It may have once been true that “if you build it, they will come”, but in today’s global and hypercompetitive marketplace creating a great product or service is only half the battle. If you want to grow your company then you will need to market and advertise your website, getting your brand in front of the right people at the right time to generate sales.
Social media ads can be a great way to target relevant people with your ads, but in this article we’ll focus on the two ways of targeting users via search – organically via search engine optimisation and via paid search engine advertisements.
What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?
In its most simple terms, search engine optimisation or “SEO” is the business of helping your site rank higher in the search results on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines for your relevant keywords and key phrases. And this takes two forms – on-page SEO and off-page SEO, which should be implemented together.
On-page SEO is the optimisation of your website to make sure that the HTML code is well structured, the meta data is in place, and the content is fresh and relevant so that the search engines can index your site and put it in the right context. Most good web building platforms and content management systems from WordPress to Shopify have solid SEO built-in, but you need to make sure that your content is also interesting, relevant, and unique – and regularly adding new fresh content is a bonus.
Once you have your on-page SEO looking good, then it is time to start with off-page SEO. This overlaps with traditional marketing, as it essentially boils down to getting people – journalists, bloggers, influencers, etc – talking about your company and ideally linking back to your site when they do so. By launching your product or service on Product Hunt or similar you will can get a boost in press, but it is also critical to actively reach out to writers and other people in your industry to talk to them about your product or service.
It may be worth offering free trial accounts to journalists that may be interested to cover your launch, offer to write op-eds for magazines or newspapers, or let journalists know that you are available to comment with services like Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Google ranks backlinks from a high ranking website, such as the BBC or NY Times, more highly than smaller, less authoritative websites, but any mention of your site is a positive signal to the search engine that your site is relevant should list more highly in their rankings.
In general, a well structured site with a good SEO plan should be able to rank for its brand name relatively quickly, but getting into the top five results for competitive keywords and key phrases can take years of work, which is where PPC comes in.
What is PPC?
Paid search engine advertising, generally known as Pay Per Click or PPC, allows you to show an advertisement for your company, product, or service alongside the top search results even if your website does not organically rank for those terms.
You will see PPC ads at the top and down the side of search results pages on every search engine, with each advertiser bidding for the top spot. PPC offers a shortcut to getting your website listed against even the most competitive search terms and phrases, but with a bidding platform like AdWords (Google) or Microsoft Ads (Bing and DuckDuckGo), getting your ad to the top can be expensive, with some particularly competitive phrases costing upwards of $20 per click.
If you want to be a little more conservative with your spending on PPC ads, then it is crucial to learn how to target long tail keywords and phrases and to target only those searching with an intention to buy. For example, it would cost a fortune to be the top ad for the search terms “buy a car” due to the huge volume of searches that such a term gets every day. But it would cost less to have your ad next to “buy a volkswagon passat car” and even less next to “where to buy 2018 volkswagon passat car uk” – which would actually be a better and more relevant term for a UK car dealership as well – creating stronger leads and improving ROI.
You need both in 2021
The reality is that to launch a new website in 2021 you really need a mixture of both organic SEO and paid ads. Organic SEO should mean that your website will rank for your brand name relatively quickly, so those already searching for you will find your website with ease. However, due to the slow and gradual nature of organic SEO, if you want to launch with a bang then you also need a budget to spend on PPC ads to target potential customers that are searching for terms relevant to your business or even searching for a competitor’s website.
Photograph by Lalmch