SEO in Hertfordshire

Search engine optimisation versus traditional style advertising for the small business.
Directories are dead?

I'm not saying Yellow Pages and other telephone directories are completely dead but "when was the last time you used one" is a phrase i never stop hearing. As well as this Yell.com itself and the other Internet directories don't seem to be much better.

Monitored numbers expose the truth

Based on our own client's experience. With a monitored telephone number and a stringently monitored answering service (where every call is logged by an operator) out of approximately 200 telephone calls last month only eight of them were actual enquiries. The rest of them were sales calls, he actually got over 15 calls in one month from the same people trying to sell a local magazine and another a lot of people trying to push a policeman's diary or fireman's diary advertisement.

The past is... well... past

When you look at it,The traditional choices to the small business were, in the past, few and far between. You really only had newspapers, leaflets, Yellow Pages and Thompson's and perhaps if you were adventurous a little bit of cinema, outdoor and (if you were being ripped off) the old post office counter rubbish.

Everybody is talking about how much of a hard time newspapers (especially the local ones) are having, Now is it because people don't read them any more? or is it because you can see what you get from the Internet in terms of response? Because with newspapers it really was just a punt in the dark.
To a properly designed website with good search engine optimisation and inbuilt analytics, there is literally no comparison.
Come to think of it, were leaflets any better? You know you got an upsurge in telephone calls to 3 days after you delivered them but in real terms how much did it cost per telephone call?

Before the internet Advertisers NEVER monitored

In my experience of the 20 years of dealing with the small businessman I have often found that they were just so happy to get phone calls they never really gauged the cost of each individual one. Think of it this way... If you are walking down the high street with a chunk of money to invest you wouldn't just blindly put it into the bank that had the nicest looking cashier, you would put it into the bank that paid the best interest rate.

However every day people used to do this with their advertising cash, they would give it to the newspaper because they sent a girl with a short skirt on week in week out to build up a relationship. The guy from the Yellow Pages, Thompson or other yearly products only had one chance per year to build up rapport and then do the deal.

Clicks are NOT sales

When the Internet first came along with people became obsessed by the fact that they could see the response in the form of clicks to their website, at the beginning this was enough because they really couldn't see response from anywhere else. I lost count of the customers who thought getting lots of clicks was the way forward but had absolutely no clue what sort of clicks these were and whether they're turning in to business in any way.

Conversions are King

It took people pay few years before they realised clicks didn't actually mean anything, it was conversions that counted. But how do you track these? Talking to most small business people about Google analytics, or putting other analytical processes on their website is like talking to a toddler about the benefits of quantum mechanics in the modern age.

I suppose that is why we get paid.