This famous quote from the movie “Field of Dreams” could not be further from the truth when it comes to your website. The fact is that the Internet is a vast marketplace with hundreds of millions of consumers searching for products and services offered by hundreds of thousands of companies like yours. The good news is that they are searching in untold numbers!  Are they finding you or your competitors?

 

In the traditional world of marketing (TV, radio, Yellow Pages and print) you had to pay dearly to reach tens of thousands of unqualified prospects who weren’t looking for you, hoping to meet your advertising goals for reaching a few true leads. This is both expensive and inefficient, and the fact is that nowadays more people are searching online than through any traditional medium.

 

With the Internet that’s all changed. Internet marketing has become the most cost-effective way to reach your customers and offers unprecedented targeting capabilities.  While Internet marketing can entail a wide range of techniques, all of which we can assist you with, the two most common strategies involve:

Search engine optimization (or SEO). This is a “pull” strategy, in which the design of your website (both the parts visitors see and those they don’t) plays a critical role. A well “optimized” site can achieve the coveted front page position on search results through Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines, assuring that when a customer searches for your product or services they will see a link to your site and very likely visit you. This strategy is “free” in that you do not pay the search engines for placement. While this is the “Nirvana” of website visibility, representing maximum free exposure for your site, even a well optimized site can take many months to climb up the search engine listings, and require constant fresh content and management to remain there.

Paid search engine marketing (also known as Pay-Per-Click or PPC). This technique gets your website near the top of the search engine listings immediately. You bid on the keywords which searchers would use when looking for your products or services and how high on the search results page your advertisement is displayed depends upon how your bid stacks up against others bidding on those same keywords. When a searcher actually clicks on your advertisement, taking them to your website, you pay a small amount to the search engine. PPC represents one of the most cost-effective means of advertising available to your business, since your ads can be precisely targeted to your demographic market and seen only by people searching right now for your product or service. And you only pay when they actually visit you!

Both SEO and PPC, in the hands of an inexperienced practitioner, can cause wasteful spending and potentially disastrous results for your web visibility. At WSI, our combination of experience, training, and expert partnerships, advisors and affiliations means that we know how to structure and implement a coordinated Internet marketing campaign for your business that truly works.

Learn more about Customer Conversion, the next element in the ABCs of our Internet Marketing System.