junior year

There’s really one online field that still separates established, large online retail players from mom and pop offline stores that decide to move online and give it a shot.  The thing that small players on the Internet don’t understand, at least at first, is once they put up a website, how do they get people to come to it and buy products?  Some of these businesses think that offline advertising is the way to get people to their website.  Maybe they try dropping online coupons into their customers’ checkouts at their physical store.  However, what they don’t understand is that they’re passing up the best aspect of the Internet—the ability of marketing products to people at the exact moment that the people are searching to buy the product.  For this reason, mom and pop stores lack behind major ecommerce retailers until they realize or hear about a certain industry:  search engine optimization and search engine marketing.  These parallel services are ways of increasing the ROI of online investments by helping potential customers arrive at an online retailer’s website, ready to be sold on a product.  SEO management has become a popular service industry, because people who are good at it have a very specific competitive advantage over other retailers.  Hence, while it may be expensive to pay for such help from a consultancy, it often makes sense over the long term as an investment in your own business.  Similarly, PPC management looks after pay per click marketing in search engines and improves the ROI of online advertising campaigns.  Again, these are expenses that most offline companies have never had to deal with and may not understand at first, but they won’t make too much money without having these services performed, whether in house or through consultants.