Search marketing

Search marketing starts with us understanding your current situation, your business goals for your website and the benefits for its visitors. From this we will undertake an audit of your website and research key phrases before recommending a campaign using one or a combination of the following techniques:

• Search engine optimisation
• Link building
• Pay per click advertising

Search engine optimisation (SEO) changes the content and code of your website to make it more relevant to search engines for the key phrases which matter to your business. We measure your position at the beginning of the process and during the campaign. Due to the time it takes for search engines to update their databases a search engine optimization campaign can take several months before any improvement becomes visible in the organic (non advertised) search results. For this reason a SEO campaign may last a minimum of six months.

Link building is concerned with the quality and quantity of links from other websites to your own. Search engines use this backlink information to help them decide whether your website is both a popular and authoritative source of information on a particular subject. We can create a link building campaign to help boost your website’s ranking in the search engines for relevant key phrases by increasing the amount of backlinks to your site from a range of other appropriate websites, including directories, blogs and articles submissions. As with SEO, link building can take several months for results to appear.

Pay per click advertising (PPC) can place your business on the first page of a search engine’s results in return for a payment when a user clicks on your ad. Unlike SEO and link building, PPC can be turned on and off like a tap. The costs for each click will depend on the key phrases chosen, and can vary between a few pence per click to over £12 per click for the most competitive keywords searches such as ‘home insurance’ and ‘debt consolidation’. The good news is you can control the key phrases your ad appears for and set a budget to control your spending. You can also limit when and where you ad is shown. We can run your pay per click campaign for you or provide you with the skills and training to do it yourself.

If you want to be found when people search, contact us to discuss your search marketing needs.

Social media marketing

Is social media the emperor’s new clothes or the beginning of a fundamental shift in how business will be conducted? Many consumer brands are already moving marketing spend from expensive brand reinforcement websites to dedicated Facebook pages leaving business-to-business brands wondering whether they should do the same. But so far there is little evidence of a return of investment for the time and money being spent, and yet every day the number of self-appointed social media gurus, with their seminars and workshops, seems to increase. Confused? Take a deep breath and read on.

Social media is a live, global experiment. No one yet knows the full impact it will have on the way we all do business but the more informed and familiar you are with it, the better chance you have of profiting from the new opportunities it creates. We can assist by using our understanding of your business and its goals to suggest ways in which social media can contribute, and then help you to get started.

We recognise that blogging, Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, FourSquare and the like are not just another ‘channel to market’. So we work with you to harness the interactivity of social media to help you get closer to your prospects and customers, understand their needs and deliver a more satisfying experience for all.

We don’t charge a fortune for practical advice and we don’t claim to be gurus. However we do understand business, marketing and technology. Contact us for a chat about how social media can be put to work for your business.

FAQs

“Can you get us to number 1 on Google for widgets?”

• Ask us a question about search or social media marketing