About Search Engine Marketing
Search is the Internet’s killer app.
Sixty million households, or 90 percent of the U.S. online audience, use search to navigate the Internet. In a typical day, Internet users conduct between 300 and 360 million searches. Internet ad network Overture estimates that approximately 60 million commercially oriented searches are conducted each day—in other words, consumers are actively looking for products and services through search engines and directories on the Web.
For marketing purposes, there are two ways to tap into Internet search to drive highly targeted sales leads to a Web site:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—This involves making changes to your Web site and other strategies such that it comes up high in the rankings of search engine results for searches that are relevant to what your site offers.
- Keyword Advertising—This involves having your paid ad show up on the first page of search results when the search terms are relevant to what your site has to offer. We primarily use cost-per-click keyword advertising, whereby you pay only for actual clickthroughs to your site.
Search engine marketing can help sell not only products and services, but also ideas in public affairs programs. For example, one client who seeks to build a large-scale master-planned community has put up a Web site to help convince the public and local government officials that its proposed community is good for the area and environmentally responsible. In this case, the goal is the winning of hearts and minds. To cite another example, the Internal Revenue Service is using SEO for consumer alert purposes. It is optimizing Web pages so that people searching for ways to avoid taxes will be able to find the IRS's fraud pages that expose suspected tax schemes and scams.
To help our clients and potential clients better understand the issues involved in search engine marketing, we have written several essays you can access from the links in the left column of this page:
- About Search Engines is a top-line overview of search engine issues and we strongly recommend you read this discussion first.
- Evaluating the Opportunity explains the primary factors we analyze to determine whether, and to what degree, you can benefit from a search engine marketing program. We're happy to evaluate your situation at no cost, provided you're genuinely interested, of course.
- Keyword Strategy provides much detail on the subject because keywords are the foundation of a search engine marketing program.
- Search Engine Optimization is a fairly lengthy overview of the key issues involved in SEO. It explains what SEO can and cannot achieve, and covers strategies and tactics we use to attain high rankings.
- CPC Keyword Advertising is a general overview of this vehicle, but also provides insight into some of the not-so-obvious issues that make these programs more complex or sophisticated than the CPC ad networks would have you believe (an uneducated customer means more profits for them).
- SEO vs. CPC Advertising seeks to differentiate the relative strengths and weaknesses of each marketing vehicle. This essay was inspired as a reaction to listening to presentations by Overture spinning the superior of its service over every other marketing vehicle to know man.
- A Search Engine Marketing Program provides a chronological snapshot of a typical search engine program in terms of tactics and deliverables.
We hope you find these essays informative. We provide them because our philosophy is that that an informed client is the best client.
In the world of search engines, change is the only constant. It's likely that at any given time various assertions made in these essays will no longer be accurate or true. If you find any errors, or would like to make a suggestion, or simply to ask a question, please don't hesitate to contact us at info@sunhunter.com.
|
