Expert Tips and Tricks for Successfully Raising an Online Profile in African Business Review

SAN DIEGO, CA, March 10, 2011 (Press-News.org) African Business Review:You would expect the main challenges when running a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign in Africa to be fairly tactical things, such as communicating with small, fragmented markets; a variety of languages and cultures; poverty; bandwidth and infrastructure constraints; and the propensity for governments under threat to simply switch off the Internet.

But according to a couple of Cape Town, South Africa-based SEM experts the education of businesses is still the number one challenge in the field; the result being that companies who do "get it" have an opportunity to get ahead of the established, traditional players.

According to Christine da Silva, head of search at Neo@Ogilvy South Africa, although implementing SEO in Africa is pretty similar to anywhere else in the world, the local market still does not fully understand the role and impact of the practice.

It has been a long process convincing companies to take a tiny fraction of the huge sums they are spending on traditional advertising and invest it in improving their organic search rankings, she said. "It is a have to have," Da Silva said, "but the good news is the costs are far less than other channels."

Jonathan Gluckman, CEO of paid search company Clicks2Customers, concurs that education is the main challenge when offering PPC services in South Africa. The bulk of his clients are based in the US, UK and Australia and when Clicks2Customers launched services in the SA market around two and a half years ago, Jonathan realised the extent to which local companies needed to be brought up to speed on why and how to use paid search.

Read the full article here.

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African Business Review is a leading digital media source of news and content for C-level executives focused on business and industry-specific news throughout Africa. African Business Review is the territory-dedicated arm of the White Digital Media Group. Founded in 2007 by entrepreneur Glen White, White Digital Media retains a diversified portfolio of websites, magazines, daily news feeds and weekly e-newsletters that leverage technology to innovatively deliver high-quality content, analytical data, and industry news. For more information, contact +44 (0)1603 217 556 or visit http://www.africanbusinessreview.co.za/.