Archive for Search Engine Optimization
SEO or PPC?
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The two main components of search engine marketing are search engine optimization and pay per click management. The two are very contrasting in terms of their benefits, their costs and how you go about using them for your website. It’s important to understand how both of these components of search engine marketing wok and how you can use them to help your business’s online presence and profitability.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO entails everything you do both on your website and off your website to boost its standings in the displayed results of the search engines. There are many different pieces of effective search engine optimization. For example, you can include targeted keywords and phrases into your content, you can build the amount of incoming links you have on your website and much more.
Results you see from SEO are known as organic. A visitor to your website that arrives there from a normal query in the search engine is known as an organic visitor. You didn’t have to pay to drive that person to your website, instead it was a result of your natural placement in the search engines.
SEO takes time to become effective and is generally a gradual process. You can’t throw up some keywords on your website and expect to be number 1 in Google the next week. Instead, SEO is about boosting the value and credibility of your website over the long haul. With the right strategy deployed continually for a long period of time you will be able to see and maintain substantial results in your search engine positioning. The result, of course, is increased traffic flow to your website and a greater online presence.
Pay Per Click
PPC campaigns entail purchasing sponsored listings that appear in the search engine results. When you make a search in Google, the sponsored results show up right at the top of the page, as well as down the sidebar of the page. Every link you see in these areas has been purchased.
The main thing to remember however is that you don’t really pay for the placement, you pay each time somebody clicks on your ad to go to your website. This offers a direct link between visitors and the amount you pay, and you can control your daily budget to limit how much you end up spending. The way that the listings are determined is through an ongoing bidding process. The more you are willing to spend per click, or per visitor, the higher you will end up getting ranked.
The great benefit of PPC is that it is instantaneous. You may not be able to run a masterful PPC campaign right away, but as soon as you create and launch a campaign, you will start seeing results. Therefore it’s an extremely powerful way to make an immediate impact on your traffic.
As opposed to SEO however PPC of course costs you money. If you don’t target your market appropriately and bid on keywords strategically, you can end up wasting a good deal of money. Another important aspect of PPC management is developing effective landing pages that convert visitors who click on your links. This is extremely important when every visitor you receive has been paid for.
Clearly there are many differences between search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. SEO produces long term results and doesn’t cost you money directly. PPC can produce instant results but will cost you every time someone ends up on your website.
An effective search engine marketing strategy will usually incorporate pieces of both. It’s all about fitting a specific plan into a budget you can afford, and deploying tactics that help you achieve your specific goals. For example, if you just created a website and want to begin seeing traffic right away, bidding highly on some of your important key phrases will help you gain an immediate presence.
However, to keep costs down in the long run while further developing your presence, you will have to use SEO to help climb up the rankings. PPC is also commonly used when you are directly trying to sell a product or service to someone, as opposed to convert them over longer periods of time.
Be sure to consider both PPC and SEO when developing your Internet marketing strategy. Both can pay huge dividends for your website, but as mentioned they are extremely different from one another. Used in conjunction, they can be an extremely powerful tag team of Internet marketing.
Offline Marketing Strategies for Your Online Business
Posted by: | CommentsMany small business owners fail to successfully connect their online business with the offline world. What this means is that they either don’t realize that online businesses can be promoted with offline strategies, or they don’t know how to make it work for their specific situations. The truth is that many traditional forms of offline advertising and marketing strategies can be extremely successful for businesses that are entirely online based.
It’s easy to get caught up in the world of online marketing when you are running an Internet business. Indeed, 
succeeding in the areas of search engine optimization, social networking and PPC campaigns are all extremely important to the success of your business. Additionally, they are all extremely cost effective forms of advertising and promotion that enable you to reach a potentially huge market. No online business would be wise to avoid online marketing.
However that doesn’t mean that you have to forgo offline marketing or traditional advertising altogether. In fact, what is consistently proven time and time again is that the most successful businesses form comprehensive marketing plans that incorporate many different tactics and platforms. Including offline advertising into your online marketing plan is simply a smart way to broaden your horizons and diversify your plan of attack.
The most important thing you have to remember though is that not all offline advertising opportunities make sense for online businesses. The trick is finding the ones that work for your particular business or industry. There is a huge variety of different options, including newspaper ads, trade magazines, conferences and tradeshows, post cards, radio advertising and more. So how is your online business supposed to find the platforms that work best?
Just as with your online marketing work, you are looking for cost effective, efficient and highly targeted forms of advertising, marketing and promotion. In the world of search engine optimization you wouldn’t try to target the broad search market of “cars” when what you are really offering is “vintage car auctions in New York”.
You would be facing far too much competition, and the costs of your efforts will be significantly higher. Additionally, the people who eventually find you may not be interested at all in what you have to offer. They may be looking for “car repair shops” “cars with the best gas mileage” or anything else.
Of course the same rules apply when you are working with offline marketing. You want to target your market as effectively as possible, and reach out to your potential prospects and customers in the places where you are most likely to find them and where they are most likely to listen to what you have to say. This will help you keep your costs down while providing yourself a better shot at actually reaching out to interested parties.
The offline methods of marketing you choose have to have clear, tangible benefits for your business. Just advertising and opening up your budget for the sake of it isn’t going to get you anywhere. Instead you need to think about what you specifically are trying to accomplish and then devise ways of making that happen.
Are you trying to add 1,000 new names to your email list so that you can grow your presence and find new prospects? Are you trying to promote a new product or service you just released? Are you offering a limited time discount or promotion designed to get customers into your doors with the hopes of selling to them repeatedly over time?
Whatever you are trying to accomplish, the first step is specifically plotting out your desired results. From there, you can find the quickest and most cost efficient ways of achieving that goal. To find 10 or 20 highly valuable prospects a tradeshow or conference may be the best route, but to send as much traffic as possible to your website a newspaper or radio ad may make more sense.
Think about your goals, keep your budget in mind and then choose the offline marketing strategy that fits the best with what you are going for. Remember, online businesses aren’t restricted to the online world. There is no unwritten rule that says a website can’t promote itself using traditional methods. So dive into the world of offline marketing for a way to increase the success of your online business.
