We are an SEO & AdWords agency, based in central Cambridge, delivering intelligent, cost effective web marketing solutions.
Established in 2001, we specialise in helping people get more from the web. How do we do this?
In essence, we make your site into something your customers will love and drive traffic to it from Google and other sources.
We provide an affordable service specially for smaller business, startups and charities by being very knowledgeable and very efficient.
The Cambridge Web Marketing Co. has been around in one form or another since February 2001.
We began as a graphic and web design studio, adding web development over time, and slowly shifted into doing digital marketing work, starting with Google AdWords soon after it first came out. We stopped all non-marketing activities around mid-2009.
The reason for this change was simple: we realised that the real benefit to clients was in marketing sites, not building them. Almost anyone can build a site these days (for better or worse), and usually a fairly decent site at that. WordPress especially makes building a small business site incredibly easy. However, the important thing is being found, and, unfortunately, the best site in the world won’t help with that if left to its own devices.
We have Google Partner status. But what does this actually mean?
The partner programme was developed by Google to help companies choose high quality agencies to manage their AdWords campaigns. To become a partner, an agency must fulfil the following criteria:
Search is the best source of high quality traffic for almost any organisation’s web site. Search engine optimisation is about getting as much of the pie as you reasonably can. The benefits of a good quality search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign are simple:
It would not be wise to write about the benefits of SEO without also sounding a note of caution.
Whilst SEO does have a very high chance of delivering a good return on investment for almost any organisation, it is not without risks.
There are no guarantees that a campaign will work or work within a certain period of time. It’s a fuzzy process, and ultimately what we do is influence Google, not dictate to it.
SEO is also a very long term process. It is not a one-off marketing stunt. You need to stick with it if you are to reap the rewards.
How long it will take depends on your site and niche, but it is normal for an SEO campaign to take six months to start to show results.
We provide an SEO service specifically designed for small to medium sized business and non-profit organisations.
Having worked with them for over 10 years, we understand the needs of small organisations, sole traders and especially local businesses (people like us, in other words).
The Power Of Search
Or: why search marketing is one of the best ways to reach customers ever invented
Just think about how traditional advertising works for a second.
It’s a scatter-gun approach: you place an advert in a magazine, on television or on a billboard, in the hopes that out of the thousands of people who see it, a certain number might remember it. And, out of those few who remember it, a certain number might actually act upon it.
The simple fact is that this approach no longer works (if it ever did). Think about how advertising is becoming more ubiquitous and intrusive than ever, as they try to get more and more eyeballs in front of adverts, as people become more and more blind to them… that’s an industry becoming more and more desperate to cling onto life.
When advertisers are unable to show a direct return on investment, terms such as “brand awareness” are thrown around. A better description might be “Emperor’s new clothes.”
Search is different
Search is fundamentally a marketing activity, not advertising.
Marketing differs from advertising in that instead of trying to grab the attention of as many people as possible and hoping that some are in your target market, you are selecting people who already have a high chance of being interested in your product or service and, ideally, starting a conversation with them.
Search marketing goes one step further: the people you are targeting are self selecting – as long as you’re doing it right. This is incredibly powerful.
You are effectively putting your message in front of people who have already put their hand up and said that they’re interested. Being sat in front of a computer or having a mobile device in their hand, they also have means of payment (or at least contacting you) literally at their fingertips.
Doing it right is relatively simple as well. You just need to choose keywords that are relevant to your business (easy) and commercially driven (a bit trickier, but still not hard).
Sounds too good to be true?
It isn’t – at least not in principle.
Of course, the devil is in the details, and actually gaining that high qualified search traffic (whether throughSEO or PPC) is a difficult process, even if the basic principles are simple enough. Even picking the right keywords to target is slightly more complicated than it sounds. That’s why, for most organisations, it makes sense to hire a web marketing agency rather than trying to sweat it yourself!
