Whether your company provides a local product or service, or your have an international market, a search engine marketing strategy should be playing an important role in your overall marketing campaign. As the internet grows it is ever increasingly important to be found through any one of the major search engines with search engine marketing. There are millions of websites in the UK alone, and each of these has many pages. Google currently indexes over 8 billion web pages and with Yahoo! and MSN close on their heels, they are all under pressure to index further. This gives us some idea of how important it is to implement a search engine marketing strategy as comprehensively as possible.

Sliced have focussed on organic search engine marketing as a means of achieving good search engine placement. We only use 'pay for click' advertising when asked by clients, however we do get new business straight from web searches by ranking highly in our keyword choice. The ideal time to consider your search engine marketing is before you embark on a new website design, although we appreciate that this is of course not always possible. Research into keywords and searches is vital to succeed with your search engine marketing strategy.

Because many areas should be considered with your search engine marketing (right down to the coding on your site), if you do have an existing web site, there may be structural changes to be made, and almost certainly content changes required.

Statistics of existing visitor flow are essential (for existing websites) in order to gauge improvements, Sliced recommend consulting your provider for these before beginning on your search engine marketing. There are also many powerful third party tools available for advanced statistical analysis, please contact us for more details.

If you are planning a new website your research and resource budget should include search engine marketing. If you are planning to optimise your website, several areas should be investigated before content creation, page structure and site mapping take place. Entry points should be examined and statistics should be assessed.

Ideally all content would be researched and optimised. Any keywords should also be researched and tested for SEO relevance. Often clients feel that they have the best understanding of what their customers may be looking for when searching for products, however this is not always the case in practice.