Few of us can fail to have been affected by the current economic climate. Thankfully, although far from unaffected, the online community has in the main been able to battle through the last couple of years and as the glimmers of a recovery begin to be visible, low infrastructure online businesses are finding themselves in a relatively positive position. Many have suggested that the economic climate of the last couple of years has perhaps been a catalyst in hastening the demise of high street businesses that were on borrowed time in any case. As a result, online traffic has benefited from a consumer base interested in looking after the pennies. What has become clear is that levels of competition online can only intensify and with tightly controlled budgets, business are looking for the best return on investment (ROI) possible for any marketing spend.
Online Marketing Mix
For decades, professional marketers have understood the importance of a balanced mix across advertising channels. Precisely the same approach applies online. Any self respecting online business will require a mix which embraces not only paid advertising (PPC) which is of course suffering under current budgetary constraints, but a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. The ROI for natural (unpaid) search is, over a long period of time, vastly better than that of any other online (or indeed offline) spend. Over 80% of website traffic originates from a search via one of the major search engines, with Google having the majority market share but significant search volumes also occurring via Bing (formerly MSN) and Yahoo. Clearly it takes a great deal of time and some investment to achieve sustainable presence in the search engines` natural results. Achievements are almost invariably measured in months rather than weeks in SEO. However, once you start to drive traffic this way,
on the assumption that you and your SEO providers don`t subsequently break any of the rules, the traffic should keep coming.
Is it Viable?
Many firms and indeed SEO providers seem to ignore this step. The first step in any SEO strategy is to check that there are actually some battles you can win. Competition in almost all sectors is intense - and becoming more so. Your business may be in an industry where any meaningful search terms that are likely to actually drive traffic to you are so madly competitive that no matter how well you may execute an SEO strategy, you will find that you gain little or no traction in the heavily contested search engine "real estate" for your target search terms. We have undoubtedly reached the point in many industries where some penetrating questions are needed. The first is thus: "does it actually make sense to compete for natural search?" Perhaps unsurprisingly, many SEO providers have a tendency to respond with "OK its going to be hard but there are some potential wins". This is often followed by the poor client making a significant investment in an SEO campaign only to be left wondering why there appear to be no results whatsoever at the end. In some cases this may simply be down to poor expectation management: make no mistake, SEO is extremely hard work and the results usually take many months to begin to materialise: any ethical SEO provider (of which there are many) should tell you this. The ultimate answer to a viability assessment will of course depend on your industry, brand and, sadly, budget. For most industries there ARE winnable areas of "real estate" - it is all a matter of planning and focus. For those that are not viable, other areas of the online marketing mix including Social Media Optimisation (SMO), email and viral marketing should provide cost effective alternatives.
A Top-Down Approach
For most businesses, a presence for appropriate search terms is absolutely achievable if you follow one guiding principle: everything must work together to reinforce these search terms. From the build of the site through to its content and links from external sites, all must focus on your target keywords. Many businesses may already have considerable information as to what search terms are driving any existing traffic. Others may have already researched the most relevant and appropriate keywords for
pay per click (PPC) campaigns in the past. In either of these cases, you may already have a list of search terms upon which your SEO activities should be based. If you don`t have this information to hand, tools such as Wordtracker and the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool will allow you to identify relevant search terms and some indication as to the search volumes by month for those terms together with the degree of advertiser competition.
From this information, you should be able to identify a "sweet spot" set of terms, balanced between search volumes and the level of competition for them. If you have an existing website, it is also worth analysing any existing traffic to see when you get the most page views. Use the information from your server`s logs (there are plenty of tools for this) to see who your visitors are, where they are from, which search engine they used and - of course - what search term. All of this allows you to build a profile of your customer. Tools such as Google Analytics will allow you to see how they navigate through your current site. Where do they stop? Which pages are most popular? This information can be further used to refine your set of target keywords. Some search terms will drive traffic but may not convert into business - often the broader searches with fewer words (which are of course harder to rank for in the first place). For most new market entrants, focusing on so-called `l long tail` terms of 3-4 words or more is usually the right starting point. You can start to target `core` terms later as you gain some traction.
Essential SEO
SEO is a vast discipline in its own right and many business owners find the whole subject completely intimidating. In general terms, the remainder of your
SEO strategy should cover the following, all of which are VITAL in achieving and sustaining search engine rankings:-
- Website optimisation (various tags, headings, structure of the code, use of images, ALT text and much more). There is a good deal of free of charge information online which will allow you to understand the basics before working with a professional web designer.
- On-Site Content. This must be relevant, fresh, absolutely unique and constantly updated, with your target keywords included at somewhere between 2 and 4% density. Many web design firms and SEO firms can provide
professionally written content at competitive prices although you may equally want to resource it internally.
- Linking (both the internal navigation structure of your site as part of the build, together with a mixture of inbound links FROM other relevant sites, outbound links TO other relevant sites and links exchanged with other sites). Linking is an entire industry in its own right and is notoriously difficult. Unless you are willing to do a great deal of research and spend a lot of time handling linking, you are usually best to employ the services of a reputable link building firm.
Getting Help
Clearly few people can be expert in each of these areas. As a result, many businesses outsource some - or all - of these activities, either to a single SEO firm or to multiple specialists. Reputation is everything in the SEO industry and there are many cost effective, hard working ethical firms. There are plenty of charlatans too.
The combination of a professionally designed and delivered site, suitable content and relevant links is a powerful one and with the correct keyword strategy should drive those vital positions in the search engine results. Few businesses address all of these areas as well as they might, leaving a significant opportunity for those with the commitment and a willingness to learn. As such, you may want to consider getting to grips with the basics via a couple of well chosen
internet & web design courses. If nothing else, this will allow you to know when a potential supplier is talking sense.