We generally focus in three areas:
* making your site an effective marketing instrument
* managing your pay-per-click campaign
* managing your campaign to obtain free search engine traffic
Pay-Per-Click
Often a Web marketing effort begins with a pay-per-click campaign. Although it imposes some cost,
since you pay for the traffic it brings, it starts right away. If you'd like to get more visitors
to your site and see business results right away, this can be useful. We can use pay-per-click to
begin delivering traffic to your site immediately; we back the pay-per-click campaign with keyword
research using leading industry tools so that the target words and phrases that we select are in
use by searchers across the Internet.
Pay-per-click ads appear on the right side of Google search results. The companies placing those
ads bid for bastion for certain search terms that are related to their business. For example, if
you sell dancing shoes you might bid for traffic for the search term ballet slippers. Based on your
bid and other factors, your ad will appear in the list of ads on the right side of the search page
when a searcher enters ballet slippers. If a searcher clicks on your ad to visit your site, then
you pay the fee that you bid.
It's best to start small with pay-per-click, so that we have a chance to learn which search terms
bring the highest-quality traffic. Your site produces a log of every action taken by visitors, and
that log can be analyzed. We can tell how long visitors who used a certain search term stay on the
site, and how many pages they read. These are the measures of traffic quality. It's useful to put
more money behind the search terms that bring visitors who stay on the site and view a lot of pages
when they come. If there's some specific action such as a purchase or sending an email that's a
desired outcome, it's also possible to determine which keywords bring the users who take those
actions.
A typical monthly spend for a starting pay-per-click is about $150, which causes enough traffic
that some reasonable measurements can be made. Then, as results are seen, the spend can be
increased. The cost per click depends primarily on competitive factors in your particular
marketplace, so details and costs can vary widely.
Free Search Engine
Traffic
Free search engine traffic takes longer to get than pay-per-click but the quest is worthwhile,
because this free traffic just keeps coming. Typically, after a period that can last six months to
a year or more, our clients appear on page one of Google for one or more query terms or phrases
that are important to their businesses. That's not a guarantee, but it is what we usually
deliver.
Visitors who are directed for free from search engines are very desirable, of course. However, the
search engines take their time finding the site and giving good position in their results. It
usually takes time to deliver solid free search engine results--months, in fact. It is widely
believed today that Google deliberately delays providing good position in search engine results to
new sites to give time to detect sites that are using techniques that they don't approve. This
so-called "Google sandbox" treatment can last six months for a new site.
The search engines don't tell us how they work, so the effort to obtain free search engine results
is based on experience, both personally obtained (I've been doing this for seven years) and
experience that has been shared by others, and occasional releases from Google. It's generally
impossible to associate a change in search engine results with a specific change in the site,
because these changes take so long to show up in search engines.
You will find that some Web marketers will guarantee certain search engine positions for free
search. There is no way to reliably deliver on such a promise, so don't believe it. You are likely
to be approached with offers to improve your search engine position. Be careful, since there are
many shady operators. It is possible to attempt to trick the search engines through a variety of
techniques that are called "black hat". These techniques may work in the short term but are likely
to get your site severely penalized in the longer term.
Web
Marketing
As an advertising medium, the Web is different from print media and print media is different from
television and so on. It's important to understand the Web visitor's state of mind when using a Web
site, and design the site and provide content to deal with those issues. How do we transform a
visitor into a customer, taking the actions that we want? Experience teaches how to do this.
An example of a technique that's important in Web marketing is a newsletter. If you become a client
you'll notice that I remind you every now and then of the importance of a newsletter. It's a way
for a visitor to say "I'm interested but not quite sold. Talk to me." The good news, of course, is
that you don't pay postage for this newsletter and you don't pay to print it! It appears in the
prospect's inbox, so it takes very little effort for the prospect to read it.
