Get Instant Clicks With Paid Internet Advertising

Get Instant Clicks With Paid Internet Advertising

Small and local business owners with limited resources must compete against large corporations with limitless corporate coffers. Even if mom-and-pop shops sell superior products, most customers prefer to shop with well-established brands. And it is no easy feat to keep a new business afloat. In fact, only 1 in 5 startups survive past the first year, while only half keep their doors open beyond 5 years. With the odds stacked against them, how can small businesses even the playing field? Search engine marketing (SEM). By implementing an effective search engine marketing campaign, new or niche companies can accrue the exposure and trust afforded to big business at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising strategies. What is search engine marketing?   As a small business owner, you may have already heard of search engine optimization (SEO) – the process of tailoring your website for search engine indexing algorithms (aka web crawlers, spiders, or internet bots) to achieve above-the-fold, page-one search rankings. The primary goal of SEO is to increase a website’s organic traffic. Elements of SEO include keyword research, blogging, formatting page URLs, and optimizing website loading times. Search engine marketing, on the other hand, utilizes paid internet advertising, such as pay per click (PPC) campaigns, to increase web traffic. SEM strategies leverage users’ internet data, including search inputs and website visits, to place relevant ads at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). The benefits of search engine marketing. You might be asking yourself why you should be paying for online ads when you could just optimize your website for free (given you had the time and patience). But there are many advantages of SEM that an SEO strategy alone simply cannot provide, including:
  • Immediate traffic. Though every business ought to use SEO, it is a long-term commitment. If you are just opening your doors, chances are you need to get your name out there as quickly as possible. While you may have to wait months to see a return on investment using SEO, paid ads can take as little as 30 minutes to set up if you know what you’re doing. Once you set up a PPC campaign on one of the major search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, or Bing), your ads could show up on the search engine results pages on the first day.
  • Page one exposure. Seventy-five percent of internet users never scroll past the first page of search results. When you pay for PPC campaigns, however, your business will appear above the fold (meaning internet users won’t have to scroll at all) in the designated advertisement section at the top of the results pages – people will see your ads before they see the organic website results.
  • Targeted advertising. As mentioned before, PPC ads are placed where they are most likely to get clicks because they are displayed based on a users’ data and search activities. Additionally, businesses can track the effectiveness of their ads with metrics, allowing them to test which combination of images and text garner the most clicks and create more effective ads.
  • Budget-friendly advertising. Perhaps the best part of PPC ads is you only pay when someone clicks on your ad – unlike traditional forms of marketing, such as television and billboards where you pay an upfront fee no matter what. With SEM, you can be sure you only pay for results, not hopes.
While you can set up a PPC campaign yourself, effective search engine marketing generally requires the practiced eye of internet marketing pros. If you would like to explore your options, partner with Social Spice Media – we implement SEM strategies that convert!