Real World Computing
Marketing the right way
My last two columns covered the first stages of creating a successful web application - the idea and the execution - but, of course, it's a complete waste of time creating an effective application based on an excellent idea unless it's actually used. The old chestnut "if you build it, they will come" wasn't even true back when goods and services were sold from bricks-and-mortar shops (which at least had some passing trade), and it's far less so for web applications whose customers only arrive at your site by active choice and very rarely by accident. This is where marketing comes in: it's the role of marketing to drive qualified traffic to your site.
There's an important point in those italics, one that I only learned the hard way. When I took over marketing Passyourtheory.co.uk, I focused on increasing the number of visitors, and it took quite a while before I grasped that this isn't the real aim. Any visitor who leaves the site without either buying or registering for a free trial represents wasted effort and advertising money, and marketing the wrong way can massively increase your site traffic without any proportional increase in income. You're paying to attract people to your site who have no intention of buying, and your advertising spend as a proportion of income goes through the roof.
Let's begin with the semi-mythical world of SEO (search engine optimisation). I was at a meeting with potential new clients the other day, who demonstrated great reverence whenever that phrase cropped up: apparently, their MD is very keen on the subject and wants to see their site appear at the top of the Google rankings. I was forced to play spoil-sport and explain that, in my view, SEO is usually a complete waste of time beyond some very basic level. Why so? Because Google isn't easily fooled and its success is based on supplying highly relevant results to searchers. Exactly how it does this is subject to constant adjustment, but is in principle very simple: first, examine the textual content of your site and compare it against the search terms, then second (and more important) assess how many other sites covering similar topics have links to yours.
Let's say you're searching for "cricket", which is a very broad term - if you try it, you'll find that top of the standard results list comes the BBC News cricket coverage. Indeed, this site ranks higher than www.cricinfo.com, which has far more cricket-related content, because many, many more sites link to the BBC than link to Cricinfo. So the secret of SEO is nothing more than making your content-filled site as easy as possible for Google to spider.
SEO used to be about fooling Google by embedding keywords in the header and adding invisible keywords in the footer, but forget that nowadays. Instead, have good content on your site - the more the better - to allow Google to understand what it's about and be able to index it easily. To get near the top of the rankings, you need to create a relevant site full of good content, and develop relationships with other sites that relate to yours - then wait. This process can take months and months, and offers no guarantee of success. With Passyourtheory, we haven't bothered to go beyond this stage, because with so many sites related to the driving theory test it would be impossible to get near the top.
In other words, Google rewards you for having a genuinely useful website that's relevant to your target audience, so what you should be doing is designing the best possible site you can, making friends with people running related sites and (as long as you avoid the most basic gotchas) leaving Google to do its work. This won't guarantee you a place among the top rankings, but neither will employing a SEO specialist who could probably achieve no more than you can and at least you'll please your site visitors.
