Online Marketing and SEO

Is your site not drawing enough traffic? Or the right traffic?
Are you not ranking highly on the best search engines?
Want to optimize your web pages to enhance search results?

Online Marketing goes far beyond SEO - just one component of online marketing. Apis works with you to construct an effective online marketing campaign around your business, designed specifically to help you achieve your business goals.

• Creating a plan to promote your website
• Paid traffic vs unpaid traffic (or SEO vs PPC)
• What should website promotion do for your business?
• How to get started

Creating a plan to promote your website

The best place to start any marketing venture, be it online or offline, is to formulate a plan. What are your objectives? What's the best way to achieve them? How will we measure the campaign's success?

The Apis approach to online marketing:

1. Create a plan through keywords – If you're going to rank well in the search engines, you need to know what you what to rank well for. You probably have some keywords in mind already, which is great. But a good plan starts with proper keyword research; figure out the exact terms people are searching for, how popular those terms are, and how competitive they are. From that point you can intelligently target the right keywords for you, given your goals and your budget.
2. Update Your Website - This is where we work on the content, code, accessibility and usability of your website. This is where we populate your site with your ideal keywords in the ideal fashion. This will prep your site for being indexed properly by the search engines.
3. Build Incoming Links - It is critically important to ensure that other, related, popular websites link to yours. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. You could pay for these links, offer content (such as articles or press releases), or post a link on your own site (link exchanges). The exact approach(es) we recommend will depend on our original plan.
4. Advertise - This can be a great way to generate immediate, targeted traffic to your website. Common methods include pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, banner advertising, newsletter advertising, etc. A comprehensive online marketing strategy will incorporate both paid and unpaid methods.
5. Measure and Adjust – Our ideal approach is to undertake a six month term for an online marketing campaign. We report to you each month with what we did, what we plan on doing next month, what your results were, and how they changed from previous months. This also allows us to adjust our trajectory as we go, constantly working to optimize the results.

A note on patience: Good search engines rankings don't happen overnight. It typically takes two to 12 weeks to get a new site indexed by Google. It can take much longer to get it indexed well. It's also important to pace your campaign, as too much work all at once can raise search engine suspicions.

The methods for properly promoting a website are no mystery. Read more about the specifics:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay-Per-Click
• Other Techniques

Paid traffic vs unpaid traffic (or SEO vs PPC)

The difference between paid traffic (e.g. pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns) and unpaid traffic (e.g. search engine optimization) is that with paid traffic you only generate visits to your site when you pay. If you stop paying, the traffic stops.

With unpaid traffic you slowly and 'organically' build your rankings within search engine results for specific keywords. The traffic generated here does not cost you anything, and it keeps visitors coming indefinitely.

Which should you choose?

There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Here is a summary:

A good strategy is to begin with heavier advertising (i.e. paid traffic) while your search engine optimization campaign begins. As the SEO starts to pay off with more unpaid traffic, you can throttle back your advertising if required. This requires more investment up front, but it will provide your website with a steady stream of visitors, and your return on investment will grow exponentially over time.

What should website promotion do for your business?

• Draw Traffic
  Not just any visitors, but the right type of visitors; your customers. By conducting proper keyphrase research we are able to uncover what people are actually searching for when they're interested in what you have to offer. This allows us to focus our SEO efforts more efficiently and effectively, maximizing your return on investment.
• Rank in Search
  You need to rank well for your best keyphrases, and we can get you there. While there's no mystery as to what it takes to rank well on Google, it is a bit of an art.
• List in Directories
  There are a plethora of really great online directories out there. Some are very large and generic, others are much smaller but highly focused on your industry. We uncover the best ones for you to be a part of, and we optimize your listings.
• Increase impressions with email campaigning or a newsletter
  Search isn't everything, and we all know that it's easier to sell to a customer than a stranger. We can employ a variety of alternative SEO strategies to reach your target audiences.

If you're looking to draw traffic, rank higher, or want to increase impressions with email campaigning, contact us.

How to get started

Are you curious as to how website promotion takes place? You've undoubtedly heard of certain "tactics" that might work better than others, or strategies that are black, white or grey.