As a site owner a key question you have to ask yourself is
how to attract or bring potential customers to your website. Search Engine
Advertising (SEA) is a way to advertise your business through search engines
like Google and Bing where you run an advertising campaign through hyperlinks.
This can help you gain a better visibility and attract customers that are
really interested.
One of the advantages of SEA is that you can monitor your
Return On Investment. Unlike with other types of advertising, you know the
traffic level and the subsequent visits it generated because everything is
measured and measurable. Another
benefit is that you are billed is by pay-per-click. Which does not generate any
costs, unless a visitor clicks on your business’s link. This allows you to
manage your budget properly according to your goals (measured in terms of
visitor volumes and / or sales) and adjust your spending to the cost of a
click. The
cost you pay per click is mainly based on the quality of your advertisements,
your branch and the competition in this branch. If
you aim a wide and competitive market it can cost you dearly in pay-per-click
advertising. I
suggest you target a specific audience and choose specific key words and
phrases, because it is useless to see big and spread your net too wide.
There are different tools to help you in your analysis,
such as Google’s keyword planning tool.
You
can also use key phrases (deep sea fishing) that will allow you to, despite the
lower volume of traffic associated to specific expressions, reach deeper into
the market and find quality customers that really want to see what you have to
offer. Consider
the following example: Suppose you sell car parts, a competitive business, you
can choose to advertise your business using links connected to the keyword
"car parts". This will probably lead to a lot of traffic from potential customers but
1) your display space will be quite expensive and 2) the target audience is
large and may be not looking for the car parts you offer.
So
if instead, you select a phrase that will has a deep instead of a large reach,
such as "BMW exhaust system parts", there may be fewer daily visits,
but you will have a customer who is looking for a specific item on your website.
Even better, by using well-targeted search terms, you can direct the visitor to
a specific webpage, in this case, the BMW parts. By the way, on Google the term
“car parts” returns about 48 million hits (surrounding the term with quotes “ ”
for an exact match), whereas you will only get around 27 thousand hits using
the term “BMW exhaust system parts”.
To develop and implement
advertising campaigns you can use Google Adwords or Bing ads,
depending on the search engines you
would like to use.
For website-layout optimization and
to quickly know the interest of potential customers, it is
important that a page is easy to visit, with a clear message and
good calls-to-action.
Once
you have incorporated these
points into your website it is not
enough to put it online and wait for everyone to come. It is necessary
to review points (changes
in the page contents, advertising, etc
...) so your SEA
campaign has the highest Return On Investment possible.
What are your thoughts on SEA and online
advertising? Have you already
tried it?
We always like it if you share your own experience with us. So
feel free to let us know.
The following Youtube-video with Google’s chief economist gives a
concise insight into the workings of SEA.
For more information on related terms you can visit some of our other
blog posts:
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