Planning your Internet Marketing strategy involves taking a new perspective on traditional offline marketing approaches. Follow these steps to develop a plan for extending your offline strategies onto the Internet. Your Internet Marketing plan should include:
Create a simple-to-navigate website that’s easy on the eye. Finding the balance between striking visual content and attractive written content is an important part of planning your site.
The next step is to get your potential customers or clients to visit your website. SEO is how you prepare your website so that people searching for keywords related to your business can find you on the major search engines. Your position in the Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPS) often affects your online credibility with visitors.
Choosing a Domain Name that clearly reflects your business is vital and although not THE most important factor, it certainly helps your SEO. Your website page titles should each feature your keywords and all of the written content of your website should be optimised for your keywords, but not to the exclusion of your human visitors.
Another way to improve your SERPs is through backlinks. This means the number of high quality links from other websites back to your page. It’s possible to engage in link swapping with other people within your business sector, but avoid buying backlinks from link farms, as this will damage your relationship to the Search Engines.
A very successful way to create excellent backlinks and build credibility is by conducting Article Marketing. This means writing or paying someone else to write a series of high quality articles related to your business and posting them at respected article directories. When a potential customer searches for information in your field, they find your well-written article, this increases their perception of your credibility and they follow the link to your site.
Online you can offer potential interested customers the opportunity to join your mailing list. This can be done from a sign up or opt-in page on your website or from a single stand alone page on a separate domain. To be sure that you are getting customers with a serious interest and not just spammers or those with a passing interest, you can offer what’s called Double Opt-In. This means once you’ve captured the customer’s data, you send them an email asking them to confirm their interest and once they click that, they are signed up as a confirmed lead.
To stand a realistic chance of getting good quality visitors to your site, it’s worth investing in Paid Search. This usually comes in the form of Google Ads. This means deciding on a range of keywords or keyphrases that you feel potential customers might use when searching for your goods or services and bidding to appear first in the Paid Search rankings. The advertiser pays per individual click on an advert (known as PPC) or per 1000 page impressions (known as CPM). When choosing your keywords or phrases try to think from the perspective of your customers and not use too many trade terms.
A blended approach to Internet Marketing, a method that involves some Paid Search, some SEO, Article Marketing and Opt-In Opportunities is more likely to be successful than exclusively focusing on one single strategy. Our search engine marketing services fit with this Internet marketing strategy and can help you increase your return on your online marketing investment.
I think the honest answer is that it depends! That is, it depends on the purpose of your site. Are you providing information or selling a product?
In very simple terms though, I would use both methods and just ensure that I measure the success of both. SEO is great once you’ve achieved success but PPC is also a fantastic way to capitalise on the many variations of a keyphrase that you couldn’t possibly hope to cover using just SEO.
What is most effective SEO natural listings or PPC? We’ve been looking at this and it seems natural listings achieves more than PPC.
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