Search Engine Marketing

It is estimated that approximately 85% of Internet users head straight to a search engine to find what th ey are looking for and about 90% will not go pass the first 2-3 pages. There is an estimated 804 million Internet users world wide with Australia making up about 10 million users.

With these figures in mind it is no wonder why Search Engine marketing has become popular amongst small businesses. Search engine is a relatively cheap medium, compared to other advertising opportunities such as television or print media, yet a high-ranking web site on popular search engines can provide significantly more targeted traffic.

So, how can you get a piece of the pie?

There are essentially two ways to achieve prominent placement on major search engines:

1. Pay for it or, or
2. Use techniques (Search Engine Optimisation, SEO) to achieve a higher ranking.

Pay For Placement

There are essentially two types of 'pay for placement' type search engine listings, bis for placement and paid sponsor listings.

Bid For Placements

Bid for placement search engines, allow you to ‘buy’ your way to top rankings. Usually you only pay when a user clicks on you ad. How high your web site is listed depends entirely on how much you pay for a particular keyword.

For example, if you paid $1 per click for a particular keyword then you will be listed higher than someone who has paid $0.50.

Benefits- The benefit to this approach is that you can control where you are ranked. If you want first placement, then all you have to do if pay higher than the person below you. Another benefit is that you web site can be listed at no.1 within a few hours, compared to optimizing a website which can take months.

Disadvantage- The disadvantage to this approach is that it can be very costly. The current cost of being number one for the term “web hosting” on Yahoo! Australia will set you back $12. That’s $12 a click to get that visitor to your web site.

Paid Sponsor Listings

Paid for sponsor listings is similar to bid for placement, the different is that the more relevant your site is to the search term the less you will pay to obtain higher rankings. Relevancy is measured by the click through rate of your advertisement. Ads are usually placed on the right hand side with generic search engine results, for example Google Australia.

The trick to this type of advertising is to write copy for your ad as targeted as possible. In fact if you can achieve a click through rate twice as effective as your competitor then you can get the number one position for half the cost.

Benefits- Can be cheaper than bid for placement if you can write good copy for your ads. Like bid for placement it offers quick turn around time.

Disadvantage- Can be harder to get the number position, as not only the payment per keyword is taken into account, but also the relevancy.

Non Payment Placements

If you decide that you don’t want to pay for search engine listing then your alternate option is to “optimize your web site”. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making your website more search engine friendly so as to rank higher with popular search engines.

So how can you make your website more search engine friendly you ask?

Different search engines rank sites differently, however there are modification you can do with your website that will help improve with all search engines. I will outline some of those in a later article.

With search engine optimization you can either do it yourself or get a search engine optimization specialist to do it for you. If you do decide to get a specialist to do it for you, be careful with the ones that will guarantee top rankings.

If a company do provide a guarantee, it is vital that you ask them what keyword will it be ranked higher for. It is useless to be ranked highly for some obscure keyword.

Benefits- The major benefit with optimizing your website is the money you will save. If you do it yourself then the cost is next to nothing, other than some of your time optimizing the website. Even if you get a specialist to do this for you, the cost is usually fixed unlike Pay For Placements.

Another advantage is that you may optimize your site well enough to get it to rank high with all the major search engines, thus not needing to pay for listings on different search engines.

Disadvantage- Despite your best efforts with SEO, there are no guarantee that your web site will rank highly, even if done by specialists. Also the turn around time can be anything from 1 week to 8 months to rank highly for your optimum keyword.

The only way top ranking is guarantee is with top dollar.

My advice is to do both, pay per placement and search engine optimization especially when your website is a new one (new sites usually take longer to rank higher with search engines).

In my next article I will be discussing some basic Search Engine Optimisation techniques that will help you with your site’s ranking.