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These days, almost everyone that has any kind of online presence has at least heard of SEO and a lot of people will now be actively trying to promote their business using these techniques. Sure, SEO is an extremely important part of modern day internet marketing but in some cases, the online marketing world has got a bit sidetracked when it comes to SEO. There are businesses piling their marketing budget into SEO every month, in the hope that customers will start finding their website through the search engines. Sure, customers are looking for your business on the search engines but the truth is, customers are looking elsewhere as well.
There are some businesses where SEO might not even be a good solution. If you are operating within a very specific niche for example, or if your business operates in a little known industry doing something quite unique, SEO might be pointless as search volumes are likely to be low or non-existent.
The good news is that there are a lot of alternatives to SEO that might be worth exploring. It is possible that they could offer a more cost effective solution to your marketing woes.
Google AdWords
Ok, so you have all probably have heard of this option but I thought it would be best to mention it as it is still an extremely important marketing option in the online marketing world. Google AdWords essentially allows you to have all of the benefits of an SEO campaign instantly. Yes, you will be able to appear at the top of Google for your desired keywords within minutes, but there’s a catch. Every time someone clicks on your ad, you will have to pay Google a certain fee.
These fees vary depending on competition, keywords and search volume and can usually range from just a few cents, to over $20 per click easily. The good thing about Google AdWords is that you only have to pay Google anything when someone actually clicks on your ad and visits your website (aka. you get a targeted website visitor).
Google AdWords is used by millions of businesses around the world and can be an excellent online marketing solution.
Facebook and Twitter
Social media (Facebook and Twitter in particular) offer an excellent way to get your business noticed by the world. Think about it, there are hundreds of millions of daily visitors to these websites from all over the world, so you can be sure that your target market is using these platforms. A good social media presence is quite hard to achieve and it certainly takes a lot of building but once you have it, it is extremely valuable.
The good thing about social media is that it allows you to communicate directly with your customers, something that a lot of other marketing methods do not allow. Even the big names around the world use social media these days in order to keep up their public relations with their customers. It doesn’t matter how large your business is, you need to be making use of social media and everything it has to offer.
YouTube
YouTube is actually the second largest search engine in the world, meaning that it has more daily searches than Bing or Yahoo (or any other search engine apart from Google). This offers a great opportunity for you and your business as you can now use extremely powerful video marketing to achieve success in the online world. Chances are that your target market is using YouTube and by creating a video that is targeted towards them, you can actually get your businesses message out there.
The good thing about YouTube is that you can create and upload a video for free, so long as you have basic video equipment or a camera enabled Smartphone. Of course, you can spend your marketing budget on a professional video production too if you like, which might offer better results in the long run.
Email Marketing
One of the marketing methods that often gets overlooked these days is email marketing. Email marketing is used by many of the largest companies in the world and it remains one of the most effective forms of online marketing. By building an email opt-in list on your website, you will be able to obtain the email addresses of people that are actually interested in what you have to say. How do you know this? They’ve opted in to hear what you have to say voluntarily.
This gives you a huge opportunity, you can now tell them about anything you like. It could be a new piece of content on your blog, it could be a special offer that you’re currently running. Anything you have that you think they might want to hear will be great for them and it can be a great way to increase your revenue.
Offline Promotion
People tend to be so focussed on SEO these days that they have forgotten about the offline world. Remember, the people that you are trying to attract to your business with SEO and other online promotion methods actually exist in the offline world too.
Use billboards, newspaper ads, radio advertising, TV advertising, word of mouth, anything to get the word out there about your business.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are plenty of other marketing methods other than SEO, both online and offline. Now, the strange thing is that although you might have looked at those methods outlined in this article as SEO alternatives, the truth is that they are actually inadvertently a huge part of SEO.
For example, if you are promoting your business on Twitter and Facebook, you are actually going to gain a following of people interested in your business and they might share your website with friends, or link to your website from theirs. If you’re promoting your business offline, a local online newspaper might pick up the story and link to you from their website. SEO isn’t just about manual link building these days.
