Search Engine Marketing – PPC

Completely different than Search Engine and Content Optimization, Search Engine Marketing involves driving highly targeted visitors using a PPC (pay-per-click) marketing strategy! The New York Times defines SEM best, as the “Practice of Buying Paid Search Listings”.

Paid advertising or PPC, offers the one benefit that no other form of Marketing can guarantee… Immediate, Targeted Visitors! The downside, is that unless you are well prepared for a paid advertising campaign, you could lose quite a bit of money, before you ever get started! I have seen too many instances where a small business runs their own PPC effort without ever testing landing pages, or even tracking paid visitors! Most small business  website owners are far too inexperienced to run their own paid advertising campaigns, and never even realize their efforts have been fruitless, until its too late!

An Effective Paid Ad Campaign Involves

  • Creating Goals and a Strategy to Reach Those Goals!
  • Understanding the Exact Needs of your Target Visitor!
  • Setup of Analytics to Track Every Paid Click and Paid Visitor Action!
  • Optimization and Clearly Defined Landing Pages
  • Split Testing of Landing Pages to Determine which Convert Best!
  • Ad Analysis to Determine Best ROI!
  • Avoiding Penalties or Higher Cost-Per-Click, for Poorly Designed Pages!
  • Optimization for the Lower Cost Content Networks!
  • Much more…

The bottom line in PPC advertising is that you MUST have a thorough and analytical understanding of every penny you spend on traffic! After all, if you knew, without doubt, that for every $1 you spend on a paid visitor to a specific page, you could earn $10, wouldn’t you?

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SEM As Part of An Overall Optimization Strategy

While paid results can be very rewarding, we feel small business owners are best served by utilizing paid campaigns as part of their overall Internet Marketing strategy with a strong focus on organic search and content optimization. The drawback to focusing too much on paid search marketing is immediately realized when your ad spend dries up, and the traffic stops.

As part of an overall website marketing strategy, we always recommend organic search optimization, which delivers targeted visitor traffic based on optimized content and proven design methods.