"PR Redefined"

We came across this information on where a typical website’s visitors come from and thought it was interesting:

Where your website visitors typically come from

So although Search Engines provide approximately half of all traffic and you should use SEO and PPC where appropriate to drive traffic from search engine results pages, direct links and direct typing provide almost as much traffic.

So going through the basics and making your website address highly visible on all marketing materials is worth the effort even if it’s not that exciting. As is online PR and other online content creation work that builds inbound links.

One of our most successful recent activities in this area has been the use of the many competition outlets such as those offered by Large Magazine and many others. They are simple to set-up and very cost effective particularly for those in consumer markets such as hospitality and retail.

Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) a scam? Apparently yes according to one prospective client I met recently. But they did accept that being high-up on Google and other search engines would be of value to their business.

SEO is basically the process of matching your website to the search terms that web users type into their search engine (Bing, Google, Yahoo et al).

Think of it as a way of creating a signpost to your business. If all the signs in the world said “go this way” we wouldn’t have a clue where we were heading. But if your business happens to be training people to scuba dive and you optimise your site for a phrase like “scuba diving school” , then there’s going to be a good chance that you will attract some highly targeted visitors who are looking for your services.

Then it’s down to the design of your website to turn these browsers into real enquiries.

High rankings can benefit your business

This is very simplistic, but the point is that SEO is not a scam because when done well it should help you get more business via your website. For us having a top ranking on Google for “Marketing Consultancy Manchester” has led to tens of thousands of pounds worth of business and has been extremely cost effective.

How much should we pay?

This is often the key question. The person we were talking to had been quoted between £250 and £1500 per month for basically the same thing. To price something correctly an SEO company should ask how many keywords, how competitive your phrases are, how complex your website is and things like that. They should also be able to show examples of terms they are successful with for other people.

Beware false examples

If your term has a geographical element (hairdressers in Liverpool for example) you should be paying towards the bottom end of the scale. If you want to be top with “cheap flights” then good luck, you will need a serious budget and a big team.

But there are terms out there which will be popular enough to make sense for you but won’t be impossible to achieve success with. If someone shows you how they got someone top with a very unusual term then it’s not really proving much by the way. You can do a lot of good work yourself by choosing the right keywords and then making some easy changes to your site and you don’t need to pay thousands for this. If you have lots of terms and your website is central to your marketing efforts, it’s worth budgeting for good SEO support.

If in doubt ask someone

We are quite happy to offer you advice on your SEO project if you feel unsure about what you’re being told. We’ll even sit in with you at meetings if you want some expert opinion. Just drop us a line.

Why do companies bother to market their products and services when they have no system in place to actually sell them should anybody respond to their marketing?
Virgin Media are a case in point – they market very well but now I’ve tried twice to switch to them and both times they have failed to follow through. Apparently my house needs an engineer’s ‘spot check’ and they have to book that for me. This hasn’t happened and now I’m going off them wondering if this is typical of their service levels, etc etc.
To add insult to injury, the second time we tried to arrange the switch, the sales person said they would ring me back in 3 days to make sure it had been done. That was a week ago.
OK, rant over, but this is a more common problem than you would think. There’s no point starting a marketing campaign if you haven’t got the follow up ready and waiting to turn the leads into customers. It will most likely make people less likely to buy from you and waste a lot of money.

Marketing communications is a management process through which an organisation enters into a dialogue with its various audiences. To accomplish this the organisation develops, presents and evaluates a series of messages to identified stakeholders. (more…)