Understanding Internet Marketing
There are two main things that come to mind when someone hears the words “Internet Marketing” – namely Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising. Many times the two are confused. Let’s clear things up a little bit.
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the practice of tuning your website so that it naturally earns a good rank for your desired keywords in the results pages of the major search engines. You don’t have to pay the search engines anything for SEO, and visitors generally trust results found in the organic or natural search engine results pages much more than the paid ads of Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
The disadvantage of SEO, as compared to PPC, is that SEO can take much longer to start seeing results. In some cases it can take years to earn a top 10 ranking. On the other hand, once you have your good
keyword ranking, maintaining it is fairly simple.
PPC involves bidding on ad placement on the search engine results pages. Pay-Per-Click ads typically show up on the right hand side or extreme top of the results pages and are marked “paid advertisement” or “sponsored links”. When someone clicks your ad, you pay a fee.
The benefit of PPC is that you can get the immediate results without having to invest in a long term strategy. The disadvantage is that once your budget has been used up, your ad disappears from the search engine results pages.
A successful SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign typically uses a blend of the two technologies. The question then is, “Which keywords should I target with PPC and which ones should I target with SEO?”
At Main10 we make use of what is referred to as the “Long Tail” of Internet Marketing to get more results. The long tail (illustrated above) is defined as the collection of keywords that result in far few searches than more obvious ones, but usually have a much more detailed search and typically result in more qualifiedvisitors.
For keywords with a larger number of searches, PPC can be very expensive and SEO tends to be much more involved than the
keywords with fewer searches.
Your Internet Marketing strategy will take into account how much each visitor is worth in order to choose which keywords you will target with PPC and SEO. In general SEO is used to target the keywords with the highest search volume and PPC is used to target the keywords that make up the bulk of the “long tail”. Main10 will help you make these critical decisions to get more value.
Optimize the Website
The key to making SEO work for your website is keeping in mind that the overall goal of search engines is to “provide relevant results to visitors”. When a visitor does a search, the search engines want that person to find what they are looking for in as few clicks as possible. If you can provide the most valuable content then the search engines will want to rank you highest.
In the Search industry, “Black Hat” techniques are the practice of trying to fool the search engines. Many times black hat techniques do work for a short while, but as soon as the search engines catch on the results are devastating.
Not only can you find your rankings destroyed, you can find your website de-listed entirely and placed on blacklists making it very difficult and painful to start showing up again in search engine results.
The best strategy is to give the search engines what they are looking for. Make it clear what your website is all about. Keep the visitor in mind. If you have done this well, then the only thing left is to make sure that the search engines understand that you have the best content. That is the real value that Main10 can offer your business.
Don’t stop there. A website that ranks well and cannot convert visitors into customers is leaving their potential unfulfilled. Create reasons for visitors to complete your desired action. Give them every opportunity to give you money.
Main10 can help you create calls to action and web pages that will help you capture leads and customers. Main10 will also run multi-variant tests to discover what approaches are most effective on your website and help maximize your conversion rate.
Drive the Traffic
Now that your site is ready for visitors, you just need to drive them to it. One of the most important factors in gaining favorable results from the search engines is incoming non-paid links. In short, the more sites that link to you, the more important you look to a search engine.
But not all links are created equally and the important thing about links is where they are coming from. A link from a site that focuses on a relevant subject is going to be worth much more than a link from your sister’s blog about some unrelated subject.
Getting the right links is one of the main focuses of our SEO programs.
PPC is a very powerful resource for driving traffic when used correctly. It can also decimate your budget if left
unattended or improperly managed.
With the use of good analytics, PPC becomes simple math. When you know the value per conversion, conversion rate, and cost per click you can make PPC profitable – Always.
As mentioned before, PPC can instantly drive traffic to your site, but that traffic will disappear just as quickly when those ads are
deactivated.
By managing your PPC well, traffic can be very predictable and stable. SEO takes time to build. How much time depends on the difficulty of the keywords you are targeting, and
your rankings will fluctuate slightly as the search engines vary their algorithms and the competition changes their websites, but once a good ranking is achieved, you can experience long-term, consistent success.
A Complete Solution
At Main10 we don’t just give you recommendations and expect you to get them done. We understand you have a business to run. We have the ability to not just give you marketing advice but to implement it correctly and efficiently on your website.
There are four main aspects to running a profitable website and Internet Marketing is just one of them. Web Design, Web Development and Web Management are crucial elements for success. All of these functions need to work well with their counterparts to create a successful website strategy.
