The promotion of your website so that there is traffic to the site is simply a matter of getting it to show up at the top of a search engine. It all starts with SEM or Search Engine Marketing which consists of SEO or search engine optimization and paid advertising, i.e., Adwords. The process of promoting a site can stop at this point, but instead of waiting for someone to click on your link at the top of a search, you might want to be more proactive and that brings us to Social Media.
If you’re not sure about this, imagine what would happen if you were in the top ten positions in a search engine for a variety of your product keywords, i.e., plumbing supplies, fixtures, heating, etc? If a 1000 people are typing “plumbing supplies” in Google every 24 hours, then a top organic listing could generate a lot of new sales for your company. The question is: how to I get to the top and what is it going to cost?
At the moment, there are three ways to appear at the top of a search engine: 1) by using pay-per-click ads (PPC), 2) by optimizing your website and finally 3) by increasing your web presence on social media. Given that some businesses can spend as much as $60,000 per month on pay-per-click campaigns using Google Adwords, you know that being at the top of a search engine is a serious business. Very few, however, will spend any money on optimizing the site and making sure that it is capable of turning all these visitors into a buying customer.
If your heart is set on pay-per-click ads, Google Adwords is your best bet. There are also some popular and highly rated search engines besides Google which allow you to choose keywords that you would like your site to appear for when a search is performed. You pay only when a searcher clicks on your listing and connects to your site. You don’t pay to list, you only pay for clicks or click throughs.
Visit Search Engine Guide for more information.
Pay-per-click ads are not only an expensive way to get to the top of a search engine, it is unlikely that they will be able to generate as many sales or as much traffic as a top 10 organic listing. It is no secret that most consumers click on organic listings in search engines 20 times more frequently than PPC ads. (according to a survey done by SEMPO in December 2004, 82% of money invested in search marketing went to PPC ads. Organic optimization accounted for only 12% of search advertising dollars. While there are many more dollars invested in paid-search advertising than in organic search engine placement, an October 2004 study of search engine user’s click-through habits by Enquiro’s CEO Gord Hotchkiss shows that 69% of the users chose organic listings over the 25% that tended towards paid listings.)
So instead of spending $60,000 a month on PPC ads as many companies do, consider the second option of devoting a portion of that money to optimizing your website: making your site search engine friendly, and making your website better in terms of how it helps turns visitors into buying customers. Not only will this help in gaining a top organic listing, which should lead to an increase in traffic, it should improve your conversion rate.
The third option is all about sharing the content that you create on your website with social platforms like FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram. Creating a larger presence on social media is going to quickly become the new way to promoting your site on the search engines.