Search success | How your company can maximize online searchability for minimal cost
Dow Jones down 777 points in one day. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers close their doors. Washington D.C. passes the mother of all bailouts. If recent developments hasn’t left your head spinning and dreaming about cashing in your remaining chips and heading to the Bahamas to go bone fishing, stick around, I have some good news about where to spend your company’s critical marketing dollars.
According to an article in the Sept. 4 issue of the Wall Street Journal, “Spending on Internet advertising is climbing at a healthy clip — rising 20% in the U.S. in the second quarter — and growth forecasts are strong despite the weak economy.” Advertisers find that the safest way to reach online customers is directly through the power of search. Why? Because with search marketing you can reach your customers directly and measure results quickly and accurately.
For example, Idexx found significant improvement in visitor traffic, bounce rates, and time on site since working with HMG on a search engine optimization review for dogsandticks.com earlier this year. Since implementing the changes, the visitor bounce rate is about 30%, down from 55% (the business-to-business average is 50%), the page views have gone up from 2.34 pages to 3.52, and time on-site has increased from 1.33 minutes to 2.54 minutes.
So how do you improve your searchability on a tight budget?
There are two primary ways to reach your customers through search marketing. One is through search engine optimization, in which you adjust your website so it ranks near or at the top of the list from a search on sites like Google or Yahoo. The other is pay-per-click advertising, in which companies pay the search engine every time someone clicks on their ads. Both search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising are now well documented as being tremendously successful in reaching new clients and generating leads and sales.
Many agencies offer a do-it-yourself program that combines the expertise from an agency with the cost savings of managing the work in-house. This scenario is the best of both worlds for companies on a tight marketing budget. The initial reports are run and analyzed by experts, and then your staff is trained to implement recommendations and manage campaigns in-house. The benefit of having an agency do the set-up work is that, among other things, there is considerable expertise involved in understanding how search engines work, how they rank websites and which keywords will have the greatest impact on increasing your site traffic and generating leads. Additional value is gained in that you don’t have to invest in software analytics tools.
Research and execution
To kick off the process of search engine optimization, or SEO, it makes sense to hire an agency to do a full keyword analysis, a web-ranking report, a link-building report and a best-practices report that will provide the understanding necessary to implement the changes. A keyword analysis shows you which keywords people are typing into search engines to find your products or services, as well as their search volumes, meaning how many times those keywords are searched each month. A web-ranking report shows where your site is currently ranked for each of these keywords. A link-building report is a list of websites that are recommended to get inbound links from. (Search engines place significant importance on the number and quality of inbound links to a website.) These sites are typically top websites and directories related to your industry.
A solid linking strategy is critical to achieving high search engine rankings. And the best practices report details how to take the knowledge from these reports and put it to use. These reports combined with a review call with the agency to answer any questions and some basic training in Google Analytics will get you off and running. The data in the reports give you the substance needed to put you on your way to completing an SEO Do-It-Yourself Plan.
For pay-per-click, or PPC, the agency can provide you with a report that outlines which keywords to buy and suggests ad copy and landing pages, as well as a best-practices report detailing how much you’ll likely spend. Finally, with some Google AdWords campaign management training, your staff can manage the PPC campaign in-house, cutting down on monthly management costs of an agency.
It is also wise to do a quarterly review with your agency to make sure you’re on the right track and that your SEO changes have been implemented properly and the PPC campaign is being managed correctly.
The Do-It-Yourself Plan is a way to make sure you don’t table your search efforts completely in a downward economy. A good agency will work with you, and within your budget, to assure you have a successful search engine marketing strategy in place.
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments