CReATION: Combine SEO with banners for a bigger bang for your buck

The past two months' activity in the MEDIA letters section seem to

show that Asian marketing professionals are starting to see the

incredible potential of search engine optimisations (SEO) for their

online promotional campaigns.

I think that Gerald Alleva from OBI and Eddie Ngan from TWC have done a

fine job of explaining the benefits of SEO, but there are a couple of

areas that we have found to be very important from our experiences, that

I would like to add to the forum (MEDIA, July 7 and August 4)

We all agree that search engines are important promotional tools and

sources of information.

In fact, Jupiter Communications reports that more than 70 per cent of

the Internet population finds new websites via search engines, while the

industry average banner click through rate is just 0.36 per cent

(Neilsen/Netratings, April 3, 2000).

At SubmitAsia, we have found that by combining these two tools -

keyword-driven banners, and optimised search engine submissions - the

results can be incredible.

In a recent regional campaign for Hewlett-Packard, working together with

Blue Sphere Interactive and iPlanners, we saw daily click-through rates

of up to seven per cent.

This reinforces our belief that the various online marketing tools,

including SEO, work best when integrated strategically.

The second important point to consider is "knowing the

neighbourhood".

Mr Alleva mentioned in his letter the complexity of understanding how

each search engine works and indexes the Web.

Even more important we believe is a firm understanding of the

positioning and strengths of each search engine in the local

markets.

Submitting to Yahoo is a no-brainer, but if you are targeting an

IT-specific audience in Taiwan, you need to decide which local sites can

provide enough return to justify spending the time/money on a SEO

campaign, and that doesn't always mean Yahoo, in the same way that a

publication like Computerworld may not be the best choice for some of

our B2C clients like Discovery Channel.

Each search engine has its appropriate audience and advertisers.

Knowing that audience, and being able to submit, optimise and track in

the market's local language is vital.

The globalisation of the Internet should not be ignored; more than 49

per cent of the Internet is now "non-English", (GlobalReach, June 2000)

and more than 30 per cent of ecommerce sales on US sites comes from

international customers.

If you are not attracting and servicing those customers in their

preferred manner, they will click on another link to someone who

will.

Yes, SEO is a complex process, but no more so than developing an

intelligent media plan, or a well-crafted PR campaign.

Much like these more established practices, we believe SEO will come to

be appreciated in the same way.

I know that our agency clients (and their clients) already value the

increased awareness that a quality local SEO effort brings to a

campaign.