Wednesday, January 22, 2014

What Do You Know about Search Engine Marketing?

You have a business, and whether it is shiny and new, well-established, or somewhere in between, you recognize the importance of making the business known. While there are a variety of ways you can accomplish this, one way you should definitely not overlook is search page advertising. When you are looking for a plumber or a nearby burger joint, you most likely do not pull out an atlas. Instead, you go to your computer or pull out your smartphone and consult a search engine like Google or Bing, and you should not expect anything less from your customers. Recognizing this fact is the easy part; making sure that your company’s name shows up high on the search results is where it can get slightly more complicated. To begin with, have you ever heard of the terms PPC or SEO?
Pay-Per-Click

Both PPC and SEO are Internet marketing terms, and both work to gain increased traffic to your website. How they achieve this task is where they differ. The first, PPC, or pay-per-click, can also be referred to as paid search marketing, cost-per-click (CPC), or search engine marketing (SEM). When it comes to the search results, PPC deals with the sponsored links section of the search engine. When a customer types a keyword phrase into the search bar that is related to your business, services, products, or industry, your ad will appear as a result. Each time a person chooses to click on your ad, you pay the search engine a small fee. Before your ad can appear in the sponsored link section, however, you must create an account that will allow you to bid upon a space for certain keywords against other similar businesses. Generally, this type of marketing is quick and easy to set up and tends to attract more customers who are ready to buy than those in the organic search results. But organic search results should not be shrugged off either.
Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to the organic search results that pop up with certain keyword phrases, you want to invest time into SEO, or search engine optimization. Unlike PPC, SEO is free. But it also may take more time than PPC to see results. What SEO does is works to place your website as close to the top of the organic search results as possible. How you get to the top is by improving the ranking of your website. Search engines rank websites on a number of different factors, including keyword relevance, the presence of new, full content, and the number of relevant links pointing to the website. Just as with PPC, you will need to research keyword phrases you want to focus on for your website. But SEO will also need you to work on ensuring your website contains relevant content, the fresher the better, and that it has been linked from other legitimate websites or blogs. 

So which is better: PPC or SEO? Now that you are more familiar with the two terms, it may be easier for you to decide. For some companies, however, it may be best to consult with an Internet marketing company to discover if just one or both methods will be the most beneficial for their company.

1 comment:

  1. Search Engine Optimization is very effective but it is long time process :(

    ReplyDelete

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