Yesterday evening, I found myself stuck in an unusually tedious traffic jam with some somewhat unwanted extra time to study the back of the car in front of me.

All I could see was the logo and a push towards their website. Now, that makes total sense. If you have an business website, you really do need to get your domain name out there. Business cards, letterheads, advertising, company vehicles, packaging and so on should all make it really easy for your potential customers to find out more about you and get in touch by giving your domain name loud and clear. Vehicles in particular need to keep your message short, sweet and simple, because unless everyone’s wedged in accident-induced gridlock your potential customers won’t see your car or van for any longer than it takes to read your company name, trade and url.

But in the case of the car in front of me, there was not a domain name to be seen. Instead, plastered brightly across the paintwork just above the bumper, was the instruction ‘google us @ [generic phrase including the business type]‘.

It certainly caught my attention, and I did indeed google for them, but I’m not convinced that it was for quite the right reasons.

First, while it’s solid marketing theory to encourage your potential customer to action, it’s also important to make it easy. In a competitive market you’re not doing yourself any favours by saying ‘We’re somewhere in town, ask around and someone’ll tell you where.’ when your competitors are providing a map and saying ‘We’re here, come on in.’.

So, ‘google us @’ has the merit of being catchy, but ‘book an appointment at’ plus the actual url takes one step out of the process and makes it a bit clearer why they might want to visit your website. For this part of the process, it’s also really helpful if your domain name is easy to remember – avoid overly long or hyphenated domains and instead choose something as clear and snappy as you can, that reflects what customers typically call your company. www.wilkinsonplus.com might not be how you think of that particular high street shop, but the company was savvy enough to make sure they also have www.wilko.co.uk pointing to their website.

Secondly, if you’re going to make your customers search for you rather than being easy to find, you’ve got to be pretty sure that Google will return you at the head of the list. To give them their due, the company whose car I was following had clearly put the work in on the search engine optimisation front, so I found them without too much difficulty. There were a few competitors with similar names snapping at their heels, though, so maintaining that position will be a continuing effort.

If all else fails and the rest of that market gets savvier about their SEO, the company I saw is going to have to fork out some cash for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to make sure that all of their offline advertising doesn’t start driving business to their competitors instead. PPC is an incredibly efficient business-generator, but your budget will be better spent maximising that efficiency than burnt for the sake of maintaining a constant number one spot.

In summary, it’s really simple. Promote your online business every chance you get, but be smart about it. Your domain name is a huge asset so capitalise on that and get it out there. Spend your PPC budget wisely – you’re after efficient advertising rather than top-of-the-listings glory. Optimise your site for search engines so that even if potential customers don’t see your offline advertising they can still find you easily.

We’ll be giving you more tips on both PPC and search engine optimisation in the future, so if you have any questions on the subject just drop us a line and we’ll see if we can build an article around the answer.