Brad Halcrow

Search Engine Marketing. PLEASE do your research.

Some of you may already be aware that less people are looking to traditional directories for businesses in their immediate area. So where do they look? You guessed it, they ‘Google it’. Local Search is becoming increasingly popular. Let’s face it, how many enquiries have you had through the Yellow Pages lately? How much are you spending with them?

• Of 2,866 people surveyed, 70% had used the Internet to search for a local business such as ‘accountant’.
• 49% used a regional term (eg: “accountant in Ashgrove”) Source: Greg Sterling of Search Engine Watch.

Recently I embarked on a campaign to a) attract more customers for Neurovision and b) find a reliable search engine expert I’d be happy to for my own clients.

Unfortunately I didn’t find the right company right away. As the saying goes, I learnt the hard way. One particular company, a big player in the industry, were, what I thought, ‘efficient’. I mistook a simple ‘Sign up and we’ll get you visitors’ for ‘Give us your money and we’ll catch you later’.

I soon realised when 2 weeks had gone by and I hadn’t heard from them, nor had I heard from any prospective customers either.

I did more research. Armed with more information, I gave them a call. It was the single most buck-passing, lack-lustre attitude you could possibly hope to encounter. The more I learnt the more I realised their practises were not so much lazy, as downright dodgy.

Luckily, I soon found Gary from Small Business Internet Marketing, an accredited Adwords Qualified Professional. The difference was immediately obvious, as have been the results.

Company A = 17 visitors in 2 weeks, SBIM = 3 visitors in 3 hours.

The comparison

The first company had a can-do, good old fashioned ’sales guy’ attitude. I asked him if they could help optimise my landing pages, he said their CEO would contact me to help with that – Great! By the time he asked me to ‘reach for the plastic’ I did so.

Gary instead, insisted we meet. He explained everything to me. I realised just how much there is to know and why it’s important to hire a specialist (not just your local web guy who ‘can do it all’.

Gary is also an accredited Business Consultant. He asked to meet again to run through a 2 hour process to help me better understand my business and therefore an effective marketing strategy. Which we did. Note: I still haven’t paid Gary a cent at this time.

If you’re serious about generating enquiries through your website, Hit Reply and we can get the ball rolling. You’d be amazed just how cost effective it really is.

How Twitter flattened the playing field.

In a day when it was only true blue computer geeks who were able to build a website it was only they or those who could afford to pay them to publish content. For the average schmo to contribute anything to the interweb could be likened to scaling a cliff. Not many people had the gear or the knowledge. Along came blogging and web 2. With free services such as Wordpress & Blogger anyone is able to publish. Here, the ability to contribute exists using comments but the publisher is still King of his domain. Enter Twitter. Completely flattening the publishing playing field Twitter’s effortless publishing platform enabled everyone to share the podium. Follow or unFollow whoever you like. All posts created equal. Good content, Bad content. That’s the decider. Immediate, real-time conversation. No waiting for people to write a post, to upload, for Google to find it, for us to find out about it so we know to search for it…

Jay leno – Merc 6.3L AMG SLS