Why use Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine Marketing expands your audience. Advertise with Google, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter alone and you'll reach over 90 percent of the internet audience. Add in smaller, niche PPC search engines and shopping engines and you'll experience complete coverage.

Results can be measured. Statistics can be gathered from your web server logs to determine the efficacy of an ad campaign.

Why search engine advertising?
Your customers use search engines to find information about products or service that you sell. Advertising on those search engines is one of the cheapest ad vehicles available. Search engine ads expand your reach across your target audience. Your advertising results are measurable. Ads can be revised in the middle of a campaign. Perhaps the better question is this: Why start anywhere but with search engine advertising?

Search Engine Optimization? Pay Per Click? Which should you use?
It can be confusing learning about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising Programs (PPC). Many clients don't know which option to choose, or whether or not they might benefit from both. Below, we've described advantages and disadvantages of each, and when they may be best for you. At the bottom, we describe how some companies strategically use both together.

Pay Per Click Advertising Programs

Advantages

• Pay per click advertising programs are fast to implement. It usually takes two to three weeks for us to do our work, including time for you to approve everything along the way. Then, Google AdWords are up and running as soon as we place the campaign, and Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter listings are live after an editor reviews them.
• We don't have to change anything on your web site.
• In theory, there is no limit to the number of terms we can bid on.
• PPC is good for promotions, as we can turn the campaign on and off whenever we choose.
• We have very tight control over the program, as we dictate where the listing appears and what it says.
• Placement of PPC listings is usually higher on the search engines' results page for sponsored listings than for editorial listings.
• It's very easy to test different search terms, offers, descriptions, etc., and measure results.

Disadvantages

• Clicks can be expensive. Bidding wars often erupt. As more companies learn about PPC, more enter the fray and bids go up.
• You must keep paying for the clicks every month. If your budget is ever cut, your listings will disappear, along with your search engine traffic.
• Some searchers ignore sponsored listings, since they know they're ads, and skip right down to editorial listings.
• It requires time to monitor and adjust listings on a constant basis.
• Listings are subject to editorial acceptance. With SEO, we can say whatever we like on our site (which is where the engines pull our title and description). But with PPC, editors insist that all listings be factual and that we not compare your company with others. This means that even if you are the "largest" provider, we can't say that.
• Listings are displayed on the most-used engines in the US, but not many other places. Your visibility is limited (however, many believe that being limited to probably 90% of searches run in this country isn't very limited).

Pay per click advertising may be best for you if:

• You want to get up and running quickly.
• You have a promotion where you want to be able to turn a campaign on and off.
• You want to be able to test search terms, products or offers and quickly see results.
• Your site is search engine-unfriendly and you don't want to invest in changing it.
• You're only concerned with the top search engines people are using.
• You're confident you'll have the budget to spend for the long haul, and you have time to maintain positions on a regular basis.

Again, there's not always a need to choose between SEO and PPC. Many companies do both. Here are some suggestions for running a combination of both:

• Run a quick PPC campaign first, while the lengthier upfront work for SEO is being done.
• Similarly, test search terms with PPC and see which ones searchers seem to respond to most, before undertaking SEO.
• Use both strategies in an effort to be visible in as many places as possible. Even if you appear twice on the same search engine results page, lean back and grin, knowing that you're both high up on the page (PPC) for people moving quickly, and in the editorial results (SEO) for anyone who may skip over the ads.
  

Search Engine Optimization

Advantages

• We do work upfront and monitor and report your positions. The changes we make today will probably still be driving traffic to your site a year from now. However, your rankings may continue to change and we can help track and update your strategies so that you remain highly ranked.
• Over time, SEO is usually less costly than PPC. In fact, it can be free of charge after the upfront work is done.
• There's a credibility factor, since the site is listed in the engines' editorial results. This is a sort of third party endorsement - savvy searchers know that the site didn't buy their way in, so the ranking is viewed as "earned." Some searchers skip over sponsored listings and only pay attention to editorial results.
• Broad coverage on all search engines worldwide. In theory, if you have an optimized site with links pointing to it on other sites, every search engine out there should be able to find and index your site. You may get traffic from search engines you've never heard of.

Disadvantages

• We must make changes to your web site. Normally, this is easy to do, and the changes are usually transparent to visitors. However, if you have invested heavily in a search engine-unfriendly site, you may not want to implement workarounds to make it more welcoming to engines.
• Results (rankings, traffic) sometimes start slowly, though they do build over time. Usually, within 3-4 months you'll start to see lasting results.
• There's no guarantee as to results. We can't predict how many rankings we'll get for a particular search term or engine; nor can we predict how much traffic we'll get.
• We are limited as to the number of search terms we can target by the number of web pages we have to optimize, since we don't want to optimize any web page for more than one or two terms apiece.

Search engine optimization is probably your best bet if:

• You want to spend some time on search engine marketing upfront and have it pay off in the future, on conceivably every search engine there is around the world.
• You have a budget to do some work now, and want to save money later on.
• Your site is fairly simple, without a lot of complicated bells and whistles.
• You can afford to wait a few months for results.