Search and You Shall Be Found

Consequently, both Smitka and Appel believe SEO is a long-term investment crucial to a web marketing campaign. The Search Engine Watch website (www.searchenginewatch.com) can be a useful resource offering a number of tips on how to best optimise your website. Otherwise, outsourcing the job to a specialist can help and it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. Because a lot of companies supply these services, before you engage an optimisation specialist Smitka suggests you know your budget, know who your target market is, and go with a reputable company that has worked with other businesses in your industry.

Engine Revs

If you’re hoping to get fast results from your website then you’ll need to do more than just optimise it. "Gone are the days of build it and they will come," says Appel. This is where search engine marketing (SEM), or paid search, comes in. For example, Google’s AdWords, Yahoo’s Overture, and Sensis’ BidSmart—all with different structures and benefits—offer pay-per-click or pay-for-performance services. This generally works by you agreeing to pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your listing, with the cost depending on where you want to be ranked in the listing. Search engines like Sensis determine their rankings by an auction, where you bid for how much you are prepared to pay per click for a particular key word, and this is a continual process. At any time someone can out-bid you for the particular key words you’ve chosen and your listing will move down the page of search results until you are willing to pay more per click. The paid search listings often come before or to the side of the organic search results.

Appel believes SEM has a number of benefits, including immediacy, cost-effectiveness, and the fact that it is completely measurable. "That’s the most important thing about search," he says. "The technology is in place to measure how many clicks you’ll generate from the search listings, right through to conversion on the website, whether that be a sale, a lead or even just a form filled out.

It also breaks down international barriers. From a competition perspective, what’s interesting for SEM and SEO is that you could be competing with someone across the road or someone on the other side of the world."

Monitoring Traffic

A client of Hitwise, Techni Waterjet—manufacturers of waterjet cutting machines—decided to use SEM when they began developing their export markets. "At this stage it became evident that utilising the web would be our most economical means of marketing," says director, Darren Reukers.

While investing in SEM has increased traffic to their website, another key benefit has been the monthly reporting supplied by the agency. "This gives us exact figures as to how we are travelling with SEM," he says. "They give a detailed analysis of the key words our customers use when searching our products, and what features of our website work or don’t work. Knowing this allows us to make better decisions for the future when working on our strategic marketing plan."