Many businesses that have come online ask the question: “now that the site is up, how do we get business?”. This is a valid question. In trying to answer this question many small or medium sized businesses turn to an employee who has some knowledge of how the internet works. Usually the employee does the online marketing in addition to their current workload. This adds strain on the employee and results online tend to be limited. Another question is: how much does the employee know about online marketing? Being active on social networks is a good foundation because of familiarity with the medium, but doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to get results.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a must in any online campaign. Getting “free” traffic from the search engines is always good. The problem is: what happens when Google changes its algorithm and traffic all of a sudden stops coming to your site? In 2012 many businesses were affected by Google’s algorithm change. ( A search algorithm is a formula that a search engine uses to rank website pages based on how relevant the keyword and the pages are.) Businesses that solely relied on SEO were badly affected and lost most of their online revenue. Did Google do this to hurt businesses? Of course not. They are only interested in providing the best results for searchers.
AdWords Campaign
AdWords tends to be the last of the options for marketing. Mainly because companies see this as a cost rather than an investment. If we take the above scenario, an employee or possibly the owner of the business decides to create the campaign and manage it themselves. Usually what ends up happening is that a campaign gets set up, some keywords are chosen, they set a budget and let it run. After a few weeks the campaign runs at a loss and the person in charge deems AdWords ineffective and costly.
Businesses that ran both a SEO campaign and an AdWords campaign were less affected. Not all websites were affected from the algorithm change from Google. Some actually fared better. The ones that were affected were the ones that relied on using sketchy tactics to rank well. Was this done on purpose from SEO companies or individuals? For most no. These were the techniques that worked at the time to try to rank websites. If a business ran both SEO and AdWords campaigns and were affected by Google’s change, at least they had the AdWords campaign running that still brought in results. Not all was lost.
AdWords Specialist
AdWords is fairly complex. Add the data that is collected with Google Analytics and you have something that can be overwhelming for most. Now that you have a campaign up and running, how do you get results? This is where an AdWords specialist comes in. AdWords is a specialty. Think of when you go see a doctor who specializes in an area of health. The doctor has focused in a specific area to understand it in depth so that they can provide the greatest results when problems occur. An AdWords specialist has done the same. They have learned the ins and outs and with experience can provide the greatest results.
If you are running an AdWords campaign and are not happy with the results, strongly consider hiring an AdWords specialist. They will be able to bring insight and results. The advertising campaign and AdWords specialist should not be seen as a cost, but rather an investment that provides opportunity and a positive return to your business.
