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Online Marketing 2 Workshop - what happened on the night

This workshop continued looking at ways to help a company increase its online presence. Provided by Storm Consultancy's Dave Kelly and Steve Thorne, we discovered the difference between paid and organic searches.

Dave kicked things off by looking at organic searches: the main listings that appear in a search engine like Google. To determine how near the top of a search listing your website is, Google uses factors such as quality of content, website structure and how many people link to your site.

The key message from this section was the importance of generating frequent, quality copy mentioning the keywords you wish your site to be found under. This does take time and effort, but will also encourage visitors to interact with you, further improving your 'search rating'.

Following this, Dave used a '10 second test' to underline the importance of appropriate website design and content in helping retain people who do visit your site. Using volunteers from the audience, he looked at their websites for only 10 seconds each, in order to see how effective they were at conveying what service they provided. This led to lots of great tips and questions from the audience, whilst really showing how quickly people can dismiss a website if they can't see the information they want straight away.

After a quick break for a coffee and a bit of networking, we were introduced to paid searches; basically all the adverts that appear at the top and side of Google. Both Dave and Steve stressed how easy it is to waste money on this type of advertising if it's not approached with care. In order to understand the best keywords and demographic to target with your advert, you need to invest time and money in experimenting with and analysing the best ways to place your ad, or pay someone to do it for you!

Dave finished up the workshop with a demo of just how easy it is to set up an advert using Google Adwords, including ways to track and analyse the advert's performance.

All in all, a very interesting session with a complex answer on which searching method is best. It all depends on the time and money you have to spend, but I think we can all agree that we are now more informed about how to make this decision.

I hear that Dave and Steve provided further advice and insights in exchange for a few drinks at the bar afterwards, so I hope this session proved useful to those who attended.

We've attached a copy of the slides for Organic Search and Paid Searchif you want to investigate what happened in more detail, and if you have any feedback on this session or would like to get some similar events in the future, please drop an email to info@creativebath.org.

Posted by:

Cedric Sureshkumar

Sector:

Advertising