OnlineTao Internet Marketing

These are some of the search engines that focus on the UK. If you are a business targeting the uk, then you want to make sure that your SEM strategy gets your site listed in the ones relevant for your audience.

EZILON
WEBSITE DIRECTORY THISISOURYEAR
UK KEY - UK START PAGE
UNITED KINGDOM CRAWLER
2GOGO
ABACHO
A BIZ DIRECTORY
ABREXA UK
ALL THE UK
ASK? DIRECTORY
BLUE DAFFODIL
CELEBHOO
CLICK 4 CHOICE
ENGLAND CRAWLER
EXALEAD
GASTA
GIMPSY
GLOBALSEARCHDIRECTORY
GOOGLE
GREAT BRITISH PAGES
HUTSY UK
INDEX PLEX
N-IRELAND CONNECTED
NORTHERN IRELAND CRAWLER
NORWICH PORTAL
ODP
OOBDOO
PUT MY FINGER
QANGO
RED HOT CHILLI
SCOTLAND CRAWLER
SCOTLINKS DIRECTORY
SCOT SEARCH
SCOTSMART
SEARCH AND GO
SEARCH CORNWALL
SGT SEARCH
SPLUT
THE ARENA
THE GLOUCESTERSHIRE PORTAL
THE SEARCH SITE
UJIKO
UK WIZZ
WALES CRAWLER
WALES INDEX
WEB WOBOT
WOTBOX
YAHOO!
YEANDI

The long tail is important for a number of reasons. First of all if your sector has a relatively high level of online rivalry then unless you have a strong established online presence in that sector, building your campaigns around the most popular keywords is not likely to deliver any value. It is better to target the longer tail relevant key phrases where you will have a better chance of achieving strong rankings in the natural listings and also pay a lower but still effective cpc in your paid search campaigns as well. Developing this further though is an even stronger argument to take the long tail very seriously. You see the people who search using 3 or 4 word keyphrases are generally further down the buying cycle and therefore those keyphrases should deliver a higher conversion rate. So as long as your upfront research to drive your internet marketing is thorough and well thought through you will see the results you want.

Many companies going online spend a bit of time deciding which of the numerous internet marketing vehicles they are going to use to drive traffic.  It is easy to get lost.  There’s seo, paid search, online display, affiliate, blogging, email, viral to name but a few.

The key is to find where the low hanging fruit is, that is going to get you off the mark the quickest and deliver you the most value in the soonest time.  Well it does depend on the businesses, your business model, your existing client base etc.  Because if say you have not had an online presence before but you have been established offline for years with a large installed base of customers and prospects.  Then judicious use of email is likely to be very beneficial to develop more value from your existing customers.

If however you don’t have a large pool of customers already or you want to expand your market presence then a strategy around search is going to teach you so much if you give it some proper thought upfront.  As long as you have got a half decent website, paid search is so targeted that you are quickly going to be able to find out which key phrases are driving you traffic and delivering you sales.  Obviously there will be most clicked on terms for your sector which are unlikely to be profitable for you initially, but the idea is to determine keyphrases that deliver moderate amounts of traffic with less than average competition.  Do this and you’ll be away.  It’s not going to be perfect initially but it will be useful.   Then in parallel to tweaking with the existing pages to improve conversion you can use the knowledge from your paid search campaigns to drive your seo efforts which in turn is going to start pushing you up the natural search rankings for relevant terms.   But search is the key - get search work for you and you will steam ahead and the knowledge will help non search related campaigns succeed and add further value downstream.

In order to drive relevant traffic and convert that traffic to customers you must get into the mindset of your potential audience.  That means you need to understand what keyphrases they are searching for on the search engines.  They will be a large spectrum of keyphrases some generating much more traffic than others.  Once you know what your audience is searching for when they are looking to buy or find out about your type of products then you need to get a feel for how many real competitors there are for each keyphrase.  Notice I say real competitors.  Real competitors are the ones that have reasonably compelling messaging in their listings and landing pages, have optimised landing pages for those terms and have generated a healthy number of relevant backlinks from relevant sites.

Having created that picture of the market landscape you are then in pretty good shape to start discerning which keyphrases are likely to work for you in terms of optimising your site and bidding for paid search.

Many businesses when they first go online turn to paid search (google adwords etc) to drive traffic to their site.  Many will find this vehicle easy to get going, easy to spend alot of money and easy not to make any money.  This is because to make it work, takes time and expertise which the majority of businesses starting off online don’t have.  Also because ofthe high adoption rates of this online marketing vehicle in many markets, competition is fierce which drives the cost of relevant traffic up further.

Because of this many businesses have got disheartened with paid search and are now looking at other ways to generate relevant traffic.  SEO is an obvious and important way to do this and although likely to deliver strong relevant traffic over the longer term the business is going to have to wait to see profitable results.

So where doe that leave ACME Ltd who has gone online, who is short on cash and time ?

Well, the good news is that there are proven ways of generating potentially substantial levels of relevant traffic in the near term - Affiliate marketing, auction sites and distribution of free ebooks.  These will be explored further in future posts.