If No-One Can Find Your Website, Does It Exist?
If your website dropped from the Google listings tomorrow, what would happen to your traffic? If the answer is; “um…there wouldn’t be any” then you may need to rethink your marketing strategy. A number one listing for key terms is all well and good, but brand awareness can be just as important in ensuring sales and repeat visits. Taking advantage of Google’s tools can help build this awareness and possibly, (just possibly) make the search engine itself obsolete
Take a look at a brand like Nike; do you think they lose much sleep over optimising their website? With such pervasive public awareness of their products, they don’t need to worry about SEO. If they were delisted for some reason they’d still have loads of visitors going directly to the website, bypassing the search engines entirely.
What sets Nike apart from the rest of us is their huge marketing campaign. With the sort of offline activity that involves television adverts and sponsorship deals, they hardly need to worry about having a fully optimised website (in fact, Nike’s site is flash-heavy and pretty awful to use).
But I Don’t Have That Sort Of Budget!
But, like Nike, you can still take advantage of Google’s tools. Searching for ’Nike’ brings up both their website and a sponsored link; despite holding the number one spot for their brand name, Nike aren’t afraid to buy visits. Research has in fact shown that holding the number one paid and unpaid positions in the search results increases the click-through rate for both, so having a sponsored link to bolster your brand name is no bad idea.
Hmm…What Else Can I Do?
Another way to build brand awareness is through Google’s content network. Contextual adverts used to be, quite frankly, useless, but recently Google have improved their system and they’re now worth a look for some sectors.
One of our clients for example has customers who we think use networking and referrals rather than search engines to find what they’re looking for. Google now lets you hand-pick websites to show adverts on, so we sourced several special-interest sites that show Google ads and set our client’s campaign running there.
Along with an offline campaign (such as printing your URL on bags, leaflets etc), top results in the search listings and contextual adverts on specialist sites can put your brand before potential customers again and again, until they know who you are and go straight to your website. Once this happens, an accident with your search positioning won’t be the end of the world.
Today’s Moral
In the long term brand awareness is your biggest seller, so make sure you lay the foundations now. The best measure of a booming business is direct traffic; a steady rise means people are coming back again and again, skipping the search engines because they can find what they need with you.
Although search is a huge source of traffic, don’t neglect old-fashioned advertising and traditional offline methods; a holistic approach is the best way to ensure long-term survival of your website.
