Is Your Website Useless?

Further to the story in the Gazette, it is estimated that by 2011 Internet advertising will become the largest ad medium, at nearly $63 BILLION. Yes, Billion! Compare that to just $16.9 billion for the full year of 2006 or $7.134 billion in 2001. (Industry Survey Conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB))

This is "a watershed moment" in the media business. Newspapers as well as electronic media are scrambling to incorporate and monetize their online presence. The marketing landscape is in upheaval and quickly changing.

What does this mean for the advertiser using traditional media? Simply put, if the Internet is not part of your advertising arsenal, you are losing business to those who are aggressively using online marketing to promote their goods and services.

I say "aggressively" because if you believe as many website owners do, that "if you build it they will come," you are quite mistaken. Check these numbers. Here's what the Internet universe looks like:

As of 2006 figures, there are approximately 100 MILLION WEBSITES serving up somewhere between 15 and 30 BILLION web pages and it is estimated that over 30,000 web pages go up every single day.

So where is your website ranked within its niche and is it useful to your visitors?

Well here's the sad truth. Unless you are ranked on the first or at least the second page of any given search engine, your website is virtually invisible. Yes, you may have spent thousands of dollars on your not-so-search engine-friendly flash driven website - but nobody knows you exist.

For a primer on how to tell the level of your online competition and where you rank on the Internet (Google as example) - click on this image.









You will see that the global search term “women’s fashion” has 15,300,000 web pages that are vying for top ranking position on that keyword search.


A little closer to home, if you click on this image, you will see that a local search query for the keyword phrase “montreal advertising” lists 7,850,000 web pages hoping to place on the first page of Google. Look further down and you will notice that our advertising agency, Noasound, is actually the first listed agency on the page. The others are industry related.








How can you get noticed?

You now have two choices.

1. You can advertise your web site offline and online

and/or

2. You can have your site professionally optimized so that you rank on the first page of the search engines for the keyword search terms that are most related to your business.

I mention above, “and/or” as an option. This is to say that even if you rank on the first page of Google, you should still use offline media to direct people to your site. I advise my clients who have first page ranking, to do exactly this. It gives them an opportunity to do what no other advertising medium does quite as well as the Internet. For example, when you direct a primed radio listener or newspaper reader to your site:

1. You welcome a receptive visitor and prospective client who will respond much better to the sales copy on your web pages.

2. You can show and sell using video clips as mini infomercials.

3. You can actually make a solid connection and build a long-term relationship with your visitor. Using powerful promotions to capture their email address you can build a list of eager buyers that you can sell to over and over again!

To find out more about harnessing the Internet, take a moment to give us a call at: 514 696-9443 or write us.