Internet marketing is a comprehensive marketing campaign and usually involves paid clicks (PPC). SEO can work great as an online marketing strategy but the two are not the same. Usually you need to pay in order to run an internet marketing campaign. For search engine organic results you don’t have to pay a thing (assuming the optimization work has been done).

Small business owners are confused about this issue. They think they need to pay in order to rank high on Google search results. But most of them can have some qualified traffic to their website without running an Internet Marketing campaign and this is all about optimizing their website to be properly indexed by search engines. A couple of good trusted links will do a good job in allowing the search engines “know” that a website is important.

Can Internet marketing do much more than SEO? Yes it can, but it also costs money. Most small business owners do not have big budgets for advertising and don’t know enough about online marketing to trust it. This doesn’t mean they cannot have qualified traffic to their website.

To conclude, SEO brings free traffic to your website, Online Marketing brings paid traffic to your website.

According to Wikipedia, usability means the ease with which people can employ a particular tool (a website in our case) in order to achieve a particular goal (a call to action in our case).

After many years of using Google Analytics to research how visitors browse websites, I can say that website design and usability is as important as the marketing campaign itself because it greatly affects the number of conversions (successful sales).

The following are some common usability tips that will affect any Internet Marketing campaign.

Do not assume that visitors will get to your site and they will know what you do or what you sell. They don’t. Your landing page has to be as clear as possible stating what your business is about and have a clear call to action. If you do business in Raleigh for example, mention Raleigh somewhere. Potential clients tend to trust local companies more.

Once visitors are interested and they decide to stay on your site, the navigation comes into play. Keep it simple and easy to use to help visitors determine what to do next. Identifying what section of the site they are in, helps guide visitors where they can go next. Most of the potential clients or buyers will want to browse a bit more before making a decision.

Remember, keeping the visitors on the site and guiding them to the call to action is extremely important. Do not bug visitors with unnecessary information hoping they they will remember it and eventually return. They really need a good reason to do that – some kind of special offer, to catch their attention.

Try and keep the contact forms as simple as possible. People do not like to give loads of personal information on the internet. Ask yourself if the information you’re asking for is so important that you’re willing to lose a customer.

Internet Marketing and good rankings are important, but these don’t mean much if you’re turning visitors away as soon as they click on your website. Does your website send the message you intended to send out? Do users enjoy browsing your site? These are the questions you need to ask yourself before starting an Internet Marketing campaign.

More than that, businesses that never had big budgets for advertising, start advertising online on Google and Yahoo for as low as $10 per day.

Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing can have a big impact on a small company online presence. But if you are looking for the best results, you need to know how to setup a PPC(Pay Per Click) campaign.

First, you need to consider the area you are targeting. If you are doing Air Conditioning and Heating in Raleigh area for example you want to show the ads only to people located in Raleigh area. You wouldn’t want to pay for online visitors from Charlotte, because you wouldn’t go there to fix their AC.

Then, you need to know how to select keywords properly so they will attract most of the potential buyers but in the same time exclude people who browse just for fun. For example if someone wants to advertise for Web Design in Durham you would want to exclude people who are looking for “free web design”, “free templates” or want to “learn about web design”.

One other thing is the quality of your content. You have to choose keywords that are significant for your content. This means that your website should be optimized for search engines. If you have an old website, that uses old technologies, it will be harder for search engines to properly categorize your website and your quality score will be lower. This means you will have to pay more for clicks.

Your ad content is very important also. You wouldn’t want to get lost, so using words that have a real impact is important. Your best price or a feature like “Free Inspection in Raleigh” would definitely attract visitors. Just be careful so the content of the ad is MATCHED by your website content.

Internet advertising and Pay Per Click is becoming a business by itself.

We only setup campaigns for clients that design or re-design their websites with us because it is a real hassle to do campaigns for websites not optimized for search engines. A small business needs potential clients and not Digg.com kind of traffic. The budgets can be as low as $10 per day and you will really attract clients.