Google is THE advertising channel in the near and forseeable future. If your marketing plan doesn’t include Google optimization at this point, then you’re probably still hoping Betamax wins, you still buy cassettes for your Walkman, and your roller skates have four wheels — not in a row.
I recently attended the Web & Interactive Design Summit 2009 at the Harvard Medical Conference Center. Honestly, I was on the fence about going because they were mainly talking about how to use the new CS4 suite to design web sites, and I have a pretty good handle on that (although seeing the new CS4 features was kinda cool). But what impressed me most was Sandra Niehaus from Closed Loop Marketing’s presentations on Web Strategy in Search Dominated Environments.
Sandra’s first slide titled, “Opt out of the recession” says it all. The media landscape is no longer like the fertile fields of 1960’s TV where you had a huge captive demographic on one of 3 major networks. It is now so fragmented across TV, radio, outdoor, and social marketplaces (to name a few) that you can’t guarantee viewership of your marketing message. Technology has allowed your message to be muted, skipped, or just distracted from. But one channel that is growing is online usage, and if you want to be found online, then you better be speaking Google’s language.
Basically, you need your code to be Google-friendly, you need your content to be Google-friendly, and you need other web sites to link to your site. Of course, getting found is just the first step. I’ll speak about converting leads into customers in my next post!