Published by Jon Roberts
Web design services

For your site to go global you need to ensure that the market is able to find it, this involves spreading the news about your site as loudly as possible and in a better way than your competitors.

One of the biggest mistake a business can make when investing in their website is to believe the old saying “build it and they will come.”  Building a great looking website and placing it on the web is only the start, ensuring that you have a decent ROI (return on investment) can be a daunting task, you must ensure that you have a solid SEM (search engine marketing) plan in place – to not commit to either PPC (pay-per-click) or SEO (search engine optimization) is a plan in itself – but in reality it is a very short sighted plan.

Your competitors will be using SEO – check out their ranking in one of the top search engines for yourself.

What a business needs to decide is do they have the time and resources to effectively market their own website?

The cost of paying for key employees time needs to be established both in terms of their hourly rate and the cost of them not carrying out their main role.  Lets suppose that this calculation arrives at £30.00 per hour (a very modest sum of money in todays world) thats £240 for an eight hour day, £1200.00 a week, £4800.00 a month, £57,600.00 a year!  Now ask yourself how much a decent SEO campaign would cost for the same period?  If you were spending £57,600.00 on PPC you would be getting seriously good quality click through rates and therefore ROI that would exceed initial cost of the website and the SEO!

SEM is not just about PPC however, SEM involves organic SEO, in other words quality on page search engine optimization, quailty code optimization, content building (possibly through syndication) and quality link building to name but a few different methods.

A good SEM may involve both PPC and SEO – this can be a very difficult task for employees with little or no experience of the subject to suddenly have to undertake, part of your investment may/should involve training staff in the field of web marketing, this all adds up.

Every business starting out wants to be the next Amazon or EBay, but fail to realise that to do so costs time, money and a great deal of effort coupled with a really clear understanding of your goals and what is required to achieve them.

As I have stated in previous posts, search engines love good well written content – and so do your customers/users!

Content for your website is king!  Have you ever considered hiring a copy writer?  This is part of a good SEM.  A copy writer will ensure that you are maximising your copy for the keywords your are seeking to market under.

What about analytics?  Most hosting packages come with a raft of tools to analyse your websites performance, our own hosting packages come with some great analytic tools.  These provide you with lots of information about how your website is performing in a given search engine, listing the unique visits from them.  In addition to analytics on your own site there are a huge range of tools that will help you analyse search engines and the popularity of key words – Rank Sense (costing $25.00 per month for the basic subscription) is a good example of these.

All in all, a business must ask the all important question – to pay for SEO or not to pay for SEO?  I cannot answer that for you, it is something you need to consider given all the facts.

What a business must not do is sit back and expect their site to get into the top three for their chosen keyword on its own – to get to the top costs money, whether you pay for an SEO company, or undertake to do-it-yourself.

Can I just make a very important point here.  A while ago I had a conversation with a business lady who had just had a new website built and was very please that the web designer had managed to get the website listed in Google at position one!  My obvious question was “for what keyword?”  The customers reply is typical of many, “for the name of my website!”  Lets face it, anyone can get a website to be number one in Google for the name of the website!!!!  You only need to submit your site to Google (something Google will do all on its own eventually!)

Whatever you decide, please please please ensure that you do some search engine marketing, otherwise you may as well spend the money you intend to invest on the design of your website on some business cards from a well know online publisher – costing £12.50 for 250 cards (the £12.50 is for postage and handling – the cards are free) because that is all you will have without SEM – a fancy business card!