Small Business Marketing: An Online Focus
Unlike big business, small business owners cannot just splurge money on brand building and marketing. Most small business marketing strategies need to be result-oriented and cost-effective. Some effective ideas for small business marketing are as follows:
Small Business Marketing Plan
You should first find out your target audience and what’s the best way to go about reaching that audience and only once you have this information devise a marketing strategy. Then it’s a matter of weighing up the various ROI potentials of the different marketing mediums. This of course may mean some trial and error, but sometimes it’s our failures that help us move towards creating business success.
Brand Building and Small Business Marketing
When it comes to small business marketing, brand building probably isn’t at the top of the list of small business objectives. Nonetheless no matter what size business you are running creating awareness of your products and services is always desirable. In terms of bang for your buck online media produces the best results, however this is still a very new area for many business owners.
That said the most cost effective way to build your brand as a small business is to just create happy customers that are willing to spread the word about your business on your behalf. It’s also important to note that with the advent of the internet it’s never been easier for your customers to share their opinion with hundreds if not thousands of web browsers. So doing good business still is the best way to build your brand.
On the topic of the web, by opting for a small business marketing strategy that focuses on online methods of advertising you can generally produce much cheaper leads than other marketing mediums. Building a website related to your product or service and filling it with useful content about them is the first step of getting involved with the online mediums of promoting your business.
Small Business Internet Marketing Ideas
Some common business internet marketing techniques used when it comes to promoting a small business website include:
- Search Engine Optimisation: Also known as SEO, this focuses on increasing the rank of your company’s website on the major search engines which can produce significantly greater amounts of relevant traffic to your site.
- Pay Per Click (PPC): PPC is where business bid on keywords and pay for ads to be placed alongside the organic search results. It provides businesses with the opportunity to gain quick exposure in search engines without waiting months and months for SEO campaigns to take effect. Though this can get quite expensive and it’s important to create highly efficient campaigns that target the right people searching for the right terms.
- Email Marketing: Through email marketing you can keep all your customers aware of your latest services and products. This is one of the cheapest and most effective small business marketing methods given the high propensity for satisfied customers to buy from you again if contacted.
- Social Media: Joining various social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and others is an emerging marketing trend that is suitable for some small businesses. More than just a business marketing idea, making use of social media profiles is often a great way to get customer feedback.
- Affiliate Marketing: If you’re not interested in spending loads of time finding out how to effectively market your products and services on the internet, then you could potentially offer an affiliate program where third parties will market your products and services for you in exchange for a commission.
For small business marketing strategies to be effective prudent planning is critical. This is also applies with online marketing and in many cases it would make for a good investment to at least do some of your business marketing planning with an internet marketing consultant. In Australia, you can find good consultants in all major cities like Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, etc. They will be able to help you build and effective strategy for your small business marketing.
Cheap SEO: Not As Cost Effective As You Might Think
Online business success is often determined by its visibility on the major search engines. Good search engine rankings generate more visitors which produces more sales. Search engine optimisation or SEO for short is the process of optimising a site to achieve better rankings in the search engines.
Whilst many SEO firms and services are reputable, increasingly, potential SEO customers need to be wary of cheap SEO services which don’t offer genuine longer term value. The rising demand for SEO services coupled with the budget constraints of small business has produced the emergence of relatively automated, basic and cheap SEO packages.
Despite being attractively priced, cheap SEO services often produce questionable results, which may not be both sustainable in the long run and not detrimental to the website’s integrity in the eyes of the search engines. Getting a good ranking in all major search engines is time consuming and requires a great deal of expertise and often quality content development. It’s well understood that any time consuming task is going to cost more. Under these circumstances, the concept of cheap SEO is very sceptical.
Automated SEO Often Lacks Quality
Often these cheap SEO packages centre around automated link building, automated directory and search engine submissions, optimising only the homepage of a site, no content development and few quality inbound links. For the most part they rely on targeting unproductive keywords that have relatively low levels of competition in online markets at the moment. However low levels of competition won’t be present forever, thus the need for a more long term strategy that is focused on quality and not low quality ranking factors that the search engines themselves are likely to discount in the future.
Unfortunately, any way you look at it, SEO takes time. It’s process should include keyword research and keyword selection based on potential value, content analysis and development, onsite reconstruction as well as optimisation, quality link building as well competitor analysis. Also, SEO isn’t not an overnight process, it takes time before you’ll get to see the results of your efforts, due to the time it takes for the search engines to recognise the changes in both your site and the new sites that are hopefully now linking to you. So beware of companies that talk about getting result within two weeks with their cheap SEO methodologies.
The higher price does not mean the availability of a better service all the time; however, real SEO approaches for which much effort is required are rarely offered by cheap SEO companies. Indeed, these cheap SEO methodologies are not the most effective ones and a number of reasons can be established in support of the view. These include:
- Quality SEO companies and consultants will focus on long term value.
- Often an ongoing SEO commitment is required because the reality is the web is always being updated and as such the ranking change all the time along with your competitors online marketing strategies.
- Many cheap SEO packages utilising automated techniques, which search engines are likely to discount for in the future.
- Attempts to manipulate search rankings via automated process can result in your website being penalised in the search engines, so cheap SEO services might end up costing you dearly.
- SEO is not as simple as the application of the right keywords in the right places. An expert SEO consultants should be engaged, they will cost more but they will have the experience to help you avoid the pitfalls as well as give you the advantage over your competitors. Remember that small improvement in rankings can lead to exponential improvements in your traffic.
- Look for an SEO that actually has a presence in the SEO industry, rather than just offering cheap SEO services without any industry reputation.
In Australia, you will find a number of renowned SEO companies in all major cities including Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and others. Many of these companies offer end-to-end SEO solutions. However, before hiring their SEO services, you should do some research work on which will definitely bring an effective result for you. Feel free to ask potential SEO firms what differentiates them from the competition, and if their biggest point of differentiation is “price” it might be worth moving on.
Link Building In Brief
Basics of Link Building in under 500 words.
Building links to your site is a vital part of SEO. Links from other quality sites is a key indicators search engines in determining your site’s quality and relevance.
Important Aspects of Links
- Anchor Text – Are used by search engines to determine page topic.
- Who Links To You - Search engines value links more from relevant sites that are authorities on the respective links topic.
- Where Links Are Located – Prominent links within content are more valuable than links tucked away in the footer of a page.
- Number Of Links On The Page – Links are more valuable from pages with only a few outbound links as opposed to pages with hundreds.
- Quantity – The more quality links pointing to your site the better.
- Diversity – Search engines see natural link diversity as a sign of quality whereas repetitive link building strategies are seen as trying to manipulate search rankings.
Main Methods of Link Building
- Directories – Submit your site to relevant directories.
- Comments – Leave comments on related blogs.
- Forums – Post links in topics and in forum signatures on related forums.
- Article Submissions – Submit article to article directories with links to your site within the article.
- Guest Post – Guest post on blogs with a link back to your site.
- Email Requests – Email relevant sites that might consider linking to your site.
- Exchange Links - Only trade links with reputable and relevant websites.
- Start A Blog – Add links to your site within blog posts.
- Press Release – Craft press releases to build buzz and links.
- Buy Links – It’s against Google’s guidelines, but many link builders do it. Be discrete.
- Offer Incentives – Don’t systematically “buy” links with offers; just subtly incentivize linking to you.
- Review Competitor’s Link Profile – Then attempt to obtain links from the same places.
- Use Hubpages & Squidoo Like Services
- Utilise Social Bookmarking
- Create Link Bait – Produce content that will motivate the linkerati.
- Create Widgets, Programs, Plugins, Products, Quizzes – People link to useful things.
- Setup “Link To Us” Pages – Offer banners, badges, cut and past HTML code snippets. Making linking to you easy.
- Embed Links Within Syndicated Content – Your syndicated content should at least link back to you.
- Optimise Internal Navigation – Search engines factor anchor text of internal navigation links as well. So add keyword rich anchor text within navigational links.
Link Building Warnings
- Avoid rel=”nofollow” – Links with the attribute rel=”nofollow” won’t be valued by the search engines.
- Avoid Pages That Aren’t Indexed or Crawlable – If the search engines can’t find or crawl the page the link won’t provide any value.
- Avoid Javascript – Search engines have traditionally had trouble indexing javascript.
- Build Links To Sub Pages As Well – Don’t just build links to your homepage.
- Don’t Link Spam – Search engine algorithms are always refining and spammed links will eventually being devalued.
- Don’t Trade Links With Loads of Irrelevant Sites – Link exchange systems with irrelevant sites will get your site penalised.
- Beware Of Redirects – Many don’t pass link value.
Ultimately, building quality content makes any link building campaign easier as people are more likely to link to you.
Best SEO Company Websites – Top SEO From Brisbane to Perth
When it comes to hiring SEO companies most businesses find it difficult to distinguish between quality SEO services and the smooth talking salesman. Unfortunately SEO is quite a refined art where the principles are simple, but if these simple principles are applied to the wrong degree the results won’t be improved search engine rankings rather the delisting of your site from the rankings. So it’s vital you hire an SEO expert or company that knows what they are doing.
If you are in the market for an SEO company I highly recommend reading our 21 Signs a SEO Company is Bad at SEO before you start reviewing candidates.
In addition to the above article I’ve decided to try and shed a little bit of light on some local SEO companies via a website SEO audit on SEO companies that claim to be SEO experts.
So why do an SEO audit on SEO company websites? It’s a simple case of seeing if these SEO companies practice what they preach and in some case see if they are even aware of what SEO best practices are.
SEO Company Website Review Process
So what I’ve done is a search in Google using the term “SEO Location” and selected 10 of the websites that have ranked well when searching for that term. So for example I entered the search term “SEO Brisbane” (a term all Brisbane SEO companies should be aspiring to rank for) and have chosen to review the first five organic rankings, the first three local listings and the top two sponsored results.
It’s important to note that given that these SEO companies made the list of SEO websites to be reviewed says that they must have been doing something right to be among the most prominent sites when searching for the popular SEO keyword phrases. Nonetheless some of the results are quite interesting, and they are outlined in the posts listed below:
- Sydney SEO Company
- Melbourne SEO Company
- Brisbane SEO Company
- Perth SEO Company
- Adelaide SEO Company
- Gold Coast SEO Company
Please note the following:
- There are SEO companies in Sydney that aren’t included as they haven’t optimised their site for the term “SEO Sydney” but they should have.
- This list was derived using Google International. Results may vary based on search preferences and location.
- The companies have been listed in the order they appeared on Google.
- I have also commented on likely conversion optimisation performance of the site given that it’s not all about getting traffic.
21 Signs A SEO Company Is Bad At SEO
Following on from our Best SEO Companies series, I thought it appropriate to talk about how you can spot a bad SEO company.
- The SEO company contacted you via email, phone or mailer despite their supposed skills with search engine optimisation!
- The SEO company offers “instant” or “quick” results. Above board SEO takes time. One caveat would be in instances where your website already has an extensive link profile in comparison to the competition, but poor onpage SEO. In these rare cases some ranking improvement can be achieved quickly. In the vast majority of cases SEO campaigns often take many months.
- All the SEO company talks about is keyword integration, keyword density and inserting keywords into meta tags. Keyword stuffing worked well a decade ago, there is a lot more to SEO these days.
- They avoid the topic of link building (or worse still don’t offer any link building within their packages). Building links is where SEO’s earn their worth.
- Their link building campaign is just directory submissions and trading links with hundreds of irrelevant sites. These sorts of links aren’t of great value in the eyes of Google.
- The SEO company tries to bamboozle you with statements like “we’ll submit your site to over 1000 search engines!” The vast majority of your search engine traffic will come from a handful search engines which have probably already indexed making search engine submission redundant.
- The SEO firm always talks top 10 and tries to impress you with the idea of being ranked in the top 10 for three word phrases – Read Google CTR – A good SEO firms will compile keyword reports and will work with you to select keywords to target based on a combination of value, potential traffic and present competition, and should be aiming to rank as high as possible (hopefully first).
- The SEO firm guarantees everything unconditionally. At the end of the day Google is an entity unto itself. So no one can honestly guarantee anything and when they do they often are just guaranteeing worthless results.
- SEO firms that talk about “Google PageRank” too much or make promises about improving your PageRank. The reality is PageRank is trivial when compare to achieving good rankings. That should be the focus of the SEO firm.
- They don’t think anything other than SEO is worth investing in. SEO is just the first piece (albeit a big piece) of an online marketing strategy. Quality SEO firms will be willing to discuss other aspects of internet marketing such as conversion optimisation (great when used in conjunction with good SEO) and complementary marketing campaigns like PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing; even if they don’t offer those services themselves.
- Many SEO firms want large retainers for work already completed. Make sure if you are paying a retainer that they are still continuing to work and develop your SEO campaign (ie continued link building, content development, new keyword phrase optimisation etc).
- The SEO firm doesn’t have a proven track record or isn’t forth coming with their previous client portfolio that shows current top 1 rankings for valuable two word phrases.
- They are unwilling to explain how they SEO sites. SEO isn’t rocket science, so they should be able to explain it to you in layman’s terms. Those that aren’t willing might be hiding their black hat SEO strategies or the fact that they don’t know anything about SEO.
- The SEO company implies that you won’t have to change at least some of the content on your site, add additional content or that the content on your site isn’t important in maximising the benefits of SEO. Content is what Google sends people to you site for – it’s an important part of any SEO strategy.
- The SEO firm say it’s only important to optimise your homepage. Whilst the homepage optimisation often proves to be the most fruitful that doesn’t mean employing good SEO on the rest of your site won’t achieve a good ROI.
- The SEO company implies there are no risks to SEO. Search engines do apply penalties to sites and even deindex sites that attempt to game their ranking systems. Whilst the search engines are advocates of website owners using good SEO practices, however there are grey areas when it comes to SEO.
- The SEO firm doesn’t rank well in major search engines for their own company name. Seems crazy but there are SEO consultants out there that don’t even rank in the search engines themselves. I often suggest when looking for a local SEO that simply searching for “SEO Location” is a great place to start. So for example if you live in Sydney search for “SEO Sydney” and look at the top 10 ORGANIC results.
- People within the SEO company don’t participate in the SEO community. The search engines like Google are refining their algorithm all the time and most good SEO’s will have at least some involvement in SEO/webmaster communities to some degree.
- They want to charge per keyword. Whilst this wouldn’t instantly imply someone was a bad SEO, but the vast majority of good SEO companies just don’t operate like this.
- The SEO company says they can achieve good rankings irrespective of the competition. Competing for search engine rankings is pure competition. At the end of the day only one site can rank first for a search term, and if there are millions of sites competing for that term then ranking for it is going to be difficult to achieve.
- They contacted you. Once again the point of SEO is to get people to visit your site and contact you. There is also a huge shortage of “good” SEO services out there and the SEO’s worth hiring aren’t out there scouting for more business.
PPC In Brief
Basics of PPC in under 500 words.
PPC (Pay Per Clicks), like it sounds, is a form of website advertising model where you pay for each click on your ad (visitor to visit your site).
The biggest PPC network is Google AdWords. It’s largely a keyword based auction system, where advertisers bid on how much they will pay per click relevant to specific keywords.
Major Benefits of PPC
- Instant Results – You can have a PPC campaign up in a matter of hours.
- Pay For Performance – You only pay when someone visits your site
- Highly Targeted – You can target searcher searching specific terms, languages, in certain cities or country, at certain times of the day.
- No Site Changes Needed – If your site is ready you can drive traffic to it straight away.
- Budget Controls – You can limit your campaign spent to a few dollars or tens of thousands.
- Ranking Controls – You increase or reduce your bid price to change your ad ranking.
Optimising Your PPC Campaign
To effectively utilise PPC for Google AdWords you should implement the following:
- Match Types – There are three keyword match types, broad, phrase and exact. Try and use “phrase” and [exact] match to better target relevant searches. Broad match gives very untargeted results.
- Negative Keywords – Makes sure your ads don’t show for irrelevant search results which will cost you money and reduce ad CTR’s. Eg if you sell used cars and are targeting the term “use car sales” you don’t want your ad shown when someone searches for “used car sales jobs” do you?
- Separate Keywords Into Adgroups – Improve relevancy of your ads by grouping major related keywords together.
- Always Test Ads – Try different calls to actions, USP’s, keyword integration, use of price, capitalisation, etc.
- Use Landing Pages - Make it easy for visitors to get that information, product or service they want once they have clicked your ad. If you send them to your homepage and they can’t instantly see what they are looking for they may leave frustrated.
- Optimise Your Landing Pages – Always test and refine your landing page (Google Website Optimizer). If you can increase your conversion rate relative to the competition you can justify higher bid prices.
- Set Goals and Track Everything – PPC is expensive so track conversion through goal setting and Google Analytics so you know exactly what your ROI is.
- Use Location Targeting – If you live in Sydney and want to buy a used car, are you more likely to click on an ad that says “Used Car Sales” or “Sydney Used Car Sales”? If in doubt test.
- Content vs Search Network – Separate content network campaigns from search network campaigns and test the ROI of both.
- Quality Score- Google wants to display relevant ads for its users as well as make money. So make your ads and landing page relevant to the search terms your targeting. Increase your CTR as much as possible.
And that’s PPC in 500 words or less. Please leave your questions and comments below:
SEO In Brief
Basics of SEO in under 500 words.
Search Engine Optimisation is exactly what it sounds like; optimising a site for search engines to read, understand and index. For Google, Yahoo or Bing to rank a site, they must first be able to read the site and determine what topics it’s relevant to.
Search engine ranking algorithms are complicated in theory factoring a huge number of variables, but in practice only a few have a major influence.
Major Elements of SEO
- Keywords – The most important factor in rankings; the presence of the keywords on the page you want to rank for. Where possible they should appear in the title tags, meta tags, heading tags, content, URL, images. That said you will find more success aiming to rank for popular 2, 3 and 4 word phrases because there is less competition for them.
- Links To Your Site – Links are how search engines determine site quality. Links are like votes. If someone links to your site search engines interpret that as them endorsing your page/site. Like all democracies, the more votes (links) the better.
- Anchor Text and Relevance – Those voting for your site (linking to you) express what your strengths are with the words (anchor text) they link to you with. So a link using the words “great cooking tips” to a search engine says your site has “great cooking tips”. If that endorsement came from another popular cooking site it’s a much more respect opinion than if that endorsement came from any old site.
- Domain Name and URL – Major keywords in your domain (or page URL) tells search engine your site (or page) is about that topic.
- Lots of Quality Unique Original Content – Search engines’ purpose is to connect their customers (searchers) to good quality content. So more content means more terms search engines will find and rank you for, but remember quality counts. So write for humans first, then optimise for search engines.
- Age and Trust – The older your site is the more search engines can trust you, because it proves you’re not some fly by night SPAM site. As you build more links over time search engine trust in your increase and they’ll allow you to broaden your content and still be ranked well.
- Site Navigation – Internal links are still links according to search engines, though not as valuable as external links. Your site navigation should utilise your major keywords, link to all your major pages and be easy to navigate. A sitemap can help search engines crawl your site.
- Images – Optimise your image alt tags to improve both your page optimisation and generate extra traffic through search engine image search features.
- Tracking – This won’t help improve your rankings, but it will provide important information about the search terms people used to get to your site.
- Don’t SPAM – Search engines evolve and eventually eliminate SPAM. So don’t keyword stuff you pages and SPAM links all over the web. Just provide quality content that would be valuable for their searchers. That’s what they want; so work into their agenda.
And that’s SEO in 500 words or less. Please leave your questions and comments below:
Click Through Rates On Top Google Rankings
I’m sick of seeing SEO companies offering “guaranteed to get your listed on the first page”. Seriously, if you’re an SEO and in the business of improving Google rankings, aiming for anything less than top 5 you’re ripping your clients off. Sure the average business owner wouldn’t know that the drop off rate from 1st to 10th is close to 1400%, but professional SEO companies should be informing their clients of these facts.
CTR Based on Top Google Rankings
A study was done back in 2006 on click through rates (CTR) for top Google rankings which. The breakdown of the proportion of clicks that each ranking position got has been displayed below:
Ranking 1st: 42.13%
Ranking 2nd: 11.90%
Ranking 3rd: 8.50%
Ranking 4th: 6.06%
Ranking 5th: 4.92%
Ranking 6th: 4.05%
Ranking 7th: 3.41%
Ranking 8th: 3.01%
Ranking 9th: 2.85%
Ranking 10th: 2.99%
Second Page: 10.18%
So You Pursue Top Google Rankings; Not Top 10
Given the above evidence why would anyone aim to rank anything but first? Getting on the first page just simply isn’t enough to compete long term and this doesn’t even factor for the reality that most people are substantially more inclined to purchases from their first point of contact than additional points of contact.
So Why Such A Substantial CTR Drop Off?
At the end of the day realistically the bulk of the CTR drop off comes back to a couple of factors:
- Refine rather than scrolling - most people are more inclined to refine their search further by adding an extra keyword when the top search results don’t seem to match what they were looking for rather than scrolling through the results and additional pages.
- People are satisfiers not optimisers - most people are looking for something that satisfies their problem or query, they’re not looking for perfect information. So if the top result provides adequate information to solve their problem they are not going to continue on through the rankings visiting other sites.
- Assumption of best results are first - unfortunately the majority of searchers have come to assume that Google automatically provides them the best result for their query making lower ranked results erroneous.
- Keywords in title – top results are more likely to have the keywords search for in the title tag which Google then bolds which significantly increases CTR as a result of attracting the eye.
Now whilst as a general rule of thumb the higher you’re Google rankings the better the CTR, however this phenomenon may vary between topics search for and purpose of the search. For example if someone was searching to purchase or book something online (particularly bigger ticket items) it’s unlike that they’d limit their research to just the first result. As in with searches that precede action being taken which is of high value then a greater amount of research will be conducted. Nonetheless ranking higher is still always better.
Increasing Competition in Search Engine Result Pages Coming From Google
Over the past couple of years Google has evolved into more than a search engine. They have moved into web analytics, emails, video, maps, advertising, images, rss and even publishing themselves. With their diversification has come the leveraging of their core asset – their own search engine result pages (SERPs) to support their own secondary assets. We have seen the introduction of images, maps, local business listings, youtube videos and aggressive advertising into their own SERPs which have increased the competition for searchers clicks.
This trend isn’t likely to reverse and highlights just how important it is to diversify you internet marketing strategy into more realms than just SEO.
Why Your Conversion Optimisation Is More Important Than SEO
ShoeMoney
I get emails every day from people who rank in the search engines for their keywords but are not getting any leads from it. When I send them a list of like 20 things to do to improve their conversion they tell me “but could this affect my keyword ranking?”.Annoying…
Continuing on from the previous post – Is Your SEO Focus Destroying Your Sales Conversions? – too many online marketing campaigns are focused on SEO as their internet marketing solution rather than just a small part of the equation.
Diminishing Returns of SEO Optimisation
Whilst the click through rate difference between 1st and 10th can be as much as 1500% there comes a point where SEO won’t yield the return on investment that optimising a site design for conversions or integrating optimised landing pages into PPC campaign will. Often refining the average site design to convert better can produce just as significant a ROI, if not even more so, than SERP ranking improvements in addition to giving you a longer term strategic advantage over unoptimised competitors in paid traffic mediums.
Over Reliance On Google
Also far too often people forget that Google is a law unto itself, it’s not obligated to rank your site for anything, and if all your eggs are in the SEO basket be prepared for some tears and a business model break down. If your online success is over 70% dependant on Google that’s a single point of failure if I have ever seen one. Now I’m not saying Google and SEO shouldn’t make up a very important chunk of your online marketing campaign, but it’s not the be all end all that many SEO companies sell. Rather it should be seen as the very healthy bonus to an online marketing campaign.
Poor Conversion Optimisation Helps Your Competitors
Aside from over reliance on SEO and Google, the reality is with your competition just a click away users don’t waste time trying to work your site out or spend too long trying to find the products and services they are looking for. They literally conclude in a couple of short seconds whether you have what they want. Failing this test they will be browsing your competitor’s site seconds later.
So not only are you missing conversion opportunities you’re giving your competitors a bite at the cherry, not to mention that in our fast paced world empirically it’s been shown that customers first point of contact is many times more likely to make the sale than following points of contact. So making it simple to get find the information they need then proceed down a sales funnel and/or get in contact with you is vitally important.
You need to remember that in the world of business, sales are more important than potential prospects. So keep your website focused on best serving your customer, rather than focusing on primarily serving Google.
Plan For The Future Of SEO
The web is the most competitive place for businesses to compete and having a site unoptimised for conversion will hurt you more in the long run than having a site that is unoptimised for search engines. With Google’s algorithm constantly evolving many top search engine marketing experts are speculating that websites that engage their users as well as continue to build an aging link profile are gaining a first mover advantage if/when Google decides to build user based data into their their ranking algorithm.
Internet Marketing Darwinism – Survival Of The Fittest
With SEO many feel search engine traffic is free therefore conversation optimisation of it isn’t essential, but the reality is every visitors that leaves without buying, subscribing or clicking an ad is a missed opportunity that you may not get again, or worse is gone to the competition. If your competitors utilise their opportunities better than you, it doesn’t matter if you out rank them today because Darwinism is alive on the web and the fit, strong and flexible organisations and individuals using best practices will eat into your market share and increase user retentions which will indirectly lead to eating into your rankings well over the longer run.
Sell Because People Want To Buy
Many site owners fear being overly focused on conversion optimisation or being “too aggressive” in selling themselves, but at the end of the day the strong will rise to the top and weak will be filtered out of the web like any other competitive system.
Plus when was the last time you visited a random site and went “man I’d love to be friends with the owner of this site?” That’s right, never. Your visitors don’t want to be your friends, they want you to help solve their problems.
And when was the last time you said “wow this site provides great value, but I hate the fact that the owner had the nerve to place ads on his site.” Once again, rarely.
So remember that people have come to your site to solve a problem, make that as easy as possible for them, and if you can cost effectively solve that for them, you’ve created a win win situation which is the principle under which business is done. Don’t be afraid of selling to people who want to do business with you and don’t get caught up on SEO – it’s not the primary part of your business.