Make it easier for customers to find you online.

So you’ve made the leap and brought your business online (if not, check out our Online Products section to see how we can help get you started).  Now it’s time to decide what your objectives are and how you will use your site to track whether or not you’ve met those goals.

 

That’s right. The simply getting a website is only half of what it takes to establish an effective online presence. The next step involves clever marketing to strategically position your brand in the minds of customers all over the internet. Though this type of marketing has many different forms, each with their respective strengths and weaknesses depending on your message and your target audience, there are two surefire ways to improve your visibility and brand awareness right off the bat: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC).

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

 

In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your site’s ranking in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing through the use of targeted keywords and phrases in the content of your site. The higher your ranking on these search engines, the greater your visibility becomes and the more traffic (or visitors) you’ll receive.

 

As part of your SEO strategy, our Internet Marketing team takes into account how these search engines function and what some of the most common keywords in your industry may be. Using this information, we are then able to develop a pattern of techniques for how you can make search engines work for you. Although they do require habitual performance reviews, SEO techniques are fairly easy to maintain once they have been set into place.

 

Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

 

Pay Per Click Marketing, also known as Cost Per Click, is a very proactive form of search engine marketing that requires purchasing advertising space on search engines, popular interest sites, and even blogs. Just like SEO, these ads rely on a knowledge of targeted keywords and strategic placement to become effective.

 

One advantage that this form of advertising offers is that it allows you to better control where your message is seen, ensuring that it’s positioned in a location that is most relevant to your target audience. 

 

The other advantage of PPC Marketing, which you only pay for the ad once a potential customer clicks on the link to visit your site, requires your site to have the necessary atmosphere to boost sales including easy navigation and a clever use of product imagery to encourage buyer interest.   The cost varies usually depending on its location and number of clicks it receives.

 

The best option is to not rely too heavily on either one of these strategies alone, but instead maintain a good balance between SEO and PPC.