SEO Blog

As more business transfers from off to online, it’s important that your business remain up-to-date.

When you consider your advertising plans for 2009, it’s time that you switched your expensive, unfocused and immeasurable offline advertising strategy for a powerful targeted online approach to advertising and marketing.

It’s time to join your competitors and your customers by advertising your goods and services online before you get left behind.

So why should you switch?

It’s Targeted

Internet advertising allows you to target your advertising directly to people that are already interested in your product or service. When someone looks for your goods or services using a Search Engine, your ad appears to them, no wasted effort or expense, just an advert directly targeted at an interested potential customer.

Rather than the expense of offline newspaper and television advertising, online advertising allows you to target who and where your advertising is shown. For instance, you can decide that you only want to advertise in your local area, nationally, regionally or globally. You can advertise to English-language speakers only, or include other languages or everyone. You can even specifically target one set of ads to one type of customer, a different set of ads to another. You can produce different landing pages for each of those ads, so each type of customer receives a unique online experience of your website.

It’s Measurable

The advent of the Internet has brought with it ways to measure the effectiveness of every penny spent on advertising online. Using advertising systems such as Google’s AdWords, MSN Search Advertising and Yahoo Search Marketing allows you to control precisely how much you spend on the basis of how many people are clicking on your adverts.

You can test and experiment with your different ads, and immediately drop ads that aren’t producing results. This is simply impossible in the offline world, where this decision would cost your company dearly.

Using analysis tools, you can examine whether your ads create conversions to sales, sign ups, or whatever action you wish your potential customer/client to take. You can experiment with different wording, different landing pages and different types of ads to different kinds of customers. You can measure each step, to see if it’s successful, how successful and what it costs you compared to the revenue you are making from it.

It’s where your Customers are

Switch on your computer - your customer is already online. More than two-thirds of the population of the UK use the Internet each week. People are spending more and more time online and it’s where they do their banking, their communicating and more importantly for you, their spending.

More than £40 billion will be spent online in the UK this year. Online advertising will allow you to take a piece of that pie. Internet advertising attracts just the type of customer that you are looking for, one that is already searching for what you have to offer.

It’s Where Your Competitors Already Are

No doubt, your competitors are already implementing their 2009 online advertising strategy. They know the power of targeted ads with measurable results and are connecting to the millions of people and businesses using the Internet to shop for products and services on a daily basis.

The switch is quick and painless but to avoid being left behind, it’s time to take action.

If you’re using the Internet for business, you’ll understand the importance of getting a good ranking in the Search Engines and how vital that is for the success of your business online. If you don’t possess the skills to produce your own great search engine results, then it’s time to hire an expert, a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Specialist. But how do you know what to look for when hiring an SEO specialist?

Keywords

An SEO specialist is an expert with keywords. A real authority on SEO will dedicate considerable time to research the precise keywords that your target customer will be typing into a search engine and ensuring that those keywords feature significantly in your website’s content.

Guarantees

An experienced and legitimate SEO specialist will not make outlandish guarantees. They know that Search Engine Optimisation isn’t an exact science and only Google and the other Search Engines are in possession of the precise details of how to achieve the number one spot in their rankings. A specialist will be able to guarantee greatly improved rankings, but not specific positions for all of your chosen keywords.

Credentials

It’s important when you’re hiring an SEO expert that you check their credentials. Are they an authority in their area? Have they written an eBook or better still published a book on the topic? Do they hold real qualifications? Do they have experience? Furthermore, do they use ethical techniques for improving the traffic to your website or do they use certain ‘black hat’ techniques as they are called. It’s vital that you check their credentials and avoid the sharks that lack the expertise to get the results you need and so resort to unethical methods that will only end up with your site getting banned by the Search Engines.

Location

Many people have been sucked in by the cheap SEO deals offered by so-called specialists located somewhere in the Third World. The trouble is that their command of the English language is often less than desirable and you can’t get them on the phone during your office hours. What’s more, if you select a specialist that is closer to home, you’ll be able to visit their offices, discuss with them in person your needs, and have a person and place to go to if you need help.

Freelance, Agency, or Employed?

Employing your own SEO staff means that you have a full time expert available to dedicate their entire working week to the promotion of your website on the Internet. If you have £30k+ in your budget to spend on this type of expert, that’s great. If you don’t have that kind of budget, the two other options are:

Freelance – Only there when you need them, so you save money but they have limited time and resources at their disposal.

Agency - A pool of employee expertise with a measurable reputation, more costly than a freelancer, but more likely to deliver sustainable results.

Think carefully about your choice of SEO specialist and look for an ethical SEO expert with excellent credentials.