Traditional marketing is getting continually more expensive yet less effective by the day. So we have to look at up-dating our modus operandi. We all know it’s vital that all commercial organisations are on the web. But a web presence by itself won’t bring results. Customers HAVE to be able to find you!

Picture a new retail premises opening up shop: They’ve spent a fortune on stock, fixtures, merchandising and systems. It’s opening time, they look for clients… And discover they’re in a tiny backstreet, 3 miles out of the city centre on the 4th floor, and the road outside is closed due to a diversion. What’s worse, they haven’t told anyone where they are. Can you see a fundamental flaw?

Nearly all commercial sites on the web are in exactly the same situation.

The internet has dramatically changed the shape of modern marketing. Ten years ago, as everyone was getting on the bandwagon, there was an idea that everyone needed a web site. Businesses scrambled to get themselves an online presence, often spending tens of thousands to create fancy graphical sites. This trend was cheerfully encouraged by on-line design companies, who relished the business! It started to become obvious though that these sites weren’t receiving any traffic. There was a belief that if you built it, they would come. This proved to be a complete fallacy…

Modern internet marketing requires a fundamental shift in thinking from traditional marketing. A traditional marketing guru would tell you that your web site is your online catalogue or advert of services. Therefore, you’ll need to utilise all the normal marketing channels (print, radio, TV, media etc.) to drive traffic to that site. Essentially they’re working in the same way as they’ve always done. They produce the pretty brochure and then market every possible avenue to generate enquiries to send that brochure to. But this is entirely the wrong way to approach it.

The internet itself is not just a viewing portal. It’s a huge dynamic environment with complex interactivity. Users drill down to investigate the services they’re interested in. We can find the sites we’re looking for because Google, Bing and Yahoo etc. have formulated huge site directories to simplify the task. Can you imagine trying to find something in Yellow Pages if there wasn’t an order and an index? You’d never find what you were looking for.

The Search Engines solve this dilemma. Which means businesses can no longer use traditional marketing. As the only thing that counts now is being indexed on Google or the other major Search Engines. Even that though isn’t enough. Research shows that only a tiny minority of people look beyond the fifth slot on page one. Which means you’ve got no chance if the best you can do is page six!

So to give all companies a chance to be on the first pages, the Search Engines came up with a novel form of paid advertising. You only pay when someone actually chooses your advert - hence the name ‘Pay-Per-Click’. It was revolutionary. Basically the only time you now paid was when someone already interested asked to look at your site. Professionally monitored and targeted adverts can bring spectacular results.

But it’s now a very saturated market. Costs per click have been heavily driven up, mostly by inexperienced marketers bidding too highly. Click prices are now so expensive in some markets that they’re no longer profitable. In particular where every sale requires a large number of clicks. This has brought Search Engine Optimisation to the fore, where driving a site to page one is the goal.

Try this: Type a handful of relevant keywords into one of the Search Engines. Look through pages one, two and three. Is your site there? Chances are - the answer’s no. Which means you’re just like the shop in the middle of no-where. If it is there, would clients really use those keywords?

It’s possible you’ve already done some advertising in the paid listings - and maybe you’ve had some results. But are you professionally managing your campaign? Is your ROI satisfactory? Which are your most successful areas? Testing, measuring and split-testing are some of the most important factors with all PPC campaigns. You’ll never get the best results without correct figures.

Both in Britain and around the world, statistics show that commercial advertising and selling is experiencing a seismic shift towards the internet. Companies must acknowledge this, to survive and flourish in today’s economy.

The ever developing skill of learning how Search Engines position sites on their natural search listings is known as Search Engine Optimisation.

‘Natural’ search listings are the main lists of results that come up when you search for something. Paid listings are separate to natural listings. In a typical Google or Bing search, you can see the paid listings in the right column and in the yellow box at the top. Whereas the free listings are taken from the main index. Sites are graded by how relevant they are, and how important they are (according to the SE!).

Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. If we’re the 7th listing on page 9 then we’re hardly going to get prospects beating our door down! No-one knows all the factors that Search Engines (SE’s) use to determine your rank. It’s not in the SE’s interest to tell people everything they do.

So, over the years a complete industry has grown up around this. On the Search Engine side you have upgraded technological patents being regularly filed. Causing much mystification about their methods! On the other side you have an SEO industry. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

Search Engine Optimisation deals with both on-page and off-page issues. Off-web criteria also play a part in SE listings, (e.g. demographics). This doesn’t come under the remit of SEO though. Off-page factors are covered in a separate feature, as that’s a whole subject in itself.

On Page Optimisation

If we can make changes to our site to make it more friendly to Search Engines, this is called ‘on-page’ optimisation. This is quite straight-forward - it simply requires correctly setting up your site. Doing things such as: Keyword seeding (in the right places and the right amounts), using H1 and H2 header tags (and to some extent meta-tags) and internal linking.

It doesn’t matter if all that sounds very confusing.

It’s very easy to control on-page factors. But to be quite honest, they have the least relevance to your ranking these days. To be blunt, some would say it hardly has any effect at all. There was a time when SE’s were ‘duped’ by On-Page optimisation. But that door has been completely closed down for several years now.

The only time that ‘on-page’ becomes important is when you have taken care of ‘off-page’ and have a lot of inbound ‘back-links’. At that point, careful tweaking of on-page factors and internal linking can yield results.

A Bit of Advice…

Keywords and phrases that bring up massive results should be avoided by anyone new to SEO. In a search for ‘Car Insurance’ on Google in the UK for example, you would find around 70 million results. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

On the other hand… The phrase ‘Southampton Car Insurance’ only brings in three hundred thousand. (Assuming I was a car insurance provider in Southampton.) This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search terms.

I’ve a much better chance in the rankings having added the word ‘Southampton’. Getting ranked for a term such as Car Insurance would take pots of money and a great deal of time. I would actually be competing with the insurance conglomerates! Not a wise choice at all - and actually not the best way to go about things either.

In fact, what we really need are terms that more specifically reflect our product or service. In Search Engine terms, these phrases (which can have a number of keywords) are referred to as long-tail. If your market’s very competitive, you could be selecting seven word phrases. Three to four keywords is average though.

In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. Occasionally we’ll accept bigger numbers, but only if the results at the top haven’t been optimised well. In time our back links will grow. Then we’ll get a better rating on some of the bigger yielding phrases. If we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 3-12 months time. This strategy is also far more targeted at the start. Frankly, we’re only interested in the customers who are looking specifically for what we offer. There’s much more chance these people will buy!

It’s a good idea to spread the back-links around your web site. Limiting them to the home page is unwise. We call this ‘deep-linking’ - and Google in particular likes this. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. These may contain links to many individual product pages, so it’s worth driving appropriate search terms to them. The home page shouldn’t be the only one to receive back-links. Google and the other SE’s are looking more and more at how individual pages on your site are listed and treated.