Sending you customers from one town, some towns or every town
Good Internet placement requires constant attention. What works well today might start trailing off in just a few days. New competitors come online, old competitors change their strategies/tactics, and the search sites are always changing the rules of the game. They don't want people to "beat the system".
SEM
Search Engine Marketing is our primary focus. This is the quickest way to get in front of more customers. We also think it is the most cost effective, but more on that later.
SEM is paid advertising on the various search sites. Usually this is set up as pay per click or cost per click advertising. You bid on the key words and/or key phrases that you believe your customers are likely to use when conducting searches on the Internet.
It is a great concept and it really can be effective at bringing traffic to your site. The trick is to make it cost effective and actually bring you customers. The cold, hard facts are this...each day more and more of your competitors are starting to bid on the same keys that you are. This creates an environment where the common keys start to get over priced.
We use two basic strategies that make Internet advertising more efficient than ever for most companies:
- We find the uncommon terms and longer search strings that your competition is less likely to bid on. This allows you to bid very low AND have your ads run with fewer competitors surrounding them.
- We write damned fine ads. We don't want people clicking on your ads out of curiosity. We want you to spend your ad dollars on the people that are going to contact you. 1000 clicks won't do you any good if they don't turn into customers. We write the ads that convert clicks into customers for your business.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the strategy to get your website placed as high as possible in the "free" search results (also referred to as organic results). It's a noble cause and the price sounds right. Hey, Free is for me!
While you don't pay the search engines for this placement, there is most definitely a cost associated with SEO. SEO requires constant maintenance of your site as well as your site's web foot print. Sites that link to yours are important in this equation as are the sites that you link to. Your site has to be configured to the rules and algorithms of each of the different search engines... AND to top it off those rules are always changing so you need to always be changing your site to keep up.
Yes, we should all strive for the best possible search placement. But it requires constant maintenance. Never less than once a month and preferably at least once a week if not daily. This is why we say SEM is the more cost effective approach overall. SEO requires considerable labor and time. Most smaller companies do not have the resources available for this to be handled properly.
Website Development
Putting up new websites for companies is one of those things that is a double edged sword for us. It's pretty fun to do, but it's tough to make money at it. The truth of the matter is a good, text based (read basic) website with good information and easy navigation is all that 85% of the businesses out there need (kind of like ours, eh?). The cool thing is that we can do that for people pretty cheap...the bad news is that many people want the flashiest, sizzlingist (is that a word?) site available to show off to their friends and competitors.
Please reference the section above on SEO...a basic, text based website is the quickest and most effective way to enhance your presence on search engines. Search engine spiders and bots can't read flash animations or much of the customized scripting used in high end websites. Don't get me wrong, I like fancy sites. It's good to put those addresses on your business cards or in your yellow pages ad or wherever else that people might see it to type it in. Consider having a second site that is text based for SEO and SEM purposes if you just gotta have that fancy, high dollar site...or let us know if you want a fancy site pretty cheap too. We might be able to help you out there.
Online Directories
If you've read this far I guess you've earned the closest thing we have to a secret (for now). The best bang for the buck on the Internet are the different local directories and Internet Yellow pages. Unfortunately, they are also the worst bang for the buck.
Each of these sites operates under their own systems and rules which much of the time completely contradict each other as well as the search engine rules. Most of them offer a high percentage of potential customers but with a significantly lower volume of searches compared to search engines.
They also usually have almost no flexibility compared to search engines. If you zig when you should have zagged you might be tied to a steep monthly expense for a year or more. We know these sites very well. Use our expertise...you'll congratulate yourself down the road for making such a wise business decision.
-KL
Kevin's Perspective (for what it's worth)
Valid questions. The reality is that smaller, localized companies are the ones that offer the most long term potential for Internet advertising.
Most of them can't afford to hire a dedicated person to do this work for them and it really is more work than somebody can handle with an extra hour here or there.
The search sites are ALL focusing on how to best care for the local markets. The facts are that consumers are looking for local companies more than they are looking for a big nationwide company.
We might be a bit ahead of the curve offering true Interactive Agency services to businesses like yours...but within five years it will be pretty standard stuff (we think).
Just think, someday you'll be able to say "I remember Breakaway Search when they were nobodies". Personally, I can say that about Google. I remember when it was a neat little tool that allowed me to search through archived Bulletin Board postings...I'm guessing most of you don't even know what an Internet Bulletin Board was?
Well, the short story is that Google came out of nowhere not even ten years ago and look at them now. I'm not saying we are the next Google. I'm just trying to paint the picture of how fast things to change in the Internet universe.
Gotta stay one step ahead...
-KL
