All posts by Stuart Tofts

Here at SEOptimise, we know it can be hard to persuade some bosses you need online marketing. Sometimes they do not use the internet, or simply do not want to allocate the cash – perhaps because they do not believe in the returns which are possible with a decent search engine optimisation campaign. To save you time, we have prepared the below letter. Simply edit and print!

Dear [insert boss's name here],

I hope you are well. It was lovely seeing you and your [wife/husband/new wife/new husband/children/dog] at the recent company [picnic/drinks night/your boss is a tight-fisted git, please delete the entire sentence].

It has come to my attention that, far from being a passing craze, the internet has become a rather important tool for businesses. While I appreciate you once said the web is a [fad/wasteful pit of porn and vice/thing spiders live in], I was wondering if we could please have an online marketing budget.

There are a number of reasons for my request. One is that more people than ever are using the internet, as demonstrated by the recent research published by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. The average adult spends 1.07 hours a day on the internet. [NB For some bosses, you may have to print out this and the following pieces of evidence out. Put them in a nice shiny clear-fronted folders, that always adds gravitas]

Furthermore, the internet is a great place to market to people. A recent study issued by the Internet Advertising Bureau found the internet drives 40 per cent of brand engagement, more than the press and television.

Importantly, when the consumers are online, they are using search engines to navigate the web. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! (I know that Yahoo! advert with the big claw print confused you, but it really is a place on the internet). Google is the most commonly-used portal, achieving 87 per cent of the searches in the UK in May, according to Hitwise. ComScore analysis suggested Google properties accounted for 74.2 per cent of all searches. Whichever is right, that is a lot of people using Google a lot.

To conclude, the internet is not the marketing tool of tomorrow, it is the tool of the moment, the tool our competitors are using and a tool we need to exploit.

Yours sincerely,
[Insert name here]

Google is now the most popular website for Brits browsing the web with their mobile phones, a new report reveals.

Research conducted by Opera shows Google has finally overtaken Yahoo! in terms of unique visitors.

Another search website, MSN.com, makes the top ten most visited sites list for mobile users.

This shows it does not matter whether the consumer is using their mobile or their PC, the preferred starting point for online experiences continues to be a search engine.

However, I was a little surprised at first to see Yahoo! had previously outranked Google as the most-visited online property.

Earlier this month, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising revealed the most popular website in the UK was Google, with three-quarters of users visiting it over the seven days to July 3rd.

Of course, back in February, Opera announced Google was to be its default search engine for mobile web users, instead of Yahoo!, which accounts for the smaller engine’s previous supremacy.

Furthermore, the company asserted that more than 35 million people use Opera Mini to browse the internet from their phones – and that was before the recent storm of iPhones flying off the shelves.

We keep talking about the possibility of mobile internet becoming mainstream but seem to forget that millions of people already browsing the web on the go through their handsets.

Websites carrying sports news should use search engine optimisation (SEO) to boost their viewing figures, a new report suggests.

A study conducted by JupiterResearch concludes sporty websites could become leading internet businesses, as the hardcore fans are “avid consumers” of online video.

It asserts websites which rank highly in the search results are likely to see traffic from a potentially lucrative audience, with wider potential revenue streams than advertising.

Serious sports fans can then be targeted with online shopping options, paid video and ticketing, the research firm notes.

If any sports webmasters are reading this, I am particularly keen to work on websites covering the premier league and Oxford United (and one day, ideally, the two together).

However, for the more general marketer perusing this blog, I think this research highlights once again the importance of visibility and SEO.

People turn to the web for support in every aspect of their lives; to shop, for sports and entertainment, and for news and information.

The online audience is growing and businesses need to be easily found by consumers or they will lose them.

Users’ expectations of search engines have developed considerably during the short period they have existed, a Google blog post notes.

Amit Singhal, a fellow at the search giant, explains that users have moved on from “give me what I said” to a “give me what I want” stance.

In response to this, Google has invested massively in the way it crawls and presents websites, he continues, adding that the organisation works hard to serve its users with websites which are rich in relevant information.

Now, to a certain extent, this is obvious. MacDonald’s has to serve edible burgers (well, some may disagree!), Reuters has to produce up-to-date news and Tesco’s fruit and veg have to be fresh – there is simply too much consumer choice for them to fall behind the competition.

However, the search engine world is equally competitive but very different to fast food chains, news agencies and supermarkets, because an entire industry – that of search engine optimisation – has sprung up around the portals.

Our tactics are all geared towards increasing our clients’ rankings. We are paid to care about our customers’ requirements (increasing visibility) rather than the needs of those using search engines. Even we white hatters are solely concerned with where our clients’ websites rank.

I cannot deny that this industry could have been bad news for consumers, if Google and the other portals had not moved quickly to work against the unfair manipulation of its algorithm.

It is happy to promote white-hat (or ethical) SEO tactics because these do not detract from a user’s online experience. In fact, in some cases, SEO enriches it by making a site easily navigable, filled with useful content and so on.

However, the future is bleak for black hatters. Search engines will come down heavily and consistently against attempts to manipulate the results unethically because offering useless websites damages their brand. They cannot afford to do otherwise.

There are a lot of ways to market to consumers and sometimes attempting too many can actually damage promotional efforts. A business which tries to engage with clients through print, mobile, web and post will either have a whopping big budget (think mega-brands such as Coke) or fail to successfully reach their audience through any of them.

Even within the different mediums, there are different ways to engage prospective consumers. I often come across people who are frantically attempting to market through hundreds of different ways. More often than not, they are wearing themselves out, overspending on their budgets and failing to boost sales anyway.

For this reason, I think the web is a wonderful place. It presents many different marketing opportunities but many of them feed into one another, giving firms a marketing edge. Furthermore, the nature of the platform makes it possible to assess consumer response, carefully control budgets and target people more effectively.

Here are a few online marketing methods which are cost-effective and feed into each other – making them vital for targeted budgeting and targeting the relevant consumers.

SEO

Feeds into: PPC, Web 2.0, Email marketing

Raising a website in the search engine results increases both a firm’s visibility and credibility. It is obvious that the higher a site ranks, the more likely it is to be visited but it also gives a firm gravitas. Consumers have quite a lot of trust in portals like Google and businesses risk seeming shoddy and second rate if they do not rank well.

Ideally a firm wants top rankings both organically and through paid advertising. High visibility can both help and be helped by tactics such as blogging and newsletters.

PPC

Feeds into: SEO

Pay-per-click advertising is a funny beast. It is often used while companies raise their organic rankings, which can be really useful, particularly for firms which are new to SEO. However, some people feel it is unnecessarily costly and short term. There are arguments which suggest consumers trust websites which appear organically far more than those which pay for their position. However, I think PPC can be a really useful tactic by itself. It guarantees visibility and – let’s be brutal but honest – the more times a business can put its name in front of the consumer the better chance it has of a sale.

Ideally, a business will both rank highly organically and appear in the PPC adverts – lest a competitor lures the consumer away.

Web 2.0

Feeds into: Email Marketing, SEO

Social media tactics such as blogging are a gift for marketers wanting to raise their reputation, visibility and sales. By supplying interesting and regular content – perhaps industry news and comment – a website raises its rankings, boosts the potential for targeting more obscure keywords and phrases, and looks prestigious and informed. Consumers who have benefitted from interacting with the brand online may be motivated to sign up to a newsletter or to receive offers, which increases their loyalty to the company in question. Social tactics boost the chances of inbound links, raising a firm in the search engine rankings.

Ideally, social media tactics will never exist in isolation but always seek to carry the consumer to the next level, whether that is signing up for further information, or an actual sale.

Email marketing

Feeds into: Web 2.0, SEO

Email marketing can take relationships built with Web 2.0 to the next level. It encourages readers of a blog, or those who have encountered a brand through a viral widget or other social tool, to actively seek out a company. They supply their email address, request a newsletter and suddenly, they are an engaged consumer with an interest in – and relationship with – the company. It is important, of course, that such newsletters or communications are interesting; everyone has signed up to a newsletter only to receive dull attempts at sales. It should be an extension of the trust the company began to build through social media.

Ideally, a business should refer and link back to its blog and other pages throughout the newsletter, in order to drive highly-targeted traffic to a website. By storing past newsletters on their website, marketers can provide a valuable resource for the online community and help SEO by showing the search engines regular, fresh content.

Online advertising is the most effective means of building brand awareness for retailers, according to a new report.

Research conducted on behalf of the Internet Advertising Bureau revealed web-based promotions are the best way for the retail sector to build brand awareness and secure long-term relationships with customers.

Despite this, the IAB study expressed surprise at how little the retail sector spends online.

It noted that total consumer spending though the internet during the last six months of 2007 was £47 billion, yet the sector accounted for just five per cent of all online promotional spending.

What interested me about this report is that key wording – long-term relationships. Long term.

As the economy wobbles towards a period of negative growth, shoppers might not be spending as freely as they have been.

However, the ongoing work of building brand relationships needs to continue. Retailers have to ensure their target consumers feel engaged with their product when the pennies start rolling more freely again.

While recession bites, though, businesses may not want to spend the same amount on marketing, even to secure their consumers’ long-term loyalty.

This makes it more sensible than ever to spend promotional budgets online; doing so is cheaper, more effective and makes it easier to measure the ROI.

I really enjoyed a recent blog post by that most industrious search engine optimisation (SEO) commentator Jill Whalen.

Earlier this month, she wrote a diatribe against insidious online thieves, the plagiarists who don’t steal straight copy but rewrite it so it is hard to trace as they pass it off as their own.

I imagine everyone who publishes regularly online has come across this and knows the frustration of discovering their copy butchered into being someone else’s ‘original content’.

Furthermore, it is very demoralising to create a blog post or article and then find some lazy unmentionable has ripped it off.

Jill’s post sums up the problem beautifully. However, she did not really come to a conclusion or solution – possibly because there isn’t one.

In an ideal world, perhaps search engines could employ millions of human editors – preferably graduates or sector experts – to lovingly and personally select the content which is given top rankings.

Now, of course, that is not practical. You may have noticed the web is rather large. Even within sector-specific portals, screening all copy is difficult – users can chose a wide array of information or they can have small amounts of assured content.

The trouble is, people keep talking about the “wild west” that is the online world, yet no one – myself included – has proposed a viable means of curbing bad and criminal practice.

No one is going to sue some ‘copywriter’ 4,000 miles away for rewriting their content; few people will even find them. Jill Whalen says the problem is particularly prevalent within the SEO sector but I simply think we are more likely to discover it than other groups. We read a lot more content than the average online viewer.

Still, the web must and will develop. As more money is spent on promotional tactics such as blogging and article marketing, more corporations will suffer content theft.

It cannot be long before governments across the world will be forced to take intellectual property issues online more seriously and to put real thought into beating the thieves.

They may not succeed until a clearer content management system develops, but at least online publishers would have a clearer legal path.

Almost three-quarters of internet users accessed Google in the last seven days, according to a new report.

Research released by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising reveals the search engine is the most popular property on the web, among Brits – followed by the BBC’s website and eBay.

Furthermore, those people are online to shop, with half of all users listing buying goods and services as one of the main reasons they access the internet.

Its study revealed 73 per cent of all adults now have the ability to connect to the web, mainly at home (63 per cent) but also through work (38 per cent).

For me, the most exciting part of the research was into just how much time the average Joe and Jo spends online.

It showed that in one week, the bog-standard average person spends a massive seven per cent of their waking life using the internet, rising to ten per cent in homes with access.

That, according to the report, compares to three per cent of time spent reading print, such as newspapers and magazines.

Why would anyone spend the bulk of their marketing pennies on advertising through print? The internet is cheaper, it is more effective, it allows for more targeted marketing and it is where the consumers are.

Google loves us after all. Or, at least, it cautiously approves of us.

The search engine publishes guidance for webmasters and, until recently, the only information it carried on SEO agencies was a warning about the terrible scams many use to try and trick a site into high rankings.

Such advice cannot have helped the SEO reputation in a world where those of us using best practice are often tarred with the same brush as those using nefarious and short-term tactics.

Black-hatters may sometimes achieve high results but will ultimately damage their client’s ranking (not that they care, they will have scarpered with the cash by then), and it is these firms many people think of when discussing SEO.

Anyway, Google has now admitted that ethical SEO has benefits.

A post on its Webmaster Central blog reveals the advice has been updated to note a list of the ways in which we can help. This includes content and structure development, technical advice and keyword research.

All right, it isn’t gushing, but it is certainly a start!

Relying on spreading a website’s address to consumers has never been a good way to market online.

Unless a firm is the lucky holder of a truly simple domain name (Hotels.com, Diet.co.uk and so on), it cannot hope to make enough consumers remember its address to keep it in work.

The majority of online business is directed through search engines. A buyer does not open a browser and try to remember the address of Inter Flora, they open Google or Yahoo! and search for “buy flowers online”.

However, ICANN’s latest decision to massively expand the number of top level domains available is going to make the battle for online audiences even harder.

As the number of variations increases and the complexity of web addresses grow, consumers will become even less likely to remember them, making the importance of decent SEO even more pronounced.

Furthermore, the ICANN move will create considerably more scope for cybersquatting and brand infringement, as unscrupulous people aim to cash in on a firm’s reputation by purchasing its name within a new top level domain.

There exist ways for brands to challenge such developments, but it is vital firms are in a strong ranking position in anticipation of such a threat. The last thing a brand needs is to be outranked in search results by the cybercrook hijacking its identity.

Secure high visibility for your domain now, use paid ads if necessary. Just make sure your corporate space is easily found before the internet expands even further.