You've designed a great website, you've created the perfect content that your customers will simply love, you've got a great and memorable URL. Only, there's one problem... you have absolutely no idea how to drive traffic to your site!
Sounds familiar? This was the same dilemma I had when I decided to shift the focus of my company - from being a digital marketing agency, to a digital publishing company. From providing web and mobile development services to clients, we decided to shift to creating online publications for the fast-growing internet community, especially in the Philippines.
Our first project? To launch a website catering to mothers - www.babycentral.com.ph. It's a website in partnership with baby magazine, the pioneer in baby-oriented content in the Philippines. We had great content, a great partner, great traditional media support. Only problem was I had very little idea on how to drive traffic to the site, other than to rely on "traditional" techniques.
Being a marketing professional steeped in "traditional" marketing (I used to work with the brand management department of Procter & Gamble, universally recognized as the pioneer of brand marketing as we know it), my first instinct was to use tri-media advertising - launch a print ad in baby magazine, tie-up with radio shows, and other traditional techniques.
However, when I started talking with friends in the industry and researching over the web over my "problem", I realized that the most important secret ANY aspiring online marketer needs to master is SEARCH MARKETING.
THE WEB EXPERIENCE STARTS WITH SEARCH!
Why search? Because the consumers' web experience starts with search! How many URLs do you remember from rote memory? Most probably, just like me, less than 10. How many bookmarks do you have? Probably less than 20. We rely on search engines like google and yahoo to look for the content we want in the internet.
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING VS. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
There are two principal ways of marketing one's site using search: search engine optimization and search engine marketing.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, involves the disciplines and the techniques employed in order to help one's website reach the top of the organic search results in a search engine once a keyword related to the website's content is typed. For example, if our website is a baby-oriented website, the goal of SEO is for our site to be at the top of google's list of resulting websites whenever someone types, for example, "baby", in the google search bar.
Search engine marketing, on the other hand, is "paid search". It involves buying "keywords" or phrases from search engines, so that text ads about your website will appear alongside organic search results whenever the keywords are typed. For example, if we buy the keyword "baby", everytime someone types "baby" in google, our text ad will appear at the right side of the google search window - separate from the "organic" search results at the middle of the page.
More on search engine optimization and search marketing in my next entry.
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