SEO Blog

It’s the start of a new year, and in an industry like this, it’s time to predict what the year ahead has in store. SEO is notorious for its malleability, keeping up to date with changes and fluctuations is part and parcel of its survival, so it’s important to have a clear understanding of what could be coming up in the months ahead.

That said, 2012 appears to be a year in which online privacy will take centre stage, especially in Europe. You only have to look at the number of legal battles involving Google and a number of European countries, including Germany and Switzerland, to understand that it’s a hot topic. But why is this the case?
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On Friday I wrote about the problems that online retailers face at this time of year when trying to promote their businesses online. Today those issues really come to the fore with the arrival of ‘Mega Monday’, supposedly the busiest day of the year for ecommerce sites.

With the world pouring online to buy Christmas goodies, you want to make sure that your site isn’t left behind. So whilst this advice might come a little late for some, there’s no harm in learning lessons from the mistakes and triumphs of this year’s big players.
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Whether you’re an established offline business or are just starting up online, you need to have a clear understanding of your market. It’s not like building a store in the real world, where your competitors are usually defined by geographical location. On the Internet, there are no boundaries or borders. Customers can get their goods and services from anyone, anywhere and at any time.

Therefore if you are going to stumble in blindly to a saturated market without any sense of what you’re looking to achieve, failure is the only likely outcome. Let’s say I want to create a new poker site. As you’re probably well aware, there is a massive online gambling industry in the UK. Huge companies compete for lucrative rankings in Google – often propped up by offline campaigns, display advertising and affiliates.
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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.