Effective SEO Is An Ongoing Marketing Campaign,

On the suggestion that he reigned in his advertising because sales were going so well, Mr Wrigley (yes love it or hate it, someone made a fortune out of gum) compared his expenditure to a train pulling carriages: “Just because we’re travelling at speed now, what do you think would happen if we removed the engine?”

Longevity of traditional marketing campaigns such as press advertising is well known, but what about the web, and in particular search engine marketing?

If ever there was a medium that champions instant results, then surely nothing comes close to the web. Everything about it is here and now – click here for instant results, get rich quick, satisfaction guaranteed…

Most people have seen beyond the ‘Guaranteed number one spot for $99 and automatic submission to 1,000 search engines’ approach, but as search engine optimisation (SEO) becomes more mainstream, more marketing managers are seeing the benefits of progressing beyond the first 12 months of search engine marketing and its progression into the maturity of year two.

Exciting months as they are, the early days of a search engine optimisation campaign are all about establishing site popularity and effective rankings. It’s a time consuming and laborious process of hand submitting sites to the top search engines through to researching, contacting and securing reciprocal links from relevant websites. Due to the low cost of the service and the steady increase in visits, very often the return on investment is relatively high and seeing a ROI of several hundred per cent is by no means unusual over the first few months of the campaign.

And so eleven or twelve months down the line, isn’t the job done? Surely there isn’t much more than can be tweaked or adjusted to achieve better rankings…is there?

Well, keep thinking of effective search engine marketing as the marketing discipline that it is and you’ll appreciate that stage one of the campaign is barely over; and in the same way that a clued up marketing manager knows about the value in building awareness, you negate all the investment made to date if you pull the plug now.

Think about it. Towards the end of that first year you will know which keywords and phrases work and more to the point, which don’t. Now is the time to research more and resubmit to leverage the success of improved rankings to date.

As you are able to track visits to your websites, a maturing search engine marketing campaign will influence your website evolution. You’ll want to refine where visitors go and what impedes them making that conversion to sales or contacting you.

A mature campaign will see visitors arriving at different places in your site – and not necessarily the home page. Second and third year search engine marketing veterans will be able to spot gaps in the buying process that may result in new [‘landing pages’ that are built to answer specific visitor enquiries and speed up the conversion process.

And there is content to think about as well. Twelve months into that initial campaign our experience is that the visible page text becomes critical in the search terms used to find your website. Although you started with a list of some twenty-five keywords and phrases, analysis will show that the search net has broadened enormously. Our mature websites are found from enquirers using over 2,500 keywords and phrases. In another example, one of our clients consistently receives well over 50% of their monthly enquiries from the top five search engines. When evaluating the source of business leads, chopping search engine optimisation then doesn’t seem such a good idea.

Like any marketing campaign, effective management is key to success. But search engines are fickle. Changes in algorithms, or those elusive rules they employ that mean the difference between first and second page ranking, are constantly changing. Google has been through at least three so called dances which has seen previously well placed sites being toppled overnight from their top positions with seemingly no explanation.

Not only that, but as organic search becomes increasingly cut-throat with the big boys squaring up for a showdown, new deals and feeds are constantly being negotiated.

It’s a moveable feast.

Vertical Leap’s fully managed service sees the company monitoring and reacting to these changes on your behalf so that you don’t have to. Of course no search engine marketing company can claim to have inside knowledge of the search engines rules but unlike everyday Search Engine Marketing companies, Vertical Leap is one of the very few that will react on your behalf without being instructed.

Ask any marketer and they’ll tell you that consistency is the key to successful results, and search engine marketing is no exception.

The moral of the story? Effective Search Engine Marketing is a legitimate marketing campaign with a high return on investment that can be sustained and even increased into second and third year campaigns fuelled by popularity earned from the early days of optimisation. Stick at it!