Why Search Marketing?
June 19, 2008
Why SEO and Search Marketing is such a great way to promote your business?
I’m not going to throw numbers at you. If you are reading this blog you probably already know that people are using the web every day to look for what they need.
Potential customers are googling every day for the best deal. If what you are selling can’t be sold online, you can still use the web as point of contact with your customers, so there’s really no excuse for any business not to be actively pursuing strategic listings in Google.
Search Marketing is great because you do not look for your customers; they look for you. You strategically pick the keywords you want to be found for, and they find you while searching these keywords.
From a customer’s point of view SEO and Search Marketing is non intrusive and relevant.
From a business point of view it’s efficient and inexpensive.
Non Intrusive and Relevant
It’s non intrusive because you are not spamming junk mail in their home addresses or annoying them at home with unexpected phone calls. You are not forcing them to watch your spot on a TV commercial when they would rather keep watching their favourite TV show.
It’s relevant because you only display your marketing when they are looking for it. You are actually helping them to find what they need, and this makes you relevant, and useful. It helps build a healthy, long term relationship with your target audience.
Efficient and Inexpensive
It’s efficient because there is no waste. Only your target audience gets the message. This doesn’t happen in all other areas of off line advertising, where the possibilities of segmenting your audience are a lot more limited.
TV spots, street signs, even radio ads and print ads, they are all seen by a lot of people who are not interested in your products or services. Big business can afford them and that’s all well and good for them, but what about start-ups and small businesses that need to target their audiences with a laser beam? With Online Advertising you only send the message to your audience, and no one else.
Let’s talk about how inexpensive it is. Some people claim that organic SEO is free, and this is obviously a fallacy. It’s true that Google doesn’t charge a fee for listing your website at the tops of its listings, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually free. You need to earn that position with an organic SEO campaign, which naturally costs time and money.
On the other hand there’s PPC (Pay Per Click), which allows businesses to buy traffic paying per click or per ad impression. In these cases the results come a lot faster than with organic SEO campaigns, and it is incredibly important to optimize conversion metrics in the landing page to avoid negative ROI equations.
Regardless you go the organic SEO or the PPC way, these campaigns are very inexpensive compared to off line advertising or traditional PR, which is one of the reasons more and more businesses are using the online space as the main promotional channel.
In future posts we will look at how to organize successful Search Marketing campaigns.
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