SEO - Organic Search Engine Optimisation
Whether you already have an established website or are in the process of launching a new one, it will need marketing, you will need SEO!
It is impossible for any website that has not considered search engine optimisation to achieve good rankings on any search engine without any form of SEO marketing strategy. SEO does not just apply to ecommerce and other business websites but also a community blog or a hobbyist's portfolio for example. In the case of business websites there's a good chance your competitors are funding SEO marketing campaigns to further their rankings. In the case of the none commercial websites it could just be that a similar site to yours is unknowingly using better keywords and phrases as well as updating their content more often than you. All this means your constantly being out-ranked!
When we say marketing, we don't just mean your usual pay-per-click campaigns. There are all kinds of marketing strategies you can follow to get your website viewed and more importantly for that viewer to recommend your website to their friends, family or coleagues. There are offline strategies such as leaflets, newspaper ads, posters and even good old word-of-mouth. Then there are online strategies that may not cost you anything but time such as running blogs and utilizing other social networking media.
SEO - What Is Organic Search Engine Optimisation?
Organic SEO or Organic Search Engine Optimisation in a nutshell is gaining overall popularity for your website through means of optimising the meta data and content on your webpages. You then spread the word about your website via blogs, forums, directories, friends and relatives to gain traffic. Once you start to build the traffic you won't lose it as long as you keep updating your website regulary. Your website will eventually drive traffic towards itself through its own popularity. Although that doesn't mean you can call it a day, your website's popularity will fade as more new websites come onto the scene with the same target audience as you. Bottom line is, organic SEO is extremely front heavy to get things moving. Once you have attaind a good place on the internet you still need to keep your content fresh and interesting or your visitors will look start to look elsewhere!
Paid Advertising
You may ask why should you pay for advertising after everything that has been said so far about organic SEO. Well, one thing you will notice whilst going about your organic SEO is that it can take a while just to start lifting your website off the ground. This is where paid advertising comes in. With paid advertising you can get your website seen on other peoples websites as well as search engine advertisement areas for a set period of time. Of course there is still a lot of competition here so don't think this is an easier route to getting your website seen. Usually the positioning on your advertisement is dependant on your bid for that placement, simply a case of the higher bidder wins.
Your pay-per-click advertisements should target the key phrases you have already drilled into your webpages. If you are selling cars and you create an advert targeting the key-phrase "car sales" you will not get a good conversion rate simply because "car sales" is a very broad phrase attached to every car showroom website out there. You need to keep your competition level down! To do this you would need to target a more accurate phrase that matches a phrase on the webpage you are linking to and perhaps your location to get an even more custom phrase such as "Milton Keynes Car Showroom". This phrase will only compete with other car showrooms in Milton Keynes thus making it easier for you to promote your page or website.
Now that you have a few pay-per-click type campaignes in place you will start to see traffic coming in, probably a lot of traffic but this is not always a good thing! If you are a business selling goods then the chances are a lot of the clicks you are getting will be from competitors either doing their pricing research or simply to expire your maximum daily click count very quickly before their potential customers see your advertisement. The key aspect here is conversion rate! Therefore it is wise to work out what days and what time of day your customers are shopping. You could also try to obtain geographical data too. With this information you could set your advertisements to only show during these times and/or areas.
So I Need Both Organic SEO & Paid Marketing?
It is entirely up to you what you think will work best. No one knows your website or business and target audiences as well as you. What we would always recommend is that you start your organic SEO first, get your strategy organised and moving. Make sure you target specific key-phrases per page rather than cluster a page with multiple keywords thus losing the focus of the pages content. Then if you need to speed things up consider paid marketing. If you have a high level of competition then you may need to keep up your paid marketing as well as your organic SEO but the bottom line is, your website NEEDS to be optimised for the search engines first. Remember that if your adverts are appearing on the first page, that doesn't mean your website is.
SEO = Time, Time & More Time!
We have already mentioned that organic SEO is free, depending on your strategy of course, but it does take up a lot of your time. If you are running a business or a generally busy on daily basis then you will most likely find you simply do not have the time to design, implement & maintain a healthy SEO strategy. This is where you may need to consider outsourcing your SEO. On the other hand you may have the time required but just need help putting the strategy together. In either case we are here to help!
We offer strategic advice as well as the resources to fullfil your SEO strategy. Contact us for a free chat to discuss your SEO requirements via our contact form and we will phone you back, it really does cost you nothing to talk to us!
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