Internet Marketing in West Yorkshire

The options for marketing these days are vast. When it comes to internet marketing, it’s important for businesses to be aware of the avenues that will best suit their individual needs. For businesses in West Yorkshire, competing not only with London businesses, but with Manchester in the North-West and Nottingham and Sheffield in the South, getting to grips with the internet and developing a powerful marketing plan is simply essential.

Internet marketing doesn’t stop at web design

Many businesses still have the belief that a website is enough. While a website is important, it’s only the first step to having a real presence on the web. Without further measures, such as search engine optimisation, the web design simply functions as an expensive online business card – one that most of a business’ target market doesn’t know is there.

Search engine optimisation works by building up a site’s reputation around the net. This means companies not only appear higher in the list for searches on their keywords, but they’ve got a better chance of being noticed generally as well.

Locality is one aspect that many businesses fail to maximise on in SEO, and in West Yorkshire this can be a serious error. The industrial strength of Leeds has long drawn people to West Yorkshire, and these days major companies such as Asda and Morrisons make the area their home. There are plenty of reasons for people to do business locally, but before that can happen, people need to know that a business exists. Local search engine optimization achieves this by increasing the presence of a company in local directories and also in the results for searches that use local keywords. Business owners can talk to us at Engage Web about this aspect of SEO.

Combining SEO and PPC

Pay per click is another powerful marketing tool that West Yorkshire businesses are using to establish themselves on the net. To make PPC efforts even more powerful, it can be a good idea to work this form of advertising into an existing optimisation campaign. By combining the two, companies can double their presence in the search engine results pages. Pay per click can also be a great way of cheaply testing the effectiveness of a keyword list before launching an optimisation campaign.

In a stand-alone effort, pay per click advertising is a great short term marketing idea. It’s an efficient way to draw traffic to a site in a swift push. This can be particularly useful for seasonal periods, or when businesses are marketing a special local event.

Why a website is so important

There are many techniques to explore with internet marketing, but these paths should always lead back to the business website. The site is the online home of the company, the place its customers can turn to. What this means, though, is that if the website isn’t well-designed and well-maintained, the business is lost.

It’s for this reason that content should form part of a marketing plan. Content is a cost-effective way of establishing an online presence and a great way for a business to link back to its locality. Company owners can talk to their marketer about adding it to an existing plan.