SureFire’s two principals (that’s us, Jeremy Templer and Mark Sceats) started working in search marketing many years ago. Google was still finding its feet, and search engines like Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, and HotBot still roamed the earth.
In dog years, about a hundred years ago.
“And it’s only because we’ve been able to keep learning new tricks that we’re still here to tell our story..”
What’s kept us going, is our love for and interest in the work we do. For Mark, that’s organic search marketing (he’s the SEO guy). For Jeremy, that’s paid search (and, yes, he started before Google was a thing). But, regardless of how we do it, we like to help good businesses get more online customers.
When we first started making search work for clients, delivering them not just more traffic, but measurable increases in business profit, other online marketers would say: wait a minute, how’d they do that?
Everything was measurable. And the competition hadn’t woken up.
We were the white-label guys that other agencies turned to when the online marketing brief included search.
Today, we can still get great results. But it’s a challenge for any business that isn’t already a known brand.
“The pie has grown, but the slices keep getting smaller.”
Organic search has given up clicks to local search, paid search, shopping, and search engine snippets that don’t deliver any website traffic at all. Content may have always been king, but producing topical, relevant stories that search engines like and people want to read is no easy task when everyone is doing it. Or when your client is an electrician, say, or a company that makes tyres.
Paid search has struggled too in an increasingly mobile world. As screens have become smaller, clicks have become more expensive. Competition has never been greater. And marketers have less control.
Search engines use artificial intelligence to decide who gets to see a paid search ad. And they know far more about who’s seeing an ad (and why) than they are willing to share with marketers.
Don’t get us wrong. We’re still wild about search, but we realise that it can never be the only game in town.
Running search campaigns used to be like shooting fish in a barrel. All clients needed was a budget and a goal, and we’d make the magic happen.
That’s changed. We’ve adapted, as we always have. But we were slow to make good on the opportunity staring us in the face.
We were search specialists, after all. And, quite literally, “Search” is our middle name.
Search is great when you want to tell people about your business, services, and products and they’re actively looking for just what you offer. They’re already interested, and pretty much ready to buy.
But when so many companies are competing for customers who are ready to buy, you’re paying top dollar to get them to your website. And yes, even if they find you organically, there is a hefty cost per click in the time and effort you’ve paid in making your website content search-engine friendly (and people-friendly too, of course).
But what if you could start the conversation with your customer before they’re ready to buy, before they know your company, and when they don’t even realise they need what you have? That’s got to be less expensive, because there’s less competition. But it’s still money down the drain if you don’t have a way to keep the interest of your future customer.
You want them to visit your website, sure — but you want them to keep coming back, again and again. You want them to evolve, from visitor to customer, without having to pay Google, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and all the rest over and over just to get them coming back.
“Our “what if” is now a reality. That’s right: We’ve cracked the code.”
Find is the new search. And we can get the right people to a website or landing page at very low cost.
We help our clients do the things that make those visitors keep coming back. Back to websites and landing pages that are more likely to convert.
Visitors become customers. Frequent customers become loyal customers, happy to spread the good word.
Of course, if they already know just what they want, we can get them to a landing page too.
Turns out the best trick we’ve learnt in the last 20 or so years was the hardest to learn. But now we’re ready to share our process (it’s not just search, any more).
If you need to get profitable customers to your website, and more of them, let’s chat.
