…if no-one can find it

Creating your web site is only the first small step on the road to generating traffic.

Unless you do something else, your site wil just sit there and no one will know it exists. Search engine marketing is that something else. It includes four main ways of getting traffic to your site:

• organically through keyword or keyphrase optimisation
• through referrals or link building
• by search engine advertising (pay-per-click)
• email database building and marketing

Organic marketing or search engine optimisation

What was traditionally known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), organic marketing is the idea of having your websie visible in various search engines when people search using keywords, as in Google.

Search Engine Optimisation is a complex and analytical process and achieving top search engine rankings requires regular work and dedication. Organic SEO means on page factors such as making sure your website targets key phrases in the right places on each page, making sure your code isn't working against you and validating your website.

Referral or link building

This is quite simply having links from other sites to yours. A robust SEM plan will have a comprehensive link building strategy. These can be natural, ghrough attracting link requests by having high quality contetn and a high ranking site, or it can be paid links or other techniques, such as listing your site on directories.

This is currently one of the most important ways to optimise your web site. If your web site doesn't have any links pointing to it, then Google doesn't think it is very popular or relevant. Naturally, the sites linking to yours must be relevant to what you do. For example, if your business is a professional services site, there's no point having links to it from a dozen plumbing web sites.

Pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine advertising

This strategy involves bidding for placement on search results. Submitting an ad to a search engine such as Google also means that it appears on its distributed ad network, for example, in Googe's case, AdSense. So your ads will appear both in search results and on content sites.

If you want immediate results for your website, we recommend PPC. The beauty of this advertising medium is that you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement, so your return on investment is highly measurable, as your advertisements. We can even split test advertisments to determine which one will get the best results.

Email marketing

Building an email subscription list is a key part of a modern SEM plan. It's important to know who your website viewers are and, if appropriate, to capture their emails so you can present them with information that might draw them back to your site.

Our approach

If you want your website to be successful, it's imperative that you have a balanced plan that addresses these four components. Just focussing on one will put you at a disadvantage to your competitors that have a more balanced approach.

Our approach to search engine marketing is to begin by looking at your business goals, evaluating your product or service offerings and creating a strategy to achieve your company's online objectives.

Web site metrics and analytics

There's no point in beginning a search engine marketing campaign if your website isn't going to convert your visitors into customers. We help you create a web site that sells.

By looking at your current website statistics, we can see at exactly which point (on what page or even what stage of a form) your visitors are dropping off, and look at why and how we can change that. We'll also look at your current site navigation and menus, and recommend ways to drive your customers through your website to the desired sales points.

We can also assess your existing website's search engine rankings and how well (or how badly) it has been optimised before making a our organic search engine optimisation recommendations to improve Google rankings for keyword and keyphrase search terms to improve traffic and sales conversion.

We use the latest SEO tools and analytics systems to provide you with the appropriate advice to increase your online visibility and your online enquiries.

Keyword and keyphrase analysis

You might think you know your potential customer and what words and phrases they use to find a service like yours, but wouldn't you like to know for sure?

We tell you the most popular phrases and keywords in your industry, and then optimise your website for these popular phrases. We also check out what your competition is up to and look for a gap in the market.