There's more to online marketing than SEO

11-Jan-2010 If your business is in a competitive environment, like mine is, you may find that pouring money into SEO may not be for you.  SEO is not the end all and be all of website promotion. 

There are plenty of other ways, which are now becoming popular, and SEO is being taken up by a lot of late adopters who have saturated the search results and made the user search for longer and use multiple search terms in order to find relevant results. (Hitwise have reported Searches with 3+ words have increased by 2.8% in the last 12 months.)

Having said that, every website should have the basic level of SEO as a standard.  Once you have the basics you can build on that with other methods of online and offline promotion.

Like all marketing you shouldn't focus on just one method.  SEO is just one piece to the marketing mix and should be balanced with other types of marketing and promotion.

Types of marketing:

Online Marketing

On-page Search Engine Optimisation
Website search engine optimisation involves working with the code behind the pages to ensure that the search engines can read and index your site effectively making it easier for them to rank you in their search engines.

Off-page Search Engine Optimisation
This invovles all promotion outside of the website.  Things like Linking back to your site (backlinks) or having a separate blog, listing on website directories.  Not to be confused with the black hat arts of link farming, Spamdexing or repeating unrelated phrases the list goes on.

Search Engine Marketing
Also known as online advertising, adwords or paid advertising.  You pay to promote your website by matching users keywords searches with your listed keywords.  EG If you sell shoes online, when a user searches for Shoes your advertisement will appear enabling you to target your users.

Social Media
Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn the list goes on.  Essentially you are promoting your brand, getting your name and reputation out on the internet for the world to see.  The more you contribute to people who are interested, and will read, the greater the chance they will remember you and buy from you or refer you to a friend.

Blogging and comments on your website
This is a really powerful way to get your website visitors to return to your website.  If you can create a community of users who will comment on your products with reviews, share stories or just contribute to other content on your site they will be twice as likely to buy from your site and 9 times as likely to return to read and add more comments.

Banner Advertising
Just like advertising in a magazine you can take out an advert online.  You can approach websites that attract your target market and pay for advertising space on their website.  EG If you sell baby products you might want to advertise on a mothers support website, or if you are a wedding photographer you might want to advertise on a wedding website.

Viral Advertising
This can be a YouTube video, a querky e-card or an online game, pretty much anything that will get people talking. The more people who find it interesting the more they will forward it onto a friend or promote it themselves.

Offline Marketing

There are many types of offline marketing not limited to the list below:

• Television
• Radio
• Print
• Direct Mail
• Telemarketing
• Networking
• Billboard
• plus many more

So next time someone says to you that you need SEO, think about what else you are doing online to promote your website and how that will fit in with your overall marketing strategy.

If you would like to find out more about different types of adverting you can contact us to find out more.