SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Too often, I deal with prospective clients who are looking to optimize their site and rank in the top 10. While this is a worthwhile goal, I emphasize to clients that it is important to consider marketing strategy as a whole and not in a vacuum.

I refer to this as looking from the perspective of a bird. From the bird’s eye point of view, it can see everything happening around it below. Few activities conducted below escape its attention. This is how you must approach your marketing as well. You must consider how each activity complements the overall strategy of what you wish to achieve – a sale.

In a recent study done between November and December 2005 by ComScore, they found that more than half of the consumers’ online holiday buying actually occured in subsequent internet sessions and not during the first visit.

What does this mean to you?

Being number one means little if they don’t come back. They may shop at ten different stores and yours doesn’t stand out from the crowd. This can be through a memorable domain name, searching/browsing experience, user-friendliness, etc. It also means that your site better be easy to navigate. Visitors must be able to find what they are looking for and not have to hunt high and low for the item they are interested in. Remember, it is as easy as a click away from your site.

What follow-up system do you have? Knowing that more visitors don’t buy the first time around, what do you do to make them come back? What incentives do you offer?

You’ll notice that I give no direct answers. Rather than give you answers, I like to “draw-out” the answers. By pondering on these ideas, you should develop a more comprehensive strategy to combat the information overload many of your visitors face.

Here are collection of ideas to consider:

I can guarantee that if you put at least one of these ideas in action, you’ll see great results. When you do, feel free to let me know.

“If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it”

This is so true in marketing whether offline or online. Web analytics plays a major role in determining the success of any search engine marketing campaign.

Measuring the effectiveness of your search marketing helps you improve on your current performance and also helps to identify the online marketing activities that aren’t working so you can discontinue that campaign.

Many web hosting provides already include basic web analytics which provides some simple data on what users are doing to arrive on your site and what they are doing once they arrive there. If you run PPC campaigns, Google, Yahoo, and MSN provide statistics that can aid in your process of refining search marketing results.

Many webmasters, however, do not use it or use it incorrectly. Part of the reason stems from a lack of understanding and what to look for – especially if they invested in web analytics packages like Urchin, Clicktracks or WebTrends. These packages come with many bells and whistles and an experienced webmaster can be easily overwhelmed with the amount of data that can be collected.

To understand what you should be looking for, think key performance indicators. Every web business is different. And if you’re using free web analytical tools, it’s likely you’ll need to invest in professional tracking programs to get the data you want. To establish what those are specifically for you, consider these questions:

With web analytics, you can profile user behaviors that can enable you to also offer complementary products that would go well with their current selections. Amazon.com is an example shopping engine that does well at this.

Of course, if you’d prefer not look at the numbers, you can always have a search engine marketing expert take care of it for you. Success is measured differently for people. Your important metrics should be discussed along with your search marketing expert so you know that it is exactly the right metrics you want.

As a business consultant, I’ve observed business owners who believe that more business will come from the internet space. While this is partially true for small businesses (especially those in local business) who have not tapped the online market, it is still important to remember that any business (whether based in cyberspace or in the brick and mortar world) can benefit from offline marketing. Many internet marketers such as myself, have used offline marketing like direct mail and print advertising with great success. Even with the growth of search engine marketing, do realize that some people are still not able to use computers and would still be potential candidates of our products and services. This is especially true of the older and less educated people out there who wouldn’t know how to use the internet. With the mad goldrush like behavior of businesses throwing more of their budget on online advertising, a business should still consider offline avenues to boost their profits. Considering that their competitors have shifted gears to online advertising, this could give them the added competitive edge offline while still keeping their watchful eye on online marketing developments. Google has realized this and is exploring this avenue of growth as you’ll read below.

Already a giant in online advertising, Google is quietly testing the waters of offline advertising. It is buying ad pages in established technology magazines and offering it piecemeal to its Adwords advertisers.

If this proves to be successful, Google can start to tout itself as the one-stop advertising solution – both online and offline. This certainly has caught the traditional offline advertising business by surprise as many businesses outsource such ads to large advertising agencies and let them take care of it. This would be good news for advertisers as the cost of advertising in such magazines could fall and be more reasonable to advertise in than at present.

More on the story here.