As title!

Scenario is I’ve just joined a company that operates 3 websites and all could do with more trade (I have sod all experience of websites BTW, and wasn’t employed to do this but I keep getting asked my opinion!). They are just using Google Adwords and some company to promote* them up towards the top of the first page in Google and they seem to think this is enough.

I’ve been saying that they need to back this up with more targeted selling via related websites and mag advertising – as per CRC, Wiggle, etc – as relying on Google alone surely won’t be enough on its own. But they seem reluctant to spend money on more ‘conventional’ advertising.

So how do the best sites do it, and is Google the holy grail and if you’re not on the front page you are buggered!?

Ta!

(*and getting charged a small fortune for it.)

In my experience (running the family website with a turnover of over half million from web sales) Google adwords is the best way to target an audience, but the ad campaign has to be tweaked and monitored efficiently to work at its best. It maybe a case that your business can use forum sites to target an audience, but remember, people come to stw etc for the forum and news not for the ads, people searching google are specifically looking for a product/service.

Google adwords takes time to get right and is worth doing well as it can really make a difference to your ROI. Also don’t be afraid to run your ad’s all day, invest in the right words and you should get good traffic and sales.

I think it depends on what you are selling, know the market.

Do you really need three websites could you consolidate all you business on to one site rather than splitting traffic/marketing three ways?

Thanks for the input – they are 3 different markets – Garden Furniture – Artificial Plants – and Pest Control!

Do you do your own tweaking & monitoring Si, or pay someone to do it?

si is right – do it yourself it’s very easy to set up and run your own adword campaign. buying advertising space on line is very cheap but not very effective – you’ll be lucky to get click through rates above 0.1% and then you need to spend money on getting someone to produce the graphics for the ads.

Spend a bit of time and see what your competitors are doing – doing something similar is often a good thing because if it works for them it is likely to work for you!

My job involves trying to get people to look at editorial, not commercial sites – but I find SEO is vastly overrated as a way of getting traffic.

In my experience, nothing substitutes for putting a picture and words in front of the audience and giving them the chance to click on it.

Have you looked into taking banner/panel adverts on relevant websites?

Or even print adverts?

Have you looked into taking banner/panel adverts on relevant websites?
Or even print adverts?

That’s been my point – they’re doing the Adwords stuff but the sales are OK but not good enough, they’re now on about taking on a company to promote the sites up the rankings but it going to cost the best part of 30k per year. This seems bloody expensive, but as I say I don’t know enough about it to comment properly. All these ads plastered over the tinternerd must do some good or companies wouldn’t bother with them.

I do all the google monitoring, there are some good tips out there and google do online tutorials to help improve your ROI.

We also tried external companies to ‘promote the site up the rankings’ and it on each occasion (twice) it was a complete waste of time. You are better off making sure your sites are optimised, good clean code (non table based sites) and the most important thing, content relevant to the search engines.

Hi
i was in the same boat 12 months ago, our company used an external SEO company at a cost of about £4k/month. so because i’m the IT manager i can obviously do SEO!
12 months on i’m fairly competent at it, i bought a course to help plan our new strategy and (shameless plug) ’cause it worked for us we now sell it on our website 🙂

http://www.ncchomelearning.co.uk/InternetMarketingPlan26Week-Product-70.html

Actually, i should embed the link, as Google loves links, link building is the best “free” way of promoting your site. But it’s the biggest use of my time and also very slow. It can take Months for links to show up.

A quick edit: speak to Google, you’ll have an account manager who will review your ad campaign and tweek it for you free of charge.

The company who is going to “promote” the site up is an SEO business. This are effective, but risky.

They use questionable techniques (comment spam, gateway pages etc…) to get more links to your site around the net, in turn increasing your page-rank in google.

However… this is against google regs, and they could pull your listing completely (including all adwords links!) totally killing your business stream.

I suggest doing it yourself.

1. Use adwords effectively (as mentioned by many people above). Run several campaigns at once, track conversion and sales. People might click the ad but not purchase, try to find out why. Could be poor navigation, difficult purchase process or one of a million other things. Increasing the conversion % will bring more business immediately with no cost. It is important do this first to gain the most value from additional marketing spend

2. Make sure your site is search optimised. There is a load of stuff on the net about this. As a summary, keyword rich text, proper meta tags (descriptions and keywords), alt tags on images, full sitemap (with sitemap xml, you can submit this via google webmaster tools to help them index your site), XHTML compliance (helps the crawlers), load more info on various SEO blogs and sites.

3. Get information about your site out there and talked about. Forums, newsgroups, well known industry sites. The more places your site is linked from and the more credible those places are, the higher your page rank.

SEO work is pretty easy to do yourself (or within your business) without resorting to underhand techniques. But nothing will increase your sales like increasing your conversion rate. Try multiple landing pages, adding PayPal acceptance, removing any signup barrier to purchase, free delivery etc… If you double your conversion rate, and additional marketing doubles your traffic, you have increased your sales by x4.

Best of luck!

SEO is often over priced and over valued IMHO, but is vital to get some right. We do not use any adwords etc, purely on organic SEO stuff that I do.

muffin man – drop me an email as I may be able to help on some of the SEO stuff.
Matt

Or the free-STW way. For instance create a username like James I give mountain bike holidays in Scotland. Its a long username but everyone gets the jist quickly. Then post up pics of your recent rides and drop references a la Diziaustria and others 😉

One thing really worth doing if you haven’t yet is putting yourself into the google geographical index. I think it’s on google webmaster tools (if you haven’t looked at them yet, google for them – you need to be signed up for them anyway). Geographical search is only going to get more important in the future what with all these mobile phones and laptops and doodads with gps in them that people are using nowadays. For people offering local services, it’d be stupid not to be in the index.

I’d worry about search engine ordering people – if they screw up, they can get you blacklisted from google, which basically means no sales for a few months.

I appear to be top of google search for my (rather common) name now, simply by a)having a site with lots of relevant and up to date content, simple design, a sensible set of keywords etc. and b)having a noticeable online presence in a few other places, that links back to the site.

Joe

As badboy said the most effective way to increase sales is to improve your conversion rate. Driving traffic to a site is not the same as increasing sales from your sites. Yes you may want to do both but the quickest payback is to improve your conversion rate of browsers to buyers.

A couple of things you might want to consider before going down the SEO route. Have you analysed current traffic to your site using a traffic analyser like WebTrends or you may find that your ISP provides one for free.
What is your current position in Google?
How long does somebody spend on your site?
Can you detect where the peopel who buy from you come from – if not spend time and money to find out – this will give you the biggest increase in sales.

What do you think appearing on the first page in Google for the common search items (check Adwords and your web analytics reports to see what people are entering). Is it worth the £30k for an SEO to get you higher up?

As mentioned there is a lot of good DIY stuff that you can do to improve your ranking and conversion rates before using an SEO company.

Just to say further to tyke’s point about analysing current stats etc – my web hosting company (dreamhost) provides pretty detailed breakdowns of where ppl have come from etc.

The firm I used to work for used 2 page ads in magazines, with the address round the perimeter – that increased traffic and sales substantially, for only around 1K a month IIRC. But by far the most effective advertising was word of mouth I think, it was a fairly new company and grew rapidly in the 2 years I was there, and we had no SEO or “technique” back then.

imho…

1. don’t waste your money on seo, but is your site sufficiently search engine freindly?

2. ebay; an utter pain in the “ss but by far the highest viewed ecommerce site. get a presecence with some product but use it not so much for sales as a marketing tool to drive traffic to your site, and by offering excellent service, maybe a little on-going promotional sweetener i.e. % discount for a direct sale, you should get excellent repeat sales. be warned though, it is very labour intensive.

Thanks for all the advice folks, a lot to go at!

Matt – I’ll have a word with the man who monitors the sites and I may be in touch. Cheers

I think el reg had a thing that said that your money would be better spend on yahoo rather than google as they are fundamentally evil.