In
today's staggering markets, with more fierce competition, besides traditional marketing tactics, on-line
marketing options such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click
(PPC) become viable solutions to reduce
costs as well as increase visibility. In high-tech industries like EDA and the semiconductor, with more dynamics comparing to other
industries, such as much shorter product cycles, more demanding customers, more
frequent changes on corporate websites content, and more complexity add-ons
for corporate websites are routine jobs. Hence, whether for well-established
companies or emerging startups, SEO and PPC shall play more significant roles
on customer acquisition and retention, and that demands the automation of SEO
and PPC work, to avoid error-prone manual process as well as reduce labor costs.
Hometown Innovation Automation Inc with its mission to power innovation
automation, markets a tool based on its vision on Serving Anyone with Any
service Anywhere Anytime in Anyway (A5), the tool is also named A5. Hometown
Innovation Automation Inc offers A5-based fully automatic SEO and PPC turnkey
services for you. Thanks to A5, through instant SEO and PPC automation service,
you could make your pull-based online marketing campaign truly reactive
Why Online
Marketing Matters?
Marketing is all
about precise targeting and maximum differentiation, whether on-line or
off-line, and there is a radical difference between on-line marketing and
off-line marketing. If you look at major aspects of
marketing for customer acquisition, retention and product/service
repositioning: on branding (whether for corporate band or product/service
brand), you could have packaging, advertising, direct mailing, trade show
promotions, public relationships, investor relations and government
relationships; and on customer care, you could have event management, customer
care, training and product education. For all of those marketing efforts, online
marketing may play a significant role on top of them. Online marketing efforts
could make you achieve success on generating new revenue streams, making
productivity gain as well delivering cost savings.
There are quite a
few ways to perform online marketing, to just name a few:
Among the above listed online marketing
tactics, both SEO and PPC have the biggest potential in achieving your online
marketing goal: a Forrest Research study shows that there are five popular
methods by which people locate a website and learn about companies at the
Internet 57% of people use search engines, 38% of people are based email
messages, 35% of people use 3rd party website links, 28% of people
are based on word-of-mouth, and 25% of people reply on magazine ads. Indeed SEO
and PPC are among the most popular online marketing techniques adopted widely
in any vertical industry
As two pre-dominate online marketing tactics, both SEO and PPC belong to
pull-based online marketing tactics for brand promotion, brand leveraging and
brand consolidation. The essence of SEO is traffic
optimization, not traffic maximization, with only one-time fixed costs and
minimum maintenance costs; and the essence of PPC is sales conversion
rate, in other words, click to sales ratio, with higher costs (not fixed) than SEO, yet with higher visibility.
SEO for Pull-based
Online Marketing
SEO is the process of
increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine for relevant words and phrases. The
higher a Web site ranks in the
results of a search, the greater the chance that that website will be visited by a user. SEO gets your
website ranked at top position in Search Engine without spending anything on clicking. Furthermore it is a common practice for Internet users to
not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in
a search engine is essential for directing more traffic toward the
site.
Optimization in SEO involves making web pages readable to search engines
and emphasizing key topics related to your web content, the
marketing message you want to prompt. Basic optimization in SEO may involve nothing more than
ensuring that the design and
maintenance of a website conforms
with SEO rules, thus avoid to make the website become part of the invisible website, which is not accessible through search engines. Optimization in advanced SEO may include significant assessment into every element of web page design, website
structure, keyword phrases, naming
conventions, and off-the-web-page
criteria, followed by significant SEO turning
based on above assessment. Keyword phrase research, as one of the most
important parts of SEO research, involves finding relevant keyword phrases for a particular topic that is to
be optimized, determining their popularity among major search engines, evaluating the competition, and deciding which ones should be selected to support quality SEO
Search
engines are considered a trustworthy source of information for
hundreds of millions of people all over the world, including the targeted
audience in your industry. People are inclined to accept the searched results they get for search
engines, when the
name of your company or product or service pops up at the top of the search results. The searchers see that as an
independent confirmation of the value of your web site. However, have your company or product or service listed in a
search engine is not enough, since it is highly unlikely for a user to go past the third page
of search results to locate a web site. To be honest, not many searchers even go past the very first page. This kind of searching behavior
pattern puts a great pressure on
a website to be placed as high as possible in leading search engines to maximize its online visibility.
The benefits of SEO are as follows, to name
a few:
That is why SEO is
the most economical way to promote your business, and its related
products and/or services online.
However, for large, complex and frequently changing
websites with many products and/or services to be promoted, manual SEO is also
error prone and labor intensive
PPC for Pull-based
Online Marketing
There are tow kinds of PPC, one is Search Engine based PPC (SEPPC), and the other is Contextual PPC (CPPC). SEPPC works as follows, basically, you the advertiser pay a rate you
specify for every visitor who clicks through from leading search engines such
as google and yahoo! to your website. SEPPC is
pretty simple and
straightforward: each unique keyword phrase
(e.g., digital camera) has its own bid price, and you set the budget. With a
ready website, an available SEPPC ad copy, and a valid payment method, you are on
your way to advertising on leading search engines in no time. SEPPC is in addition to their 'natural' search results, which are
still powered by a combination of keywords found on your site, link popularity
and other formulas. Two of most popular SEPPCs are google AdWords and yahoo! Overture. Now what makes CPPC different to SEPPC is that your ads do not appear on search engine result pages. Rather, they appear directly on pages of content found on websites. In effect, if you visit a website that has information about digital cameras, you may encounter contextual advertising of related products, such as memeory cards, camaera cases, zoom lenses, battery rechargers, etc. The most popular CPPC now is google AdSense
SEPPC is a great way to
get visitors for your website when
you need immediate traffic. However, SEPPC might be risky: You can spend a fortune, generate many
visits, and end up with nothing returned
(low or zero sales conversion rate). If you
place the highest bid for a specific keyword phrase or set of
keyword phrases, then you rank number one in these paid
listings.
Once someone clicks
on your SEPPC listing, he gets to your web site, actually at your specific web
page, which is called SEPPC landing page. And
you are charged the amount you bid. In this way SEPPC
can generate traffic right away. If you are willing to allocate enough budgets, you are guaranteed to get top placement, and your prospects
will see you first. If people are searching for the key phrases on
which you bid and you've placed a well-written SEPPC ad copy, you will get clicks momentarily once the SEPPC ads is activated. SEPPC
could be instant in
generating desired traffic, and SEPPC adjust is relatively faster than that of
SEO as well, that also provides unmatched capability to adept to market fluctuations. Indeed SEPPC is a targeted,
precision advertising tool
However, opportunities always come with risks, SEPPC might cost you a fortune. It's easy to get caught up in a bidding war
over a particular key phrase and end up with spending far
more than your potential return. Also, ROI can be very hard to measure. The biggest headache is junk traffic, where you spend your ads budgets without giving you any sales
conversion rate. Just as opposed to SEO, both SEPPC and CPPC do not scale well, you pay more
to get more traffic, regardless the sales conversion rate you get.
The benefits of SEPPC are as follows, to name
a few:
That is why PPC(both SEPPC and CPPC) is
the most efficient
and effective way to promote
your business, and
its related products and/or services online.
Similar to SEO, for large and complex websites with
many products and/or services to be promoted (hence more keyword phrases to bid
with), manual PPC management and turning is also error prone and labor
intensive
Under current more radical market dynamics,
more fierce competition, more demanding customers, how to make SEO (most
economical online marketing way) and PPC (most effective and efficient online
marketing way) as two of most popular pull-based online marketing tactics truly
reactive, both to prospects and to competitors? You have to have your SEO
and/or PPC being taken cared weekly (if not daily) instead of monthly in order
to achieve or maintain your established market leadership. Contrary to the
traditional wisdom of The More Haste, Less Speed, now it is The More
Speed, Less Haste