- 8th Feb, 2014
Your business is at risk of failure unless you make a change to your marketing techniques. And, when it comes to your online marketing strategy, it has to be a serious change. Online marketing strategies such as organic search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising have increased the competitive edge of millions of businesses.
If you don’t know what either of these is, you’re potentially missing out on much more custom for your business. You may have even read about the topics on the internet, but perhaps you were rather shy of trying them out for yourself. So here are some tips on using these online marketing strategies:
Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Organic SEO is an online marketing method that requires momentum and long-term commitments to its progress. By using organic SEO, your information is accumulated in a number of ways, such as link building campaigns with respectable publications and directories. The initial process of organic SEO involves identifying your business needs, image and position in the online marketplace. In order to take control of this, you have to work out some objectives in order to measure progress in your marketing efforts.
- What do you want to accomplish in your industry?
- What is your current image?
- Is your website optimised for success?
An experienced SEO consultant will help you identify keywords, integrate them into your meta tags and content, and reconstruct your online marketing strategies to fix any previous misguidance. Organic SEO stems from onsite optimisation coupled with link popularity distributed throughout the web. You can also use paid one way links to your site and link exchanges with authoritative websites. But remember, with organic SEO, it isn’t possible to just work on it once or twice to achieve results. Once you start, you need to continue or else the momentum will be lost and these strategies will not help increase profits for your business long term.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising entails the use of relevant keywords in ad placements, relative to website content. PPC advertising revolutionised online advertising by placing small businesses on the same level playing field as large corporations. By using PPC, you can stand out amongst your competition with an interesting Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in ten words or less. If you have ever considered PPC advertising, you should answer these questions regarding your business:
- What do you have to offer?
- Why should customers click your ad?
- How can you engage them with 10 words?
You should then focus on composing your ad, featuring an engaging title and ten words signifying your business’ uniqueness. One of the trickiest aspects of PPC advertising is its closeness to other competitors – in sponsored positions in the search engines. When potential customers search for information, your ad shows up in the form of a sponsored link at the top, or right hand side, of the search results. Your ad content must trigger an instant response or you may lose interest to either your competitors or the organic SEO results.
PPC or SEO?
So which strategy is best? There’s no right answer as each one has distinct advantages. PPC advertising can offer immediate increased visibility of your business, whereas organic SEO will take time for any results to manifest themselves. However, some internet users distrust the sponsored results and choose always to go straight to the organic listings. There are of course costs involved with a PPC campaign, whereas it is possible to carry out organic SEO with no upfront costs. However, organic SEO is very time consuming and, as a business owner of course, time is money. The best tactic with these internet marketing tools is to combine both in one campaign. The general consensus from marketing experts is that PPC advertising will help to boost the profile of your website in the short term until the organic SEO strategy has your website consistently ranking well for your chosen keywords.
Consider combining these online marketing strategies for a recipe for success in your industry. Many small business owners make the mistake of using only one or even none at all for their marketing campaign – think again.
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