L&S Unscripted

Search engines (primarily Google and Yahoo) consistently refer 30-60% of our clients’ web traffic. People are searching for your product or service – the only question is: can they find you? Have you often wondered how to gain that highly sought-after position in the search engine results pages when people type a key phrase that’s applicable to your line of business? The path to success is search engine marketing and I’ll begin by defining the two sides of the equation:

• SEO: search engine optimization; work performed behind the scenes to best optimize your web site for top search engine positions (ranking). Example: the top organic (non-paid) positions on Google or Yahoo for a particular search term.
• PPC: pay-per-click marketing; paid text ads placed in the “sponsored listings” area on search engines. Normally the top 2-3 listings on the search results page and the right column of listings.

We hear the question all the time – if we’re working to optimize our web site for search engines (SEO), why do we need to invest in a pay-per-click marketing campaign? In most cases, we recommend both and our clients who aggressively pursue the online marketing landscape use both. I once heard an analogy that it’s similar to advertising in the yellow pages. There’s a huge advantage to acquiring both positions. Considerations:

Time:

• Short-term solution: PPC, the fastest way to drive traffic to your web site. You build the campaign, take it live and within an hour, you could be appearing at the top of the paid listings on Google, Yahoo or MSN for your selected keywords. PPC is also a great avenue to test keywords, ad copy response and landing page effectiveness.
• Long-term solution: SEO is a process, not a project. The time spent optimizing your web site copy, image tags and META data will have a positive long term result, but you have to be patient and often, even the best SEO work takes a couple months to show a true increase in rankings.

Cost:

• PPC is a great online advertising medium because you only pay for clicks that actually land on your web page. Therefore, if your web site is well built and guides the user to the desired conversion (sale, information request or particular web activity), it is a very effective way to gain new traffic to your web site. The best part is that PPC is entirely measurable – an exact ROI can be produced for every dollar spent.
• SEO is often referred to as “free” as once you gain a ranking, you don’t pay for clicks on the search engine listings. However, SEO as a process is not free. It requires constant effort, diligently keeping up with new tactics and modifying the web site code accordingly.

Bottom line:

Search engine marketing is a highly effective, efficient online marketing tactic and it consistently produces the lowest cost-per-lead for our clients when compared to other online marketing campaign components. Once you launch your search engine marketing campaign, you’ll want to assess both types of traffic, organic and paid, to identify the quality of both sources of web traffic and adjust your campaign accordingly.

Get in the game,

Robin

In a meeting yesterday, I had an ah-ha moment. As we’ve tried to help our clients make the leap to social media, too many times social media brainstorming is limited to banner ads on Myspace or Facebook. As marketers, we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg, so I say: take social media out of the list of marketing tactics… it doesn’t belong there. Really, it’s a paradigm shift in that the social nature of messaging is infused in everything we do online.

Virtually every type of digital marketing has or could have a social component changing each medium from a one-way form of communication to two-way communication stream. For example, we must understand online user behavior to be able to join the conversation. Going in blind simply doesn’t work. This act of online listening can be defined as participating in social media. Cross-linking is social media. Reading and writing blogs, ratings and reviews is social media. Digital PR is social media. I’ve even known certain e-mail campaigns to generate dialogue. And of course, we can build web applications that have social nature and application.

Don’t place Social Media as a line item within your marketing plan - that’s too limiting. Think big. It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s simply the online world in which we live and play. Dive in.

Steadily socializing,

Robin