This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Bing Network. All opinions are 100% mine. My site WorldVillage.com has changed a lot since its launch back in… 1995. (Yeah, I’m that old!) You can see what it looked like here. Those designs were pretty cutting edge back in the day, though I guess a millennial would probably look at them now and wonder what we were thinking. I can tell you what we weren’t thinking… we weren’t thinking about mobile compatibility or social media marketing. Users downloaded pages onto screens that took up half their desks. Traffic came in through word of mouth, and through the search engines that were just starting to crank up at the time. That hasn’t changed. In the 21 years since launching WorldVillage, as screens have become thin, then handheld, word of mouth and search engine marketing are still the most important ways in which I generate visitors to the site. Sure, when I see an interesting-looking submission, I’ll give it an extra push on social media. I’ll tweet about it or put a link on Facebook and both of those deliver extra views. But I still depend on people putting search terms into a search engine and finding an article on the site that answers their question. You probably find the same thing. Take a look at your own website stats and there’s a good chance that you’ll find that you’re still picking up a significant amount of traffic from your search engine marketing, and perhaps even more than from your social media marketing. You wouldn’t want to remove either one of those sources but despite all of the talk about social media marketing over the last few years, search engine marketing is still vital. One reason is the way that search engines themselves have changed. They’re no longer websites that you have to reach before you can find the information you want. The release of Windows 10, which baked Bing into the OS, raised the number of searches by 30 percent in comparison to previous versions of Windows. Cortana has now answered 2.5 billion questions. When you can pick up a phone, ask a question and receive an answer drawn from a search engine, it’s clear that search engine marketing has developed… and users have developed with it. We all know that we have to ensure our websites can be easily read on mobile devices but it’s search engines that have quietly led the way in adapting entirely to the new online environment. It’s too easy these days to assume that marketing is all about social media, and that all our traffic generation needs to be based on shares and retweets. Those factors are important but it’s still true that search engine marketing is vital. If you look at your stats and see that you’re not generating a significant amount of traffic from search engines, you’re missing an opportunity. Nobody builds sites that look like that first version of WorldVillage any more. And the search engines that feed those sites don’t look like their first versions either. But sites still need traffic, and smart search engine marketing still delivers it. Learn more about Bing Network
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