Search engine marketing should be a part of every webmaster’s toolbox. It is an effective and efficient way of ensuring that your website gets the attention that you need it to.
Search engine optimization will get you ‘organic traffic’ – these are the visitors that are looking for highly specific keywords and that find you in the general search results. Organic traffic is just a part of the battle, though, and it is incredibly hard to rank well for competitive keywords. Search engine marketing allows you to buy rankings in paid search – which gives you a short term way of getting traffic. Note, however, that if you are paying for rankings, then when you stop paying, you will no longer occupy those sponsored spots. If you are outbid by a competitor, then you will no longer occupy those sponsored spots. Those rankings are temporary too.
Improving Your Marketing on a Budget
Search engine marketing requires you to bid for the keywords you want to rank for. The search engine will base the amount you pay on how much your competitors are paying, and how worthy it judges you of getting that traffic. The search engines don’t just send traffic to the highest bidder – if they did that, and someone had a website about Tractors, but bid a large amount of money for it to appear in the search results for searches about Chocolate Bars, then that would ruin the search experience for consumers, and those searchers might go to another search engine.
For this reason, the search engines look at the quality of your website. Is it relevant to the keyword? Does it load quickly? Do users spend a lot of time on it and visit other pages on the site before leaving? Those are all markers of quality – and a high quality site is more likely to get shown in the paid search too – and because you have a better ‘quality score’ you should, in theory, rank higher.
Know More About Keyword Search
Keywords matter too. It is a good idea to buy specific keywords, not general ones. If you are selling computer power supplies, buy “750W PSU 80+ Gold” not “Power Supply” – you’re far more likely to sell a PSU to someone who is searching for a specific wattage and rating (because that suggests they know what they are looking for) than from someone search engine for a general keyword.
Search engine marketing will take some trial and error, and it’s a good idea to use extensive analytics to track the performance of your marketing campaigns. Over time, you will see results, and you will learn what works and what does not in your niche. Be patient, and constantly re-evaluate the performance of your website, and the keywords that you are marketing for, so that you can get something that will keep on pulling in traffic – and hopefully support future search engine optimization efforts, helps with brand management service and link building for your site too.
