Featured on Page 27 of this month’s Insider Magazine, Operations Director, Michael Di Paola shares his thoughts on an increasingly valuable online marketing tactic…

“As an independent brand design consultancy, our core offering is intrinsically linked to search marketing. So, although it’s a service we offer our clients we can afford to take an impartial view on this popular online marketing tactic. We certainly never advocate techniques that we describe as ’search at all costs’. By this, we mean websites where the user experience has been destroyed by overwhelming on page optimisation such as keyword stuffing. Although it is an essential marketing activity for most businesses, search marketing must only play one part in an organisation’s overall digital marketing strategy. With this in mind, budgets should be allocated giving due consideration to other channels – both on and offline.

We constantly come across staggering sums of money being invested in search marketing by companies that are obsessed with chasing new business leads, yet they spend hardly anything on engaging existing clients or customers via e-CRM including; email marketing, personalisation & data capture.The old marketing adage that it is cheaper to keep an existing client than gain a new one is still true in the digital arena! At the same time, investment in site content can also suffer so new traffic is being driven to a site that could actually be performing and converting a whole lot better.

We realised the potential of search marketing as both a brand awareness and business development tool for ourselves a number of years ago and it has become an important revenue stream – since 2007, an additional £500k has been generated in fees. As Google becomes more ‘intelligent’ and the algorithms evolve, fundamentally sites that are user friendly in terms of copy, content and structure will also become more influential. Attempts to ‘fool’ the engines will become more difficult and ultimately the most relevant sites will prevail.

Tags: algorithms, google, search marketing, seo

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 9:08 PM and is filed under Opinion. 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.