The internet levels the playing field in many industries – allowing small companies to compete equally and effectively with larger rivals.  The key to success is to ensure that your online / internet marketing strategy is complete and being delivered effectively.

Naturally, search engine marketing is one of the most effective components of online marketing, but its important to remember that we should be part of a wider approach.. part of a marketing mix.

Internet Marketing can be grouped into three components:

1. Promotion – ensuring that the business is being mentioned (link building, pr, etc) – building your online brand.
2. Clicks – getting visitors (potential customers) to your site.  Activities such as search engine rankings, pay per click, banner advertising, etc.
3. Post-click Marketing - one you have someone visit your site, how do you get them to take actions such as place an order, enquire about your services, etc.  These activities are about usability, persuasion architecture and design, and the effective use of analytics.

Although the internet is constantly expanding with additional pages and new sites being added all the time, it is also shrinking.  There are fewer places for yourinternet marketing budget to get the full impact it requires.  Google now dominates the search climate – shrinking the online real estate for search engine marketing.  The same is also true for social media, affiliates, and others.

Effective search engine marketing spans all three of the above internet marketing categories.

We promote web sites with article and press release submission, social media campaigns, and link building.  These activities help build the brand and the authority of your web site.

We work to build [qualified] traffic to a website.  Getting organic rankings is part of this activity – but we work to make sure that the listings in those rankings encourage a click.  This is done with the effective use of title tags – not stuffed with keywords, but with a call to action that should stand out.  This comes more naturally for our PPC team when creating the text ads for PPC campaigns, but it is also important with SEO.

We should also be concerned about post-click marketing – how do we get a site to convert/sell more?  Many search marketing companies seem to forget about this aspect.. and I think it is where most search campaigns will fail.  Congratulate yourself as much as you like for that number one ranking and the traffic it is bringing, but if the site is not converting.. then it is not achieving its goals for the business and the campaign is at risk of being perceived as a failure.

So don’t forget that there’s more to internet marketing than search.. but also don’t forget that there is more to search engine marketing than a search engine ranking.