Customers have stopped relying on “old media” to make their buying decisions and have turned to search engines, like Google, to find what they need. This article shows how you can market your business in the search engines using paid and free advertising options. Whether it’s SEO, pay-per-click, or local listings, you can use search marketing to help promote your business.
The “Organic” Listings
Search Engine Optimization is the process of utilizing search engine marketing to promote a website resulting in highly visible organic listings on major search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing. Generally speaking, the more frequently and higher a site appears in the search results, the more visitors the site will receive via the search engine. There are 2 effectively utilized forms of search engine marketing: Organic Listings and Pay per Click (PPC). Pay per click is an advertising model used on many search engines where advertisers pay the search engine when the ad is clicked and for prime positioning on the search engine site. If you take a look at Google, you may notice that there are a few listings posted on the side of the search results and there may even be listings in a shaded color at the top of the search page. These are the PPC listings which are usually sponsored ads.
Many online business owners overlook local search marketing. This potentially risks losing share in their largest market. As with all search engine marketing, time, skill and patience is involved; however the rewards justify the commitments.
To successfully market a website to a local audience, there are several critical steps every website owner must take:
Optimum7 was at the PubCon Search Marketing Conference, which was held in Las Vegas, NV on November 7-14, 2009. This was our first time at PubCon. The sessions in the conference included topics from Search Engine Optimization to Affiliate Marketing and basic technical aspects of Search Marketing to Conversion Optimization. The event was very well organized and informative providing attendees a forum to network and share experiences and insights.
Perhaps one of the key moments of the conference was towards the end at the Search Engine Smackdown where Matt Cutts (Google Software Engineer in charge of WebSpam) discussed some of the latest developments which can affect search results and increase efficiency for users as well as webmasters. Here are the key points: