Everyone in the room must want to rank number one for “web hosting” but only one will get to be that, so you’d better get creative to get competitive.
Tailored to an increasingly competitive market, NVI co-founder and chief executive officer Guillaume Bouchard explored and evaluated various Internet marketing strategies in a very interesting Parallels Summit 2009 session, debunking search engine optimization and making it relevant for hosting companies to help increase traffic and sales.
This presentation was a crash course, covering SEO, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and affiliate marketing.
While some people recommend having just a handful of keywords that are highly targeted, Bouchard recommends using many keywords, and perhaps even looking for unusual ones. “If you’re not aware of new keywords, you may be missing opportunities,” he said.
As the cost of cost of clicks increases, marketers will have to become more savvy in their PPC campaigns to maintain a beneficial return on investment, finding relevant, cheap keywords.
Advantages include immediate results, great for site launches and event-driven campaigns, as well as being very useful for increasing visibility and profitability on a site not yet ranking.
It is not, however, without its drawbacks. Since 2004, PPC has become more expensive and fraud has become more rampant. The hosting industry, specifically is very expensive to launch a campaign.
“Define what your goals are before doing anything…Don’t do social just because your VP told you to,” Bouchard said.
One thing he recommended was creating ad groups by themes – in sometimes surprising ways. Trying something different can actually end up being helpful. He used the example of using something goofy like a Valentines Day or Easter promotion – which seems silly for web hosts, but they might be surprised with the results.
Also, if your company has people to write, getting into Google News is a great way to attract visitors as long as your site posts at least three times a day. Writing articles with good use of key words and links, he says, will pay off.
“If you need an example of how to interlink, look at Wikipedia,” he said.
Another thing service providers can do is develop a widget. For example, they can give a five percent discount for those who putting a “powered by…” widget in the corner of their website.
Bouchard left many attendees with many ideas about how they can use SEO and social media to attract customers and build their business.
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