Posts Tagged ‘PPC’

95% now say SEO is important

A recent survey by an online magazine involved in SEO and E-Commerce, has discovered how much of a priority search engine optimization has now become for marketing professionals.

The magazine polled its readers this April and unveiled that 95 percent of them agreed that SEO was important to their business. The complete results revealed that just a single person now said that SEO wasn’t important to their organization, with the remaining respondents still being unsure.

The analysis also identified that over 80 percent of respondents revealed that their own company website was search engine optimized. Just 11 percent replied that it wasn’t.

Importance of SEO

There is little doubting that SEO continues to cast a vital shadow over online businesses. The survey asked for comments about the perceived importance of SEO and several positive phrases were used, in particular “imperative” and “essential.” However, one possible area for review was found in the large discrepancy between the numbers of people who said SEO was important compared to the numbers who said they understood it.

Only 40 percent of those readers polled said that they completely understood the concepts of SEO. The vast majority of people, over 54 percent, responded that they understood it “somewhat.” The remaining respondents said they did not understand it all.

PPC vs. SEO

A further survey conducted by Internet Retailer, went on to discover what type of search engine marketing the companies polled were leaning towards. Despite an almost equal set of positives being highlighted, the study discovered that people still considered natural search to be the most effective. Over 50 percent of retail marketers responded with the information that over a quarter of their website traffic came in through natural search. Asked the same question for paid search and the results were 28 percent.

Both surveys continue to highlight though, how vital having an effective SEO campaign now is for companies.

When embarking on a PPC campaign it can be quite daunting to the unprepared or inexperienced would-be advertiser. Google Adwords can seem like a minefield and with actual hard cash at stake it means there is even more reason to tread carefully.

But there are 4 key stages that will contribute to PPC success.

Firstly, plan your strategy. Work out how much you are prepared to spend per visitor and stick to it. The common mistake made at this stage is that firms try and bid more than their competitors then sit in front of their account worrying about conversions and cringing as they see the spend steadily and horrifyingly creep up. Work out a conversion rate, apply a budget and stick to it.

Secondly, make sure you’ve got a good site. You can drive all the targeted traffic in the world to your site but if it’s not geared up to convert it will be a complete waste of time and money. Make it easy for the visitor to find the information they are interested in. The clues are in their search term! Ensure that the calls to action (the methods of contacting you) are easy to see and prominent and consistent. If it’s an e-commerce site ensure that information is clear and navigation is slick. Drive the traffic, then convert it.

Thirdly, don’t go hell for leather. Start small and experiment with your ad copy, keywords, bid times etc until you start striking the perfect notes. Don’t just look at Google either, there is great value and cheaper clicks available on Yahoo, ASK and Mirago. Whilst you are refining your techniques this cheaper traffic can be invaluable in making inexpensive mistakes until you build confidence and results.

Fourthly, implement the right analytics on your site. It is imperative that you can monitor how traffic performs on your site and gain vital information on conversions. If you have a form you want visitors to fill in, make sure the thank-you page is tracked when it’s submitted. Monitor calls if possible. Definitely monitor sales! The statistics are what enable you to recognise trends, improve poor performing areas, strengthen well performing areas and essentially learn from the facts to make informed decisions. Get your analytics right and you make every decision easier.

And finally (I know I said there were only 4 keys) be confident. Fortune favours the brave!

We are loving the Social Media explosion here at Ignition! It’s a really interesting and quickly developing area and it’s providing some of our clients with some excellent results.

We’ve already written about one client who suffered from a lack of search within the search engines, but whose project raced away when we ran some ads on a few social media sites; and this trend has snowballed somewhat to the point where we are almost offering a Social Media Marketing service as standard, and often in tandem to an SEO service.

And this is the bit that we are enthusiastic about, this correlation between Social Media and Search. The services are complimentary as oppose to an either/or approach. Just about every service or product has a target market, and this can usually be defined by demographic information eg gender, age, location, etc, particularly in a business to consumer scenario. So any potential visitor that is missed through the search engines can be picked up through social media. All it takes is a bit of thought and a bit of research to find out where they ‘hang out’.

Once we’ve found your audience it’s a case of experimenting with advert appearance or copy, much as you would do with an SEO project or a PPC campaign. Split testing still applies until you start hitting the right notes and attracting the right kind of converting traffic. Then we roll it out and it’s onwards and upwards!

It doesn’t just apply to consumer services and products either. Business people visit and use Social Media sites and many are becoming prolific bloggers and visiting sites 2 or 3 times daily. The enormity of this emerging and exciting medium cannot be ignored.

Social Media and Search? Together? I think so.

At the moment we are in the fortunate position of winning the vast majority of the Internet Marketing pitches we make to new clients. Usually we only dissect the pitches that we do NOT win to try and find out where we went wrong, how we could have been better etc. So it was quite refreshing yesterday to have a client congratulate us on winning their business and telling us that the reason they went with us is that we seemed to understand the most important thing to them – getting them more business.

Whilst the client was fairly sophisticated in terms of knowledge about SEO and PPC campaigns they bemoaned the fact that the other 2 rivals in the pitch completely bamboozled them with jargon. They kept telling them how good they were and what great clients they had, and how algorithms would affect them, amongst other, far more scary sounding beasts lurking in the dark corners of the internet ready to prey on the naïve company that strayed too near them. You get the picture.

Our pitch focussed on the client. We told them that traffic was important for both SEO and PPC and they should expect more of the right kind of traffic. Firstly they needed to rank highly, secondly we needed to examine how to improve the conversion of the traffic we drive to the site.

There’s nothing new there I hear you say. Well, ultimately we told the client that the only true way to measure our service, and for them to assess the value of our Internet Marketing, was in their ROI. That clinched it. We told them that once everything is stripped away; the jargon, the fancy terminology, the procrastinating on all things marketing, the lamentation of the economic climate – that we would get them more sales and they would make more money than they were spending with us every month.

So that was that. In the future we are going to start asking our new clients why they chose us because it’s now obvious to us that we need to know what we are doing right as well as what we are doing wrong if we are going to continue to compete.