| Internet Marketing Challenges - You Just Dont Know What You Dont Know |
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The trouble with marketing on the internet is that one has to know what one is looking for. In selling your business the challenge is that without knowing about you, your products or services , how do you get people to look for you and end up on your page if they don't know anything about you.
Right now you probably have no idea of who I or my own business is about. Why should you if you have never heard of either or know that we exist. The same probably goes for some of you and your own businesses when it comes to marketing them on the internet. One of the great fallacies is the belief that if you have a website everyone knows how to find you and that it will create new business opportunities. Sorry folks, nothing could be further from the truth. Competition is fierce, the sheer volume of websites on the internet and the over saturation of irrelevant information all provide you with a challenge in getting your business found on the internet search engines. If you have a business then you need to have a website. Bill Gates once said, "If you're not online in business, then you're not in business". It is not only expected, it is necessary for almost all businesses. Your website however should deliver value to your business by improving the way you conduct your business and how you market your products and services. Finding your business will be largely achieved through the use of search engines. Google alone accounts for between 60% and 70% of all searches across the world. In Australia alone it is 87% Getting a result in search engine results will not happen by itself. And if you want real results you should be aiming for first page result listings. Research has shown that 70% of all search users do not go past the first page of the search results. If people don't know about you then they will not know what to look for. The simple answer lies in the statement - CONTENT is KING. Subject to the content of your website you will have a chance of being found by search engines. Combined with any number of almost 200 different techniques you can get to the top of page 1 search engine results. There are 3 simple SUCCESS factors you MUST address with your website. 1. Drive qualified traffic to your site 2. Conversion of that traffic into opportunities 3. Make a sale from those opportunities A key aspect is optimising your web page. This is the tricky part as what you are trying to do is to interpret what you believe people will be searching for (search phrases or key words) and then optimising the text within your web page on those search terms. As a search engine optimiser (SEO), it is my job to identify the most appropriate search terms for optimisation and then determine how to optimise your page on those terms. Sounds simple right? Well in principal it is but in fact there is quite a lot to achieving real results. SEO consultants make extensive use of software and other tools to assist them in analysing the data we collect in order to determine the best approach. Some of these tools are available online for free. None of this is foolproof and changes will need to be made as time goes by. There are also a number of particular coding techniques that need to be followed in order to create a web page that is optimised and legible. What I have discussed above is about 'On-Page' optimisation. In order to achieve top search engine rankings you will also need to implement 'Off-Page' initiatives which are about building credibility and relevance for your website through links to your pages from other websites. At the end of the day your internet marketing needs to be performed in alignment with your overall marketing strategies. The best marketing is totally wasted if the product fails to deliver and this is equally relevant to the quality of your website. If it is poorly designed or fails to deliver any value to your visitors then they will not use it. To wrap up - in order for people to find you on the internet you will need to speculate on what they are looking for. Once you have made this decision you need to optimise the content of specific pages of your website around those search terms with On-Page and Off-Page techniques. You then need to ensure that visitors perceive value from your site directing them to take some form of action. Appropriately implemented in conjunction with other marketing strategies, your internet marketing campaign can put your business in front of the world's largest market. Your campaign will qualify visitors ensuring that you attract the best quality opportunities. All for less than the price of your annual fee of a Yellow Pages block advertisement. Source: Hitwise Australia: What are Australians doing online? Melbourne, 22 Feb 2008 |
