Internet Marketing vs. Web Marketing vs. Online Marketing

When people ask what flyte does, I say we're a Web design and Internet marketing firm. However, on our Web site the page title was (until last night) Web Design, Web Marketing and Business Blog Consulting for Small Business....

That's because I had a gut feeling that a lot more people would search for "web marketing" as opposed to "Internet marketing," so I optimized our home page title for "Web marketing."

Turns out, I was wrong.

I've been playing around with Keyword Discovery, a great online tool for uncovering your most effective keywords. (More on it in another post; I want to play with it a bit first.)

According to Keyword Discovery:

"Internet Marketing" has been searched for 12.7 million times in the past year, and appears on 16.8 million Web pages, giving it a Keyword Effectiveness Indicator (KEI) of 5.1 (on a scale of 1 - 10 w/10 being the best.)

"Web Marketing", on the other hand, has only had 1.7 million searches in the past 12 months, with 27.2 million Web pages competing for that term. That comes out to a KEI of 2.68.

"Online Marketing" trails the pack with 1.4 million searches and 24.4 million pages of results, a KEI of 2.58.

Why do I bring this up? Because too often we don't test our assumptions and that can lead to failure.

Search engine optimization is like shooting pool. If you knock the eight-ball in the wrong pocket, you lose. If you optimize your site for the wrong word, your business loses. So, before you spend a lot of time and effort optimizing your site for what your gut tells you, test your keywords.

(BTW, I also found out that we're more likely to attract quality leads if we promote that we are Web site designers, and not just Web designers.)

Rich Brooks
Web Internet Marketer

Tags: Internet Marketing | Web Marketing | Online Marketing | Search Engine Optimization | SEO | Keywords

Comments

[Denise Wakeman]

Intersting distinctions. For a long time, while working as an Internet Marketing consultant, I always had the feeling most people didn't know what the heck I was talking about. And, that may still be true, and now I know that I need to stick to that term, at least for the search engines. Now, if I could only convey what I do without jargon so PEOPLE could understand me...

[Chester]

Good job thanks! Best wishes to owner of this site!

[Zorning Internet Marketing]

I would have to agree I always recomment to all of my clients simple little alternatives to keywords which essentialy are the same but to search engine produce different search results and possibly keywords with a better KEI. This in turn generally provides faster ranking results and a reduced cost for my clients.

[John-Scott Dixon]

As direct marketers, we believe strongly in what you are saying... Test, Test, Test. The tool we use is out of the UK, WordTracker - provides similar information. Here is an additional thought that may help your readers: We have a client, MotionLingo. They manufacture a GPS device that provides verbal feedback during workouts. Pretty cool. Their target audience includes triathletes. Turns out, about 80% of people searching for the word "Triathlon" misspell it - Triathalon. It also turns out that close to 100% of the companies that sell to triathletes spell the word correctly. Therein was an opportunity to capture traffic by misspelling the word in our Natural Seach Optimization efforts. We created a brief case study on MotionLingo:

http://thoughtlava.com/Motionlingo.aspx

Good luck out there!