In the past few weeks I have heard more than one exasperated website owner say “I don’t need to appear on Google”. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this either. To be perfectly honest, unless your website is 100% password protected and has no public content, every organisation can benefit from being on Google - and the audience reached will be ultimately more engaged.

However it seems like the mystique and perceived limited success of being able to compete in such a huge worldwide marketplace such as Google can often cause Marketing Managers and decision makers in business to shy away from search engines and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) so much that they just put it in the ‘too hard basket’. Now more than ever, all businesses / organisations are being bombarded by third world SPAMmers and AI-generated cons promising instant success in online marketing and SEM (Search Engine Marketing, eg. paid ads on Google or Bing) and often the prevalence and rumours of horror stories around huge budgets being wasted in seemingly useless pay-per-click campaigns driven by online marketers requiring 12 to 18 months of work and spending in order to generate audience response, it’s no wonder that the entire Digital Marketing space leads many businesses and organisations to begrudgingly adopt a general dislike of building an online following completely. This often results in poor planning, haphazard execution, confusion around reporting and intel about best practice - resulting in wasted revenue in order to compete online.

The good news is there is a better way to own your online presence, and it’s not too different from ‘traditional’ marketing, with accessible tools and methods that work without having to just throw money at an online strategy hoping to get some type of ROI after a year or more - or not at all. If you know your audience and offering, have a clearly defined message, some simple monitoring tools and a few no-nonsense methods in place, digital marketing is the best method for reaching your best audience. Especially since your audience are most likely doing half the work already by searching for things that are either directly or closely related to what your offer is, there is no need to adopt a 12-to-18-month strategy in order to achieve traction in the online space that grows exponentially. MORE good news is that you do not have to follow Google’s AI generated recommendations to exponentially increase your per-click ad budget in order to achieve ROI.

Know Your Audience

Imagine being in an elevator and having 30 seconds or less to present your best customer with an irresistible offer for your products or service. Think about the conversations you’ve had with your best clients and remember the terminology used by them in discussions. By honing this ‘pitch’ down to just the key words and concepts that drive user adoption, this is the basis for being able to define an initial strategy for developing the contents required for a killer online marketing campaign. Focus testing this with a couple of trusted contacts or clients will give you even more information about what to include - and what to omit - in your messaging. These ‘keywords’ or ‘keyphrases’ can be easily added to your page contents in many ways: including them in the text / copy of the website’s pages, using these as ‘alt text’ to images and photos, naming the inline elements of the pages to include these terms (image names, hyperlink terminology, URLs, title tags, and of course microdata) will greatly increase the relevance of these terms to your website contents. Reviewing and updating this regularly based on ongoing feedback from your audience is super important for connecting with your audience, and also will help search engine robots to continually refresh their ‘spidering’ of your online content for inclusion in search results.

Accurate Reporting = Appropriate Response

Google Analytics has become more and more technical as time has cgone on, and these days it requires more than just a bit of acumen with online tools to understand the layers of data available through this free tool. The good news: most commercial web servers contain easy to read and understand analytics applications through the CPanel interface like Webalizer and AWStats, which accurately display; ay all the information you need to understand the basics of what is necessary to keep your website contents fresh and relevant in your audience’s eyes.By reviewing the monthly results of visits and visitors two the various pages in your online infrastructure - as well as the search terms used to reach these assets month to month, it can be fairly straightforward to determine what is working and what is not in your content strategy.

The SEM connection

It’s no secret that paid ads are one of the products that has made Google one of the riches places on the web - not only because they are effective, but because it is a way to ‘even the odds’  for this whole don’t know how or don’t want to spend the effort and cost on organic SEO. For those who do take the time to “do it properly” without having to pay Google for links or positioning, the results can be fantastic and lucrative, and in terms of ROI the efforts are well worth the cost to get ranked organically. However the magic algorithm fairy is often quite elusive when it comes to hiring a good SEO specialist, and those who have the juice can often take their time to drip feed results in order to sell monthly consulting and optiomisation at a high price. This often makes ‘proper’ SEO out of reach for most smaller organisations who don’t have the resources for an 18-month (or longer) campaign. What I have noticed is that combining paid ads with the3 proper steps in SEO can quite often give a website the boost it needs to reach the right audience far faster than doing organic SEO lone. And combining the tools in Google for both positive and negative keyword generation can give your website the edge in doing organic optimisation. So we often combine these two methods in order to produce short term wins as well as good value for money. Ignore the AI bots that tell you to triple your budget, and match the keyword research with Google’s analytics in the Ad space with your organic optimisation and pow - you’ll be in the eyes of your best audience in no time. 

Putting it All Together

At the risk of tipping off the Google mafia about my secret sauce it is fair to say this method has worked 100% of the time when used in conjunction with a sound SEO strategy- and that is the subject of multiple ongoing articles that could create quite a lot of content in itself. However, following these simple steps can greatly enhance reach and engagement, as well as inform content creators about vital attributes of copywriting and content development that will no doubt generate an ever increasing upward spiral in digital marketing. Yes, there are many pieces to the puzzle for both SEO and SEM but when used wisely and creatively, they can combine to deliver a power punch of relevance and user engagement that has always served our projects and clients well. If this seems all too much please feel free to contact us to put a custom solution into place to reach your best audience cost effectively and efficiently… And if your Digital Marketing team is just spending time and money on reselling clicks that only benefit themselves and Google, it’s good to know there is another way, and it doesn’t have to take a year or more - or chew up your entire marketing budget.