______

I always have this vision of a guy – maybe back in the 1930s at the height of the last depression – sitting in his office, elbows on desk, head in hands, staring at his brand new telephone and waiting for it to ring. He’d heard that all his competitors had got a phone and thought if he got one too, the business would come. So he got it installed, but never figured out why it didn’t ring.

I see a similar thing happen with business websites. How many can say that their site’s working for their business the way they want it to?

For the purposes of this post, we’ll assume your website is a great website – focussed on the needs of your audience and/or current and future customers, providing the features or functions that match those of your competitors in a way that makes it easy for users to get what they want and encourages them to come back for more. But we’ll also assume that its not delivering the return on the investment you wanted – so why is that?

In most cases it’s because too much focus, time and money was placed on the build and the design – and not enough thought given to what time, money and resource would be required to get it seen.

The common problems we see are:

* The front page never changes
* No new content gets added
* No promotion of special offers
* Worse still – as a combination of neglect on the three points above, out-of-date content is featured on the website
* Broken links – or searches on Google link to pages that can’t be found
* Offline advertising and literature are not referencing your website
* No money is spent on online advertising and marketing.

They exist because:

* No one within the business ‘owns’ the website
* No budget has been allocated to the website
* Somehow the business believes that because everyone can access your site, everyone will.

They can be mitigated by:

* Allocating a budget within your business to promote your site
* Ensuring someone has the skills and the time to make updates to your site to keep it fresh, accurate and reflective of your business
* Having a clear plan of what you can reasonably expect from your site.

Our most successful small business clients have got themselves to the stage where their sites have paid for themselves. In every case, it’s been because they’ve been prepared to spend at least the same again as they spent on the build to ensure their online investment returns with interest.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Firstly, we was asked to redesign their website, which helped because, as with all the websites we build at miggle, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is considered throughout the website build process. We identified The Cooden Beach Hotel’s best keywords and prepared website copy both search engine friendly and useful to the user.

The preparation paid dividends. Not long after launching The Cooden Beach Hotel’s website, we were achieving first page search results on our chosen keywords. This in itself was great when you take into account the very competitive market.

So, from a natural search point of view we were doing well. Our selected keywords were ranking the website on the first page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but in such a competitive market place you can’t rest on your laurels. Being pro-active is a must in search marketing, so we continued working with The Cooden Beach Hotel to improve their search rankings.

The miggle media team decided to run a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign using Google Adwords, with the aim of achieving maximum exposure in both paid and natural search for The Cooden Beach Hotel.

As mentioned in our previous post, Is Google Adwords right for your business?: “A recent study found that search advertising is still the most cost-effective method of advertising (and it is a fraction of the cost of direct mail, email, online banners or yellow pages), mainly due the fact you can target your market so effectively.”

Our initial aim was to hit the top 3 positions on the Google sponsored ads as often as possible and to drive quality, targeted traffic to the hotel’s booking engine in order to provide a good return on investment (ROI). This has been a great success – now The Cooden Beach Hotel pretty much dominates SERPs on our chosen keywords. The hotel is thrilled with their ROI and have already increased their Google Adwords spend.

The screen grab shows how The Cooden Beach Hotel has the whole page covered giving them the best opportunity to gain clicks, and hopefully bookings. A very successful search marketing campaign.

The following guides you through the screen grab (left):
1) This is one of our Google Adwords ads – competing with some huge brand names means your ads and landing pages need to have a high quality score and be extremely relevant to the search.

2) Local business listing – essential for any business to get listed here and as you can see, can give good exposure. It’s also free to submit your listing!

3) This is the natural search listing – ranked in second place for this keyword. It’s also worth noting that the website link on the first place listing goes to a page which in turn links to the hotel making it another valuable source of clicks.

If you’re interested in search marketing, contact the miggle media team to find out how we can optimise your online presence.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.