The internet marketing landscape has changed quite a bit in the last 3 years and has become even more defined in the last 12 months. With Google raising $ 4 billion from new stock offerings in 2005, we will see more changes in the next 3 years. Unfortunately, I am afraid that the small business will be left out in this process. Perhaps a better statement would be that the small business has already been left out.
Certainly, this writing is not designed to provide a solution to the growing problem. Furthermore, it has been written to raise awareness and recognize the difficulty small businesses have on the web. Certainly, the small business doesn’t get any sympathy from the major search engines in their quest to provide quality information for those searching the web.
Let’s review how the situation was created. We have to assume that a small business does not have the financial resources for a proper advertising campaign on the web (although it is less expensive than offline advertising) and that they do not have the manpower to dedicate time to those who are not. expensive marketing methods. Yes, I have distinguished between advertising and marketing.
Marketing is the process or technique of promoting, selling and distributing a product or service. Advertising is to publicize your product or service; An advertisement to attract the attention of the public by emphasizing the qualities to awaken the desire to buy.
Can the small business market at no cost? Yes, absolutely, however, the problem at hand is not spending, but time. Time they are already spending on their business and no longer have time to spend on inexpensive marketing methods on the web. What are these inexpensive but time-consuming marketing methods? This would include, but is not limited to, writing articles, maintaining newsletters, maintaining email addresses with autoresponders, submitting your articles through a variety of methods and resources across the web. Let’s not forget the standard problems of search engine optimization and HTML coding. Oh best of all is “natural” link exchange as defined by Google. If you haven’t been there yet, manual link exchange is a time-consuming process, even if you decide to spend money on lost cost services that can help you. You cannot use “link farms” as this is against search engine policies and will cause your listing to be downgraded.
To get to the top in the search engines, it all comes down to links (or link exchanges, link popularity) and content. Inbound links are better than reciprocal inks. Writing content for your site, articles, news, newsletter takes a long time to correctly write a 500 word article and the submission process is not easy either. There are some services and software to help you submit articles, but like link exchange services, they can only do so much. Could you create a blog and post your articles, no doubt? However, you can see that the “to do” list only keeps growing for the small business owner.
Could they participate in pay-per-click campaigns? Sure, however, you are now running into a financial problem and one that doesn’t necessarily provide a great return on investment. Pay-per-click campaigns are good as an overall marketing strategy and if you use them in combination with a variety of other search engine and internet marketing methods. On its own, it cannot provide the benefits that the small business seeks. Finding the key phrases (which are no longer keywords) and understanding which ones to select is not an easy task either. It requires due diligence, research, and analysis to understand the information and make an informed decision. Assuming they can get through this part of the pay-per-click process, the next phase is to write the headline and content for the pay-per-click ad. Unfortunately, we see many small businesses flocking to pay-per-click advertising in hopes of a quick return. They could also go to a casino!
In fact, there is another problem associated with pay-per-click campaigns. The relationship between exposures and hits is equally a problem when you are supposed to maintain a certain percentage relationship between the two. When search engines like Google allow your ad to be placed on other websites with Google Adsense, your exposures are increasing, yet how many people actually click on the links? From Google’s perspective, probably a lot, but from the perspective of the individual advertiser, this is not necessarily a good situation. Google now dictates the keywords it “should” bid on and ultimately consolidates the bidding war into small groups of keyword phrases and a larger number of advertisers.
Lastly, at least for this writing, but not necessarily on the subject, it’s time to see the revenue. There is no doubt that it takes months for a website to spread across the Internet. This is by no means a short-term situation and expectations should be set accordingly. Just because you have a website doesn’t mean you will see rewards any time soon. Once again we get into the dilemma of time resources to do the necessary internet marketing work to see the benefits 6 to 9 months later.
The requirements set by search engines in their quest to provide quality responses to those who are searching make it increasingly difficult for small businesses to compete on the web. So who will end up on the first page or in the first position of keyword phrase searches? Unless something changes and small business is given a chance, it will be the largest corporations that have the manpower, the time, and the money.