Search_Engine_Marketing
Driving traffic to your website is one of the primary keys to gaining success with your website and getting seen on search engines like Google© and Yahoo!© is the primary way that your business or organization will get seen. Search marketing is a complex combination of art and science that takes a consistent effort.
Search Marketing is a combination of organic optimization (seo) and pay-per-click advertising (ppc) focusing on key phrases that are used by your customers to find your business or organization on these search engines. Search marketing requires a strategic plan that starts with researching the key phrases that are right for your business or organization and then assembling a two-pronged implementation of seo and ppc techniques that will elevate your website to the top of the list for these key phrases across the major search engines.
SEO is the process of improving your website's position among the search engine's rankings in the "organic" results area of the search engine's results page. These organic results are non-paid positions of web pages that the search engine has determined are the most relevant for the key phrase that the user typed into the search engine.
That is a great question: the search engines use algorithms that measure a vast amount of data on a web page, its overall site and even the popularity of the website. Based on the "grading" of these various elements of a website / web page is what determines how high your website will appear in the search engines.
Pay per click, or sponsored links, are actually ads that are purchased on a bid basis. The costs of these ads are strictly based on the value of the key phrase that you are buying an ad for. Once you place your bid and post your ad, your costs are based on (as the name implies) your (bid amount) X (number of clicks) that your ad receives. PPC ads provide your business or organization with immediate visibility and can drive traffic to your site instantly.
Both! A successful strategy will contain both organic optimization and pay-per-click elements. Because both SEO and PPC contain pros and cons you can use each one to offset the disadvantages of the other.
Here's the concept. Lets say that you want to rank high on the major search engines for the key phrase "personal injury lawyer". Google© currently has over 13,000,000 results for this phrase. Obviously, a very competitive key phrase. In this example, getting top billing organically will take a little bit of time and effort. You probably don't want to wait that long to start getting traffic to your website, so here is where you can buy a PPC ad on Google© and get immediate visibility and consequently traffic to your website.
Sure PPC is fast but it can also be expensive and will require a lot of management. SEO is still the most important part of your Search Marketing Strategy because we know that roughly 60% - 70% of all web users click on the "organic" links in a search engine's results.
It is not advisable to take on the task of Search Engine Marketing on your own. Not only could you not progress your visibility for the key phrase(s) that you are aiming for, but you could actually decrease your visibility on key phrases that you are already visible for. Contact us to find out what we can do to help your company or organization with your Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click needs.