If you are like most small to medium sized businesses relying on traditional advertising (newspaper, flyers, billboards, radio, TV) to create new customer or new sales opportunities, you are in all likelihood losing money. Advertising waste is one key area of your business that you can find money, and become more competitive.
The illustration below shows ‘How SEO Effects MROI’. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is the most powerful marketing tool available to you today, and it is affordable. More broadly ‘Internet marketing’ is the new standard for advertising because it connects your business with customers who are ready to buy now.
Traditional advertising is expensive and is hard to measure. The questions you should be asking are, “do I continue to spend ‘X’ dollars on advertising monthly as I always have, not knowing exactly what the effectiveness of the advertising is?”, or, ‘do I “re-allocate” all or part of ‘X’ to SEO, and tie in my traditional advertising with SEO so I can measure if it is being effective or not?”. If it is not being effective, naturally this would be an area identifiable as ‘waste’, creating an opportunity to ‘re-allocate’ funds again to a more effective marketing method.
SEO is the improvement of your websites interactivity with the customer, and with the search engines, such as Google or Bing. The first step is ‘on-page optimization’, which involves a thorough diagnosis of your websites present performance and relevance. The analysis allows the Engineer to pinpoint what aspects of the websites need improvements, be it in programming, keywords management, or accessibility; the Engineer resolves all issues to prepare the website to be easier to use for the customer, and easier to ‘crawl’ or be verified by the search engine.
The next step is off-page optimization which helps to build the credibility or ‘authority’ of your website. This can be done in different ways. Search engines seek quality websites, and the more credible or authoritative your website is, the more the search engine prefers it, helping your website elevate in the Google or Bing search engine ‘organic’ rankings to the first page, or top ten. Clearly the business which occupies position number one or businesses which are in the top ten have the greatest chance at capturing the prospective buyer. The organic search results are those that are not ‘advertising’, or ‘sponsored’ (these paid results are typically at the top of the list above the organic results, or in the right hand column of the search engine results page, and are typically labelled as sponsors/advertisements).
To own the number one organic position on the first page of Google or Bing is the ultimate goal, but it takes time, hence why paid advertising, or ‘pay per click’ advertising can help accelerate lead generation in the first few months, while your website grows in the ranks (typically it takes 4-6 months to elevate a website to the top ten). How do we accelerate the rise of a website in the organic rankings? It relates a lot to how active your competitors are in their online marketing, and it relates to how active you are in your own Internet marketing. Enter ‘content marketing’, which not only gives you a great reason to create useful business promotions, but also gives you content to publish online, to increase customer interactivity and to get them to visit your website.
Lastly, off-page optimization is important in terms of which other websites you affiliate with, or ‘back link’ to; essentially this is any website on the Internet that has your website link on their page to direct traffic to your website. Dependant on the quality, or credibility (authority) of those affiliations, this may improve your website search engine performance, or it may have an adverse effect and hold your website back.
Once your Internet marketing or SEO plan is underway, maintenance is simple and feedback is instant. Your Internet marketing service provider (IMSP) works with you hand in hand, helping you coordinate the project and encouraging your participation in the creation of marketing content, like company videos, photographs, graphics, animations, and business writings for blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and related online forums.
In turn search engine rankings go up, incoming customer leads increase, and marketing return on investment (MROI) increases and is confirmed by the sales revenues. The results can be further reviewed since you have the data of the marketing campaign at your fingers (you receive your own login/password to keep track of performance and to strategize business for the future).
The end result is your business flourishes, you are able to eliminate waste, find more ‘qualified’ leads before your competitor, and ultimately increase your MROI in a short time; freeing up money in your business for growth initiatives like hiring more staff, or purchasing needed equipment. Hone in on your Internet marketing strategy today and streamline it with expert SEO.
Anthony Borges
SEO Strategist
[email protected]
www.VivosWeb.com
twitter.com/MROICHAMPS
