As an online marketer I’m often asked what online marketing medium is best. Clients want to know if they should concentrate on pay per click advertising or should they spend their money on search engine optimization? And what about social media marketing? Should they be doing that, too?
The answer is that if you want to be competitive, you have to be involved in all of the above.
It all starts with the website
In the late 90s when the Internet boom began, everyone knew they needed a website. Life was good back then if you were a web designer. Chances are, though, a good percentage of those websites have changed little if any over the years. The content is old. The website is not SEO friendly and may not take advantage of new technology. If your site falls into this category, it’s time for a website redesign.
Websites today are a place to conduct business. When people need answers or solutions, they turn to the Internet. Your goal is to get them to your site where you can interact with them and hopefully get them to choose you and your product or service. While some of the simple do it yourself website templates offered by companies like Intuit or Godaddy might work for some, I wouldn’t build my business around such a site. For more information on what makes a good website, check out our web design services page for more information on what features to look for in a website.
You’re going to need SEO
Even the best designed website has little impact if no one sees it. That means you have to do everything you can to promote your website. The web address needs to be in all of your communications to customers. Your website address should be in all of your advertising. But to really increase traffic to your site, you have to invest in professional search engine optimization.
SEO is a multi-step process that involves both on page and off page optimization. One of the more important and effective steps to take is keyword research. If you have a new company or a redesigned website, you won’t be able to compete for high quality keywords. That means you have to find keywords where the traffic is still high but the competition is low, then optimize your site around those keywords.
Once that important step is completed, then you need to tackle the off page SEO including link building, branding, content creation, and developing your site into an authority site. You can find out more about the steps involved on our SEO services page.
Why you need to add pay per click advertising into the mix
As important as SEO is in any online marketing strategy, you can’t stop there. First, SEO takes time. Your new site or newly optimized site is not going to get first page search results overnight. You can get there with the right keywords and a little work, but that’s only a small percentage of your potential clients. Your competition, who is optimized for the better keywords, is going to get more traffic and more business.
But there is a way to level the playing field and that is through search advertising. With a well structured pay per click campaign, you can compete directly with anyone for any keyword.
Let’s say you’re just starting out and want to get into wedding photography. So you hire us to build your website. We find the perfect template and within weeks you have your website and portfolio up and running. Problem is, despite all that hard work, you’re trying to compete with companies and individuals who have been doing wedding photography for years.
So you hire us to do some search engine optimization and we discover that a good keyword phrase to optimize for is digital wedding photography. So we go ahead and optimize your site and within a few short weeks your site is ranking on page one or two of Google every time someone searches on the phrase digital wedding photography.
Good work. But most people are still out there searching for “wedding photographer” and not “digital wedding photography.” Using pay per click marketing and location targeting we can get your company on page one or two of the search results for that important keyword phrase.
Now as more people discover the advantages of PPC advertising it’s going to get harder to compete even in this arena. For most businesses, it hasn’t reached that point yet. But when it does, then you’re going to see the cost for keyword bids rise and the competition get even tougher. So the sooner you get started the better. You can find out more about PPC advertising on our pay per click services page.
What about social media marketing?
If you think that social media marketing is a useless time waster, think again. Social media marketing is important regardless of the demographics of your customer base. If your customer base is the the thirty and under crowd, then it’s obvious that they’re going to interact with social media. But a social media campaign is much more than Facebook and Twitter.
Our new photography business, for example, might benefit from having a blog. Say you write an article about comparing the benefits and advantages of videotaping a wedding versus still photography. A soon-to-be bride trying to make a decision on whether to hire a videographer or a photographer or both, might find your article and, as a result, find you.
You can find out more about how you might benefit from a social media strategy on (you guessed it) our social media marketing services page.
What about traditional advertising?
There will always be a place for traditional advertising. But if I had a limited budget and had to choose one over the other, I’d choose online marketing. And I’m not just saying that because I’m in the online marketing business. Traditional advertising is costly. You spend thousands of dollars trying to reach as wide an audience as possible with the hope that your target audience will see and respond to your ad.
With online marketing and search advertising all of your efforts are directed towards your target market. You have better control over your costs. And you get instant feedback on which of your marketing efforts are producing the best results.
If you want to compete in today’s competitive landscape, you need to have an online marketing strategy. You could do it on your own, or you can hire experts like us at Click Here Online Marketing. We know how all the different components work together. We’ve invested in the tools that help us give our clients the best results. Either way, you can’t just sit around thinking about it or your competition will soon pass you by.
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