Consumer emailing list Australia

Why SEO

Prior to the internet, the only two “free” forms of promotion were word-of-mouth and publicity.
With the addition of three relatively simple online techniques, organisations large and small can tap into a significant stream of new business without necessarily spending a cent. These three forms of promotion are SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Email Marketing and Social Networking

And leads brought about by search engines are gernally thought of as the most valuable, but this is a matter of opinion. If you can have a targeted email campaign that only picks out the subscribers who are interested, this could be just as valuable. Same with Social networking!
But lets us concentrate on Search Engine Optimisation for this post.

So Why SEO? Search engines have not only become the first port of call for those looking for suppliers (formerly the sole domain of Yellow Pages for smaller B2C business), but have the added and significant benefit of providing information earlier in the purchase process.
Whereas Yellow Pages was mainly useful once you knew which product and service you wanted, search engines allow you to determine what it is you actually want.

To take the old “AIDA” (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) mantra of advertising, print directories were useful once a buyer decided to take action on their desire for a product or service.
But as you can see in the diagram below, search engines are used much earlier in the process.

For example, an issue may grab your attention and interest you enough to create a desire to do something about it. If the various links surrounding the article don’t lead you to a potential provider then another quick search will.
So very seamlessly, the web is able to take you all the way from attention to action.
This means, Yellow pages or such like – many online buyers are completely bypassing it.

Therefore, the new goal for businesses, is to be as prominent in the online AIDA process as possible.
While this can be quite challenging at the attention, interest and desire stages, it’s the action stage that they have some control over and should prioritise.
Search engines are classified as the new rivers of gold

These days its all about being prominent in the all important search engine results pages. This in turn is achieved via search engine optimisation (SEO) – a range of activities that a business operator or its provider conduct in order to achieve a prominent search result for their business.
Achieving this goal is no place for the faint hearted. Wikipedia states that Google uses more than 200 criteria to ascertain keyword relevance in its famous ranking algorithm.
In other words, the more your webpage is seen by Google to be relevant to the keyword or phrase queried, the more prominent it will turn up in results.
To work out how many votes your website attracts its a bit like judging the best player in a football match. A player’s performance is based on how many goals, marks, possessions, hit outs and so on that they accumulate over the course of a game.  But there is a big difference between a kick that turns a game versus an ineffective kick to an opposition player.  And the more of these valuable kicks the player gets, the greater his/her value to the team.
Search engines work in a similar way.  A mention of a keyword in an obscure and unimportant hobbyist website will carry far less weight than the same keyword mentioned in the website of a daily metropolitan newspaper.
Therefore the newspaper website will earn more “votes” for that keyword than the hobbyist site and be ranked accordingly.
For business this means not only including relevant keywords in its web pages, but emphasising them in a range of ways including formatting, inclusion in “meta” areas (areas important to search engines) and achieving quality inbound links to your website.

Suffice to say marketing professionals need to ensure that its website is as well search engine “optimised” as possible, to give itself the best chance of directing these qualified and valuable leads your way. Why SEO is extremely important and your company needs to address it if it hasn’t already.

Tags: Search engine optimisation, SEO, Why SEO

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2012 at 3:53 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.