Internet Marketing Challenges and Solutions for Businesses
The State of Internet Marketing.
One of the best and worst things about internet marketing is the speed with which it changes. Google changes its search algorithm between 500 and 600 times a year. That’s up to 1.64 changes per day! Only from Google. Add Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other sites around the world and the speed of change in this industry can be dizzying. And there are no signs that it will slow down anytime soon.
Where is your business today?
Today, everyone and his brother-in-law are online. Your business with one or more physical locations and all the rent, staff, insurance, inventory, and other overhead that goes into it competes with a guy in a home office who sells products he doesn’t even stock himself. But he has a great website. He works at it every day to make sure that people searching for his products and services find him and outsell you two to one because he has little overhead and can keep his prices ridiculously low.
The competition is greater
For every search, there are millions or billions of web pages. For example, I just typed “shoes” into Google and got 1.65 BILLION results in 0.15 seconds. Not that anyone is going to look at 1.65 billion web pages. Most people don’t look beyond the first 10 on the first page. In reality, most people probably won’t look beyond the first 3-5 results before revising their search terms if they don’t find what they’re looking for right away.
Search engines are smarter
And search engines keep getting smarter. Remember those 600 changes a year Google makes to its algorithm? There is a reason for that. google knows have to deliver the most relevant results possible to your users if it is to remain the search standard that it has become. He knows that Bing (or some newcomer) would like nothing more than to knock him off his throne if he doesn’t deliver the best results possible. Therefore, it changes its algorithm 1.64 times a day to ensure that it indexes and returns the most relevant results every day. This may seem like a nightmare for internet marketers trying to help their customers stay at the top of the first page of results, but it’s all for the good of the searcher, and we’re all searchers.
The times they Are a changing
Gone are the days where you could repeat your value keywords 50 times on a page to get them highly indexed by the search engine of the day. Search engines are much smarter today. Gone are the days when you could buy links from link farms to make it look like your website was more popular than it really is. Gone are the days when you could just put up your website and let it sit on the shelf and become as dusty as those old printed catalogs on a shelf in your warehouse.