offering a service that can realy make a difference to a firm that wants to achieve internet sales.
Another misconception is that these services are costly. Provided that a good choice of provider is made and all the advice offered is acted upon, the return on investment from the services of a Search Engine Optimization Company can be massive. Obviously the clients must have a product or service that is right for internet selling. If not then no amount of optimization will improve sales. Assuming however that is the case, a normal outlay of ?4-500 per month (a small amount in comparison to TV or newspaper advertising) should see a massive increase in the number of appropriate visitors to your website. This payment will support in the region of 10 keywords and with good optimisation organisations will only be payable once, and for as long as, each keyword is on page one of the Search Engine Placement listings.
It is therefore not surprising that for the first time this year the spend on Online Marketing overtook traditional methods of marketing such as press adverts and television. Even in spite of the scepticism of some, the industry is growing fast and businesses need to overcome that scepticism or be left behind.
How Will Clients Be Certain About Picking An Ethical Search Engine Placement Company
Dec0
Organisations who observe that their website isn’t appearing on the first page after a Google search using keywords relevant to their products or services may well realise they should search for a Search Engine Optimisation Company to help them have Search Engine Placement on page 1.
In the context of an Online Marketing company which mainly via the World Wide Web, Search Engine Placement on page 1 is crucial to the success of such an organisation.
The selection mechanism should be not only just based on price, as there could be Businesses who are not as trustworthy as others, in that they may make outrageous claims, such as to guarantee to get the client to Search Engine Placement at the No.1 slot of page 1. In these times of more and more Organisations changing to the World Wide Web the competition for top ranking, especially for Organisations in a big Online Marketing area, can be tight, so just getting anywhere on the first page can be seen as a win.
The Organisations needs to be sure that the Search Engine Optimisation Company is trustworthy, which could be done by asking them for a list of their customers and then contacting some of them to get their perspective. This would also give some the market and how successful they are, although in the real world there may well be a new Company that is trying to come into the SEO market and is quite trustworthy in its approach.
One way of seeing how good a SEO company is would be to do a internet search and see what Search Engine Placement their web site has in the organic results area, i.e. the results below those that are sponsored. If it isn’t on page one then their Online Marketing skills for their services are not that good, so are they going to achieve the objective on the client’s web site?
The length of time that a client web site has been on page 1 will indicate if the Search Engine Optimisation Company is using ethical or White Hat techniques to optimise the site pages. If the Client reports that they were on page 1 but now are way down the list or not showing altogether, then this means that the Search Engine Optimisation Company has been using unethical or Black Hat techniques. The search engines can locate these techniques and can remove the offending web site from the search listing, which means that it will not be listed in search results at all.
White Hat techniques can provide a long lasting place near the top of the organic results and only severe competition from other Organisations in the same Online Marketing area should normally affect that placement, apart from sites that have been ‘optimised’ by using short term Black Hat techniques of course.
In short the best way of locating a trustworthy Search Engine Optimisation Company is by referral and asking people who are customers of such Organisations.
This SEO Company has a team of people who work only with trustworthy, White Hat techniques and can help to get a client web site onto page 1.
Will Search Engine Marketing Actually Provide A Substitute For Traditional Forms Of Advertising So Speedily?
Dec0
Old fashioned advertising, for example newspaper, journal, radio, TV, mail drops and billboard advertising are now, to some extent, being swapped for online marketing methods. This is not to say that money is no longer being spent on traditional advertising, it is just no longer all being spent in this sector. TV advertising used to be in the Number One spot for the way in which advertising revenue was spent, but now Online Marketing in the UK has shunted this to Number Two and taken the Number One spot for itself.
Online marketing consists of different types of advertising which happen over the world wide web, but as it is a comparatively new media, all forms of advertising in this way are brought together under the umbrella of online marketing. Over time, this will most likely change, but for now figures are created in this fashion for assessment purposes.
Latest figures show ?1.75bn was spent on internet advertising in the first six months of this year. This increase is about 90 times as much as was spent just over ten years ago, when amounts were close to ?20 million. Of the ?1.75bn spend, just over 1 billion was spent on search advertising, which works out at 60% of all money spent in online advertising.
Companies grasp that many of their potential patrons are now shopping, searching and researching on the internet, and if they want to make certain they are keeping their customers, they need to have Search Engine Placement in order to remind searchers that they exist and why it would be a good idea to shop with them.
With this in mind, they are requesting assistance from a search engine optimization company to help them get a good search engine placement, and keep their customers loyal. They are ready to pay their Search Engine Optimization Company to do this work for them, which in turn means they do not have the same money to spend on the traditional methods of advertising.
There is also the realisation that TV viewers do not want their viewing to be interrupted by adverts, and will often, with the advent of Sky Plus, skip adverts as they watch previously recorded programmes. They no longer, therefore, consider this as the best way of reaching a mass audience, whereas use of search engine placement means they are actively marketing to the searchers who do want the goods they supply.
TV is not, however, dying in the art of advertising, nor are other traditional forms, more it is a case of online marketing being a change of focus for firms who are following their clients online.