During a client meeting today, I was suprised when one of our more ‘technical savvy’ clients said they didn’t know what SEO (search engine optimisation) was. Maybe when you become so engrossed in the minor details of a skill like SEO, and speak daily to 100’s of experts worldwide, it is easy to forget that the vast majority of people simply haven’t heard of search engine optimisation. More importantly perhaps, is that they don’t know the potential benefits!
So I talked more with the client, and discovered that they had a website which was getting direct traffic, only from people that knew of the company (as such they were averaging around 1-2 hits per day). I explained proper keyword analysis and optimisation, and the difference in traffic between being ranked in the top 3 and being on the second page of Google SERPs for these keywords. At this point their interest in the subject had increased, but they still didn’t fully see the advantage to additional traffic. This is because they currently didn’t get any business through their website, and had it simply because they felt they needed to because they were a professional company. This then lead to a much more interesting conversation around developing an online strategy for their business, but at the end of the meeting I realised I assume a certain level of knowledge for most clients which they don’t have. Don’t get me wrong, these guys are super intelligent in their own field but just haven’t been exposed to SEO and online marketing before.
After the meeting they talked briefly about marketing budgets and possibly replacing traditional methods with online marketing based on it’s effectiveness. Some people may find this surprising, but I actually completely disagreed with this approach. Online marketing shouldn’t replace traditional methods, in fact, it should compliment it. Online marketing can be much more cost effective and is very easy to measure it’s effectiveness and ROI, and during difficult times like a recession, a lot more people have been choosing it invest in it. However, it should play a large part of your overall marketing strategy. I would not recommend using only traditional online or traditional marketing techniques on their own, because you will be using an incomplete strategy.
