Search Engine Advertising
Search engine advertising or pay per click is something that every business can and should do. Even with terrific organic placement on searched that make the most sense to your business, 40% or greater (depending on the study) still buy from paid inclusion.
Looking at the search engine results page as a piece of virtual real estate puts you in the right mind set to see the advantages of search engine advertising. In a best case scenario, you are listed on the top in the paid area, listed in the local maps position, and your site shows up in the organic position, followed by a blog post that belongs to you as well. The fact is most customers will make their decision from the first page, showing up as many times as you can on the first page removes positions for you competitors websites to appear.
Dell, Pizza Hut, Dr Martens, and many other big companies have realized the value of search engine advertising and even on searches that they dominate the entire page will pay for placement in the paid inclusion. The red box shows the search engine advertising, and the highlighted yellow shows same site in organic placement.
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Dominating the search engine results page allows for many benefits:
- Increased site traffic
- Increased brand awareness
- Authority in consumer buying experience
- Less competitors on any given search
Just about every SEO expert will tell you that you have the ability to dominate on approximately five to 10 keyword strings, that said, think of how many ways a person could search for your product offering. Let use an example of a plumber in Denver Colorado. I might search for plumber in Denver, or Denver Plumber, it might be more pointed like toilet plumbing, or toilet plumbing in Denver or Denver toilet plumber. What I’m getting at is search engine advertising in paid inclusion allows this plumber to ensure that he shows up regardless of how the search is done. The same plumber with organic placement or SEO would be lucky to show up on the first page for all searches.
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If a searcher doesn’t qualify their search with a geographic location like “Plumber Denver” and only enters “Plumber,” the natural or organic search results show nationally. The local Maps & paid inclusion results will rely on the location of the physical computer to show local results, but the organic changes to national. You can see in the example below how the amount of search results changes.
With search engine marketing a business can have more complete coverage as it relates to keyword terms, locality, and predictability in frequency of exposure.