Search Engine Marketing

Should you advertise your website? In one word - yes. The success of your website hinges on quality advertising and promotion. A generation ago people looked in the Yellow Pages to find a business. Today the public looks online.

The first step is to have a website that is attractive. A click can be costly and worthless if people do not like what they see and move on.

Start with natural, organic search engine optimization. This is a slow process which can take six months to a year. While you are waiting for search engine optimization to work, the fastest way to get traffic to your website is with Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also known as pay per click advertising on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The advertising is instant, and you only pay when a person clicks on your ad and is taken to your website. Google, Yahoo and MSN allow you to target traffic selectively: by city, state, zip code, region, or the entire planet. But, if you do not have a thorough understanding of Search Engine Marketing and try to manage your own pay per click advertising campaign, you can lose a lot of money fast.

Search Engines do offer tools that are supposed to help the amateur marketeer create successful advertsing campaigns. However, the sad reality is that generally those tools actually maximize profits to the Search Engines, while doing little to help website and business owners drive quality traffic to their websites.

One of our clients came to us for website repair and redesign work on several of their websites. They had been spending $7,000 to $10,000 per month on pay per click advertising. After completing the work on their websites we were asked to evaluate and re-establish the pay per click advertising campaigns, but with a new budget of only $2,000 per month. We were able to overhaul their advertising campaigns and produce more clicks to their websites, and of a higher quality, with a budget of only 20 to 25 percent of what they were previously spending.

Pay per click (known as PPC) advertising needs to be done by a professional who does Internet marketing and nothing else, all day every day. While we are capable of establishing and managing PPC advertising campaigns, it is not our specialty and for that reason we encourage those clients wishing to capitalize on internet marketing to seek the services of a company that does specialize in internet advertising.

For those wishing to look into establishing an internet marketing program, we know several companies that do specialize in internet marketing and can provide referrals.