Proven method for driving people to your website

Every company wants a top ranking that allows potential customers to find their website quickly on the first or second page on popular engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are proven tools for increasing your presence and ranking on the Web. And, as a recent Harris Interactive research poll shows, about 80% of all Internet traffic begins at a search engine.

SEO and SEM each have their own distinct rules, and require time and dedication to be done with respectable returns. The rewards in potential marketing power are awesome. There has never been a better tool devised for marketing products and services that people want than the Internet. The trick is getting your products or services to the top of the list, something the Overland Agency specializes in.

Paid Search Really Pays

Paid search is the primary online vehicle for connecting buyers to sellers within search engines. And it’s an effective one, with 30% of web users clicking on paid ads. According to the research firm Piper Jaffray, average customer acquisition costs through a search engine are anywhere from $7 to $10. Yellow pages, the nearest competitor, costs twice as much ($15 to $25). E-mail campaigns are almost six to eight times as expensive ($40 to $80). And then there is organic search, which is not guaranteed and also takes many months to show results. Paid search, however, is immediate. Simply put, paid search is a must for campaigns and new product/service launches.

How Paid Search Works

Paid search has clear guidelines. While the Overland Agency believes strongly in this avenue and its power to boost leads and sales for a wide variety of organizations, you should never do paid search if you can’t attach your initiative to a focused, online business goal (attracting leads or specific sales, etc.). Here are other rules you should follow:

• Don’t over-spend for top position. Take the time to understand your maximum bid/daily spend in terms of the overall cost to generate a lead or sale.
• Avoid over-managing your ads. Make doubly sure that you have a relevant sample size before making changes to your campaign. Search campaigns including pay-per click (PPC) require time to be optimized.
• Don’t limit your campaigns to Google, since the lower-cost options offered by competing search engines such as MSN, Yahoo! and ASK can lower your overall cost and broaden your reach.
• Look at local search options, a growing segment that allows you to target your ads to the appropriate region, state, or city where you do business or have target audiences.
• Reserve the time and money to analyze your results when you do a paid-search campaign, and adjust for better performance. In doing this you will connect analytics to your original conversion (sales) goals and relate your campaign with a fixed bottom line return: the number of leads and/or sales you are trying to generate.
• Don’t forget to look from time to time at your competition to see what they are doing in both paid and organic search strategies. You should never plagiarize, but by benchmarking against competitors’ efforts, you can gain valuable insight into elements to incorporate into your own campaigns.
• Mobile search — which is driving online ad campaigns to mobile telephones and PDA’s is another rich and growing source of leads and sales for the right companies.