Search Engine Marketing Options
PAY PER CLICK
Yahoo and Google both offer pay-per-click ads. Your rank within
them depends on:
• How much you’re willing to
pay per click
• Keywords you “purchase”
• Amount of competition
• In some cases, geograpic
location
UNPAID (GENERIC)
Users may tend to trust free
search result listings more, but
these require constant fine-tuning to be effective:
• Algorithms constantly change
• Analytics tools aren’t provided
• Site content, meta data, and
descriptions must always be
kept relevant
Google’s Keyword Tool helps estimate both cost and placement for keywords purchased. Google, and others, also have
analytics dashboards to determine campaign effectiveness.
a smaller company’s grasp, observes Chris Hill,
DirectoryM’s senior vice president of marketing.
To compensate for long sales cycles, try collecting email addresses on your landing page,
says Leslie Stevens, president of Eclipse Marketing, a Laguna Niguel, Calif.-based consulting firm
that serves A/V and home theater integrators. You
can use that information to send prospects
newsletters and articles that will keep them engaged with your company until an IT need arises.
DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS
Be forewarned: Managing a PPC campaign is a
complex process, and the more search engines
you use, the more complicated it gets. Each engine employs unique search algorithms that
change regularly. To inch their ads into a coveted
“top five” search position, marketers must continually test and refine keywords, write and
rewrite persuasive copy blocks, and create effective ad-specific landing pages.
All of that effort will be wasted, though, unless
your clicks eventually produce deals, so tracking
results is critical. That means boning up on the
tools that some search engines provide, investing
in third-party tracking tools, or seeking outside
help from a search engine optimization consultant. Armed with tracking data, you can determine
how much a lead is worth by comparing the total
number of hits your campaign produced to the
sales conversion rate, suggests Ralf VonSosen,
vice president of marketing for Infopia Inc., a Salt
Lake City-based e-commerce company that also
consults on search engine marketing. That infor-
Start small. Test everything. Do it again.
Consider advertising on more focused sites,
such as Business.com, instead of popular but
sometimes pricier sites such as Google and
Yahoo.
mation, in turn, will help you fine-tune your ads
to drive down the cost per lead.
To be sure, search engine marketing isn’t easy.
But for a growing IT shop that finds marketing a
challenge, PPC advertising just might be the easiest way to put your name in front of a wide potential customer base quickly. •
MARTIN MIDDLEWOOD is a writer in Vancouver,
Wash., who covers business and technology.
Localize keywords to a city or state to
gain higher search engine rankings.
Activate keywords only during hours
when your customers search and turn them
off when they don’t.
