Marketing
We can design the most amazing website known, however if we cannot position it for your customers to easily find it, it is not fulfilling its potential. The easiest way to think about internet marketing is "now that I have designed and erected my billboard, I need to put it somewhere so my potential customers can see it". Ask the question- Where would my billboard be seen more often; a lonely country road or a busy freeway? The obvious answer is the busy freeway.
- These freeways in the electronic world can take the form of:
- Search Engines- Google, Yahoo, Bing, and their associated content offerings
- Business Directories- Yellow Pages Online, True Local
- Industry Association Websites- Master Plumbers Association, CPA Association
You need to be aware that marketing in the online space is a huge industry in its own right. And as with all industries there are companies and organisations with varying reputations. 'Buyer Beware' is the message here as it is easy to be wowed by the big words and unqualified promises, however the results delivered by some operators are well below standard. By far the most successful internet marketing is done through Search Engines. This can be through a Pay-Per-Click (PPC or AdWords) campaigns, or through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your website to appear in the organic results of a search engine. Managing these campaigns is usually quite time consuming for an individual business, and therefore makes good business sense to engage a professional to do this for you.
[g]commerce can present the benefits of each, or indeed both options for your business. Our staff have relevant industry experience working and consulting for professional firms whose sole business is internet marketing. We also have affiliated partners who, depending on the direction and scale of your program can provide a specialist service. This exposure like all other marketing programs will generally have fee's involved, however we will demonstrate how these different programs can deliver an exceptional return on investment.
Pay-Per-Click
As your prospective consumers abandon traditional print media (like newspapers and paper yellow pages) and spend more time online, how can you turn local online searches into phone calls? A very effective marketing strategy is the Pay-Per-Click model offered by all leading search engines.
Essentially, your business is positioned in a relevant search results page, based on the process of an online auction occurring for each search which determines your position in the Sponsored Links list, and furthermore whether you appear on page 1 or not. The more you are willing to pay for that click based on the key word or phrase, the higher and more prominent you will be. This is all well and good, however your competition will be vying for the exact same positions as you, amending their own bidding to get above you, on keywords you know gets traffic, but does it actually convert into business? Whilst a very effective way to drive inquiry, it can be very time consuming to do it effectively taking you away from serving your client base. It stands to reason that a specialised company should be engaged.
[g]commerce has affiliated itself with ReachLocal Australia, the nations leading Authorised AdWords Resller. ReachLocal have over 16,000 clients worldwide and are a publicly listed company on the US NASDAQ exchange. They, through their publishing network reach over 97% of relevant business inquiry through the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The best part? You only spend when someone already looking for your services clicks on your ad. Plus, ReachLocal campaign managers utilize smart technology to optimize your campaign twice daily, shifting more of your advertising dollars to the keywords and sites that give you the most phone calls and contacts. This is patent-pending technology, they term it Conversion Based Optimisation.
Speak to your [g]commerce consultant about utilising this technology, and get your business to the front of where people are looking for your business- the internet.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is defined by wikipedia as the process of improving the visibility of a web site or web page in the search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.
What does this mean?
It means that there are a number of factors that the search engines look for when determining the ranking of a site in their search engine results pages (SERPs) and an SEO is the process that makes sure that as many of these factors have been 'optimised' or actually even implemented on your site. However this is not limited to your actual site's code itself. A Search Engine extends it's analysis to the rest of the World Wide Web (WWW) looking for links back to your site in order to see who else trusts you. Let's look at this in an analogy: You build a fantastic shopfront business with the best layout, the latest technologies, the best customer service, the lowest prices, the highest quality products but it is in the middle of nowhere and you don't tell anyone about it. How successful would it be? Probably not very successful at all. What about if, on top of all of the other setting up you did, you employed a marketing person to get your name out there and tell people what you do via Radio, TV, letterbox drops e.t.c, how well would you do then? Most likely a heap better. SEO is no different, you invest time and money into your site and get all of the 'on page' code right for the search engines to read and make a decision on you but if nobody links to you it is a waste of time! SEO is the process of improving your site's code for the search engines as well as getting your site linked to from other sites so that the search engines can find you
Why use SEO as part of your marketing strategy?
It's a fact that consumers are utilising the internet more and more every day for just about everything, here's a couple of fast facts to demonstarte the power of the internet. According to Internet World Stats of the estimated 21,000,000 people in the country over 80% use the internet Even here at the Google Retail Blog it shows that 42% of consumers researched and purchased online and a further 34% of consumers bought in a store after researching online. That's roughly 12 and a half million customers. This Eye Tracker study shows that 88% of consumer click on the top 5 places in Google and 79% on the top 3.
Why are these facts important?
Simple, if you aren't on the first page of the Search Engines then YOU DON'T EXIST. Also you are missing out on over 60% of the Australian population. Why Us? We take a holistic approach to your website, treating it as a business of it's own. We break down your sales process and analyse how well your site converts because it's one thing to get traffic but entirely another to transform them into leads ansd sales. Also, stand behind our work and we guarantee our results. There are many other SEO companies out there that say you shouldn't however that is a safe way of saying "We don't know if what we are doing will work"