Many businesses can get stuck in old habits and methods and many are almost afraid of trying new advertising and marketing media.  Many small to medium sized businesses are happy to spend vast amounts of their marketing budget on direct mail, television and magazine and newspaper advertisements with often no idea of how effective they are.  The truth about these sort of advertisements are that yes they can work but there are a number of limiting factors.  

You can spend vast amounts on a TV or magazine advert and find that it has a negative impact on your business because the audience didn’t react in a positive way towards your message.   The other thing is how can you measure the effectiveness of the advertising.  A magazine can say they have 500,000 readers a week but there is no guarantee that those readers are going to see your quarter page advert.  A direct mail campaign may deliver your flyer to around 80,000 homes but how many of those flyers will make it any further than the bin?  There is no real way to measure the effectiveness of your advert.

With search engine optimisation and PPC you are bringing your product to the customer rather than trying to bring the customers to you.  What I mean by that is there is already a demand for the product or service you’re offering and you are simply bringing your product to the customers attention by putting it in front of them.  In theory it should be easy to sell your product or service.

The other advantage of SEO and pay per click is that you can see exactly how many people have come through your online advertising, if it converted to a sale and at what point they left your site.  You can even see which key phrases your website was found for and whether the PPC or organic SERPs brought in the customer.  All of these things can not only show how effective your SEO and PPC have been they also allow you to improve your advertising.

You may have found that you are getting a lot of people clicking on your sponsored links but it is not resulting in sales.  This could be for a number of reasons either your advert isn’t descriptive enough or your prices are higher than the potential customers expectations.  This means you can perform split testing and try different adverts perhaps one with a price in would detract those customers before they click on your link saving your advertising budget.

The truth of the matter is that the best way is to combine a number of marketing techniques together as this will help build brand awareness.  That said any business that is looking to trade online would be foolish to not use SEO and PPC to promote their website online. 

So people are finally starting to accept that we are in a recession and as a result this has had an interesting effect on the Internet marketing community.  Many businesses look to cut their outgoings when times are tough but it would seem that this trend is changing as Google has announced a huge gain.  This means that many online retailers have been increasing their spending on Pay Per Click advertising as well as their search engine optimisation.  

This to me makes perfect sense, if the number of people looking to buy your product decreases then you should look to capture the majority of those people.  This can be easily done combining SEO with PPC.  The reason this works is because some search engine users like the sponsored PPC advertising while others prefer the organic listings.  Therefore if you are at the top of the organic SERPs and have a good PPC position then you are more likely to capture the people looking for the product and now you just have to convince them to buy.

The other side of the coin are the businesses that look to either decrease their PPC and SEO marketing budgets or to cut the work out completely.  This makes no sense to me as good SEO work will deliver potential customers straight to your door and if you can’t sell your product or service once they arrive at your site then the problem must lie elsewhere.  It could be that your site is suffering from a lack of usability, it could be the website design that is putting people off or your product, service or sales staff are not up to standard.

Either way some businesses may be able to ride out the storm by simply tightening the purse strings and making cuts but many will meet a sad and untimely end.  It is always the pro active businesses that make increases rather than making cuts that survive to become bigger and better companies while their competition get left behind.        

The Internet has meant that academics can now have their work published quickly and easily either on article websites or on blogs.  Which is a good thing right?  Well apparently not.  An article featured in The Guardian has reported that search engine optimisation is killing the creativity of these articles because of the need to be found in search engines like Google. 

When writing articles it makes sense to include keywords and phrases in the title and the text to help it be found by the search engines but this doesn’t mean you have to repeat the same things over and over again.  Yes, you will need keywords in there but as long as everything you write is related to the topic then you don’t need to have a boring, wordy title.  The article uses the following quote to show this point.

“SEO can, however, make articles tedious to read. A headline that once read “Of mice and men” for a study that discussed the suitability of mice when testing drugs for humans might now say “Suitability of mice for in vivo drug testing” or something even more jargon-laden.”

Well I have already come up with a title that is creative and suitable for the SEO.  Man or Mouse? Are Mice Really Suitable For In Vivo Testing?  The other complaint mentioned in the article is that social bookmarking is being used as a method for the articles to gain popularity and this has turned it into more of a popularity contest, where as it used to be about the best report.  This is just a sign of the times and I know people fear change but yes, you are going to have to market your academic reports online if you want to be found in the search engines.  This may take add a bit of time to your report and may require some prior planning but as long as you use the SEO work sensibly then it shouldn’t effect your creativity or originality.