In those days, when the Internet was beginning to gain popularity, the site was perceived primarily as an information resource. Over time, it began to be used as a business card. Surprisingly, many people who want to promote their services on the Internet perceive the site not even as an information resource but as a business card.
At the same time, ideas about SEO and PPC advertising can also be vague. Kind of like this is something that helps attract customers.
As a result, blurred notions of what a website is and what SEO and PPC are prevented good internet marketing companies and good customers from finding each other.
Let’s try to figure out why.
First of all, let’s remember why a person comes to the Internet? A person comes to look for information. To do this, he uses search engines and formulates specific queries. That is, a person comes to the Internet to look for answers to their queries. Yes, a person can formulate his requests in different ways, and it so happens that he does not know what he is looking for or formulates a request in such a way that it is not clear what he means. Also, queries can be both precise and general.
A person receives answers to his requests in search results, which consist of links to sites. At this moment, the substitution of concepts may occur. It seems that the search engine is answering the person. But no. The search engine only finds answers to a person’s queries on sites.
Therefore, the important point is that a site is a tool designed to provide answers to human requests. It is the site that contains the information that a person is looking for through a search engine.
If a person who typed a query in a search engine clicks on a link in the search results and goes to the site but does not find information there that is the answer to his request, will he call the number indicated in the site header to receive this answer? In almost all cases, no. He will close the tab with such a site and continue to click on other links in the search results, hoping to find an answer to his request on another site. And he will find it.
That is, initially, the purpose of a site is to provide information to a person. It can be contained on the site in different quantities. It can be a business card site, only with company contacts and brief information about it. It can be a store with a large mass of information about goods, a service site, or a corporate site with both.
If your task is to use the site for commercial purposes, what should it be? First of all, it should be a site that provides information about your company, your products, and services in sufficient quantity for the client to make a choice.
That is, the key to the site is content. Without it, the site does not fulfill its original function – the delivery of information. It makes no sense to use an empty site. Try to answer the question: will a person order goods or services on the site if it does not have enough information about them, but only information about the company and a phone number will be available? A potential client initially came to the Internet to search for information and make a choice, and not call the company and find out something over the phone. Although, I must admit that it all boils down to this because, as a rule, sites do not even fulfill their original function – the delivery of information. It is difficult to work with information on sites, it is not enough, or it is not at all. This is how online chats (online consultants) appeared…. But we are not going to talk about them.
We will talk about what a good commercial site is. A good site is a site that provides an accurate, relevant, and complete response to a user’s request. What is a good commercial website? A good commercial site is a site that answers a user’s request with the amendment that he is not just looking for an answer but also wants to purchase a product or order a service.
In a commercial sense, a website is a sales tool. He should be and is. But it is only if it provides at least accurate, current, and complete information. In this case, the site is already starting to sell. Does he already perform the function of conveying all the necessary information about the company, product, and service to a potential client for you. is that enough? Why don’t customers call then?
It’s about competition. Previously, it was enough for a site to fulfill its original function – to convey information about goods and services to a potential client. There were not many sites, not all of them were good, and they were easily found in search results.
The best sites provided accurate, relevant, and complete answers to user queries. For the same reason, the sites were in high positions in search engines, and they were easy to find.
Let’s not go into history and say that in the pursuit of positions, sites for some time turned into trash cans with articles in which the same keywords were repeated endlessly, and then into donors and recipients of links, and that’s it. They have completely stopped remembering the true function of the “Internet resource.”
First, everything in its place put the changes in search algorithms, which leveled first the madness of formal correspondence, and then links. Websites that fulfilled their original function have always been, and now they have gained an advantage.
Those who did not deal with content, who did not have the opportunity or the funds to do so, were at a disadvantage. Among the factors influencing the position, behavioral factors began to dominate, which are precisely designed to assess whether or not the site performs its function.
It was enough to have relevant, relevant, and complete content for a while, but now it is no longer enough to have it in the face of high competition simply. Now that very competition has put everything in its place. Then a lot of those involved in content also started to find themselves at a disadvantage. Why?
In a short time, it has grown. Everyone has websites, promotes them, tries to engage in content, but they lose their positions or cannot take them.
What’s the matter?
The fact was that it was enough to convey information to a potential client earlier and some time ago, and it could still be different. But, what if everyone has the same information, the prices are the same, there are examples of work, reviews, calculators, etc.?
How can a client make a choice? And he got used to looking for information and learned to compare and choose – all the conditions have been created for this.
We can safely say that marketing comes to the fore. Now information about the company, product, and service should be conveyed to the client and presented, and the best offer should be made. Now the “sales” function is added to the original function of the “Internet resource.”
A website can and should be a sales tool. He can talk, explain, hook, persuade, show, demonstrate the benefits and focus on the benefits, advise, make recommendations about you, offer a typical solution. He can and should work for you.
The site should provide not only answers to all possible and impossible questions on the site, but the client should also understand why he should choose your favorite.
What do SEO and contextual advertising services have to do with it?
You need to clearly understand that SEO and contextual advertising are primarily just traffic channels to your site. And all the main action takes place on the site.
Initially, SEO is the site’s optimization so that the search engine can normally index and perceive the content and adequately rank the site concerning this content for all suitable queries. And contextual advertising is attracting traffic for advertisements also for all suitable queries.
Just as using these traffic channels is meaningless for an empty site, the use of these traffic channels is also meaningless for a site with bad content, for a site with a poor presentation of services and goods, for a site with unprofitable or non-competitive offers on its pages.
Thus, SEO and context may not help you attract customers if the visitor on the site does not choose your favorite. You can still hope that a visitor on the site will call or contact through an online consultant, and then he will make a choice in your favor, but the probability of this always tends to zero.
And most importantly, when a visitor on the site makes his choice, it is good if a sale can take place. But it can also happen that he will choose the site, but the sales department will not bring the client to the point of sale.
Everything is not as simple as it seems to those who imagine SEO and contextual advertising services as services for which money is made, and the result is itself.
And the customer’s requirements for SEO services and contextual advertising will not be more surprising to guarantee to attract a certain number of customers. Suppose by SEO and contextual advertising it is possible to predict the amount of attracted traffic. Even Google (the owner of one of the systems in which contextual advertising is configured) only predicts the number of clicks on ads. How does the customer imagine sales guarantees?
Even more surprising will be the customer’s requirements for guarantees, which has an empty or insufficiently meaningful and presentable site, and who do not have the ability or desire to cooperate on its part and provide content for the site in the required composition and volume.
How to be?
First of all, you need to accept that the content on the site is the foundation and that the site itself must be good technically, constructively, visually, and functionally. And it would help if you also were prepared because this is often not enough, and you need the offers on the site to be well presented and competitive.
How to achieve the desired result?
To get customers, you need to order SEO and contextual advertising services from those companies that, in addition to putting the site in order (in the literal sense of SEO), offer advanced rates at which they are ready to improve the visibility of your site for the full core of targeted queries and work with content.
But here you need to remember that a company providing such services is like a doctor or a lawyer, and without your cooperation, the result will be weak or not at all.
How to evaluate the result, and where are the guarantees?
In each case, the result is predicted individually. And no one can guarantee it, including because it depends on you. You can only make a good reliable forecast and adhere to a strategy based on meeting the requirements of search engines, well-known and own methods of improving the site.
Whether you, together with the selected company, will be able to achieve the desired result – you can assess this by the company’s portfolio, cases, and recommendations. If a company has been successful in SEO and PPC advertising, this is a sign that it knows its business. The mechanisms underlying these both services are universal for sites of different types and different fields of activity.
The main thing to remember is that you must first become a good client if you want to find a good SEO and contextual services company.