SEO is an essential tool for businesses to promote goods, services and generate leads through their website. Here are some tips on employing SEO to ensure you maximise on your investment through effective marketing on search engines such as Google and yahoo!

Unlike other advertising avenues, search engines drive targeted traffic straight to your website. Traditional advertising methods create demand by trying to persuade people to purchase products or services that they do not need (or really want). Using Internet search engines as an effective form of advertising responds to consumer demand expressed by their user behaviour. With close to 90 percent of consumers actively using search engines on a daily basis to find information, products and services they want, search engines are now the premier lead generation source for modern businesses.

What should you expect from your SEO campaign?

SEO leads to increased market visibility. For years, the Internet was “just a place to be” and merely used as an online brochure by most companies. Now-a-days, if seekers do not find your site within a couple of clicks, they are likely to move on to your competitor. If approached correctly, SEO can move your company to the top of the search listings, letting your prospective customers know you take them seriously; enough to make their search for purchase or pre-purchase information easier.

There are two main types of search engine marketing technologies: SEO – organic, natural listings (the main results that show up for search queries) and SEM - sponsored listings (pay-per-click programs like Google AdWords, Yahoo! SEM) showing on the side and very top of the results list page. Several studies are backing up that customers overwhelmingly prefer organic listings to sponsored links as they deep them more relevant. Sponsored links, however, have proven to be effective for targeted short-term campaigns.

Optimising your website for the search engines

So what does it take to optimise your website for search engines? Content and smarts. A simple five-page site with scarce product information and limited contact information simply is not enough to haul in pre- qualified traffic. The search engines place more relevancy on sites with content elaborating on the relevant products and services on offer. In order for your website to work for you, updating your content regularly is essential as well.

Some helpful tips on producing engine-attracting content include:

• Include lots of quality information geared toward your target market as well as search engines (search engines cannot see text embedded in graphics, so make sure you please both audiences by being creative around the formatting of content)
• Create content useful to your visitors. Post newsletters, FAQ pages, top news stories, press release archives, blogs, etc.
• Place emphasis, throughout your site, on the services that you want to be known for. Become the industry standard and stand out as the authority in your market in the search engine results.

Any modern business, with or without a well-known and recognised brand, relies on their placement with the search engines. SEO efforts are geared toward boosting website rankings to the top three pages of search engine results pages. More than 50 percent of search engine users never look past the first page. Those who do hardly ever hit the third page, and past the third is unheard of. Daily, competition for those page-listings grows and as more pages are added to the web, your abilities to rank, without SEO, become futile.

Choosing organic SEO Vs. sponsored SEM

The most successful SEO campaigns utilise a combination of both targeted organic and natural keyword based listings and sponsored listings. It has been proven that consumers respond to a repetition of a company name or brand name across multiple sections of the search engine listings, as it helps to establish authority and reliability.

Organic listings are aimed at being a long-term strategy as building relevancy of your business focus areas means proving your dominance in the search engine rankings. Sponsored search is a price war and the highest bidder receives the accolades by being placed in the number 1 spot. Whist this is effective for your brand’s visibility, organic listings are more sustainable, as your ranking is not based on the dollar value of your bid, but rather the relevancy of your content in relation to the search performed.

The success of any SEO campaign: Conversion

The best way to measure the success of your campaigns is to use detailed analytics tools to track your website stats. Success measured in number of hits is no longer an industry yardstick. The need for tools developed specifically to measure unique visitors, keyword referrals, search engine referrals, eCommerce tracking and pay-per-click tracking is vital. Any reputable SEO agency will provide tools to measure your keyword rankings, report on overall campaign visibility and competitor benchmarking.

Understanding these metrics is key to evaluating, which SEO efforts are creating loyal customers and how you can refocus your marketing energies on avenues that actually generate revenue and brand awareness.

Summary

Today, people use search engines to filter out all the advertising images we all are exposed to and bombarded with in our every-day lives (TV, radio, billboard, print, etc.). Seekers use the Internet search engines to find further information about exactly what they find of interest.

SEO and SEM technologies can be used effectively regardless of whether you sell anything online (eCommerce) or if you merely sell to your customers off-line (retail, wholesale through distributor channels or direct from your “cellar door”).

There are two main types of search engine optimisation (SEO), organic rankings (non-paid for listings) and search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (paid for listings).

SEO is the process of applying keywords and technical code modifications that boost a search engines’ ability to read your website. The main objective of SEO is to increase market visibility through the Internet. In turn, this results in increased brand awareness, more pre-qualified traffic to your website and lower customer acquisition costs.