We are well aware of the complexity of the job we undertake. The pricing of our services depends on the quality of your website and its current position in organic search results of Yandex and Google. We reinforce our responsibility with a contract and quality (customer) service.
Professional website promotion
Since we met a lot of department managers and even company directors (who, typically, are in charge of website promotion, which technically should be under marketing department) who didn’t know much on the subject — this article is dedicated to them.
Briefly, the difference between professionals and amateurs is that the former promote your products and increase sales, while the latter increase your website traffic and mindless search rankings. Here it is in greater detail:
The objectives of professional website promotion
In order to succeed you need to have a goal. Better yet, you need to understand all of your goals as a whole, so that it is clear what needs to be done, how and for what purpose. You may think it’s all just chatter. It’s not the case. Purposeless actions will only lead to waste of your budget and to inability to make sense of the results. After all, to analyze the results, one should understand the objectives that were set at the beginning.
If you are just planning your website promotion, then before looking for a contractor, let alone starting the process,--try to understand what your objectives are. First and foremost, it is important to define and set the end goal. Such objectives could include:
- Attracting customers to increase sales of products/services
- Increasing brand recongnition
- Increasing customer loyalty to the brand or product
From our experience:
Such objectives as «website promotion», «we just need to get to the TOP
What a nonsense! It's foolish.», «these 50 keywords should appear in TOP results» do not have practical use in commerce. Think about your real objectives before seeking to promote your website.
Stages of goals implementation within the framework of PROFESSIONAL and UNPROFESSIONAL promotion
Let’s look at the stages of goal implementation (issues that must be resolved to achieve it), and see how amateur website promotion differs from professional services.
Standard approach:
Under a standard approach, the contractor typically would not ask you these questions:
- Who is the main buyer of goods/services? Is it a retail buyer? Or wholesale?
- What is a target market of the client? It could be just your city, or the whole world.
- What is the socio demographic profile of the target audience of the client?
- Who is more likely to buy your products — men or women? What is the age of your typical buyer?
- How much does he/she make? What does he/she do?
- What are your goals in website promotion?
That means that your contractor takes no interest in your business, or considers it to be unimportant for promoting your website.
This is typically followed by some optimization work, buying some backlinks, and as a result some improvement in rankings on several keywords.
Now ask yourself this: why do you need an increase in traffic at all? It is an increase in sales you need, not the traffic!
Before embarking on website promotion, you must understand what it is that you will be promoting. Here, immediately two answers come to mind: website and user searches. Both are not quite correct. It is NOT the website that needs to be promoted, but the business of the client, and its products and services. How can you be effective in promoting something, without having analyzed it first?
Professional approach:
If we focus on this aspect and try to fully describe each phase, it could make a whole book. You can familiarize yourself more with each stage on the relevant sections of the website:
- website optimization;
- search engine promotion;
- internet advertising;
- content management;
- integrated internet marketing.
In a nutshell, an effective, professional process of promoting a website implies a detailed analysis of a client’s business, its target audience, market research of the goods and services which should be promoted. It is important to evaluate the quality of the website itself, and to give recommendations on improving conversion rates. In layman’s terms, the goal of this stage is to achieve the maximum return from the website in terms of orders and phone calls. In other words, we need to keep the sales department busy)) Additionally, it is necessary to choose the right strategy of promotion, which could include:
- link based strategy;
- article based strategy;
- mixed strategy;
- behavioral strategy;
- and others.
Guaranteed results
As a separate and very important issue we would like to discuss the subject of guaranteed results. This is a subject that worries absolutely all of our clients. It has to do with the fact that recently many services started promising guaranteed success of getting into the TOP of search results.
A question to the clients:
- Search engines are constantly complicating and tweaking their algorithms.
- There are around 4000 agencies in Russia that are engaged in website promotion.
How can any of them guarantee getting you on TOP of organic search results, when no one knows the algorithms of the search engines?
It is as good as a bicycle engineer’s guarantee to repair your Mercedes. He could probably attempt to do it, but no guarantees or deadline would be reasonable in this case.
From our experience
Promoting a website is an art. Optimizers all know the expression ««dancing with a tambourine»
Besides tambourine and shaman dancing, we apply our experience.» — by analogy with dances of shamans, which cannot be reasonably explained. Website promotion is much like dancing with tambourines, although some drivers of search results have been discovered empirically and already are facts.
All of the above represents the principles and methods of increasing sales from a website by using a tool which is called “search engine optimization”, and embodies professional website promotion.
