Market - SEO, PPC & Email
Effective marketing is key to the success of any business. Paper advertising, television and radio are all very good routes but there are also numerous electronic marketing avenues, which have various advantages. The most common methods are below but there are numerous other options. We would be happy to advise as to the best route for your business.
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are how a website is guided up search engine result rankings. The usual goal is the first page of Google for various keyphrases.
Regardless of the goal of a website a primary requirement for its success will be having lots of visitors. There are two main sources of traffic to any website.
- Direct requests from people who know what the website address is. e.g. existing customers or through leaflets etc.
- Search engines.
In the UK ~85% of search engine traffic is from Google. It is nearer 90% in Ireland. So Google is the primary target. Yahoo! and Bing search listings are secondary goals (Yahoo! and Bing search will merge in the near future so we can pretty much forget Yahoo! now anyway).
The search engine's job is to provide the best match in terms of results for any given search phrase. Google often uses the phrase "relevance" to describe the way it orders the results. So, our job is to increase the website's relevance in the eyes of Google.
Google uses three algorithms (procedures) to determine relevance.
- Off page factors.
- Pagerank.
This is the links to your page from other sites. This is measured as a
pagerank. The higher the pagerank of the linking page the more relevant
your site must be. So the more links from good pagerank sites the
better.
On page factors. - Hilltop. This is how the content of a page reflects the search phrase. The text content is a big factor but other elements which can be considered the architecture of the site matter as well. As the name suggests this is about being on the top of the hill not just stuffing a page with keywords. We need to look for the optimum in all things.
- Sandbox. Google figures that content which changes more often is more up to date so more relevant. Just changing text etc. helps here as do things like blogs and forums. This is less important than the other two.
The process of fine tuning a website to meet these criteria is known as "Search Engine Optimisation" or SEO.
Pay-Per-Click
Pay-Per-Click campaigns utilise the "Sponsored Results" seen on search engines and on other sites. Every time someone clicks on your link you pay a small fee, usually a few pence. This is a great way of driving traffic to website where natural search engine rankings are not yet adequate.
The advantage of PPC campaigns is their immediacy and guaranteed, measurable results. However, they can be expensive and unlike SEO, once you stop paying you lose your place immediately. Also, visits from PPC sources tend to spend less time and money on the sites they visit than those from organic sources.
Email Marketing
E-mailshots work the same way as paper mailshots. We provide custom email templates and can arrange the sending of emails to distribution lists. We operate our email marketing through the MailPro1 brand (micro-site coming soon).
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