Search Marketing

Relevancy.

Right now, as you’re reading this, customers are searching the Internet for the very products and services you provide. Not just one or two customers, but hundreds. Maybe thousands. Maybe more.

This is a really big deal. Search marketing completely flips the traditional advertising model around a full 180 degrees. Instead of advertisers seeking customers, customers now seek advertisers. You need to be there when they look for you and you need to over-deliver when they find you. Just having a website isn’t enough; that’s like putting a sign up in the woods – If no one sees it, it won’t do you much good.

Search engine marketing, like many things in the advertising business, is a topic that is often made more complex than it needs to be by the very people trying to help you with it. Part of this is due to the fact that there are technical aspects to search marketing that can be made to sound daunting to people unfamiliar with the terminology. Another reason is that many companies that sell search marketing and other related services deliberately try to obfuscate what they do.

We like to keep things simple here. Not because marketing isn’t complex – as a whole it is – but because complex subjects can usually be broken down into core concepts that are simple to understand. Search marketing is one of those subjects, and understanding it comes down to one thing: Relevancy. If you use the concept of relevancy as your guiding principle, you will never stray too far from the things you need to do to achieve success with your search marketing efforts.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (Bing) want to make sure that people using their search engines get exactly what they are looking for. Relevant search results are the lifeblood of any search business. These companies know that delivering the wrong results to people will ultimately result in their going out of business.

Once you understand how important relevant search results are to the search engine companies, it becomes much easier to master the basic concepts behind both search engine marketing (pay-per-click) and search engine optimization (improving organic rankings). It’s not about writing fancy computer code or using proprietary tricks to “fool” the search engines. It’s really just about making steady additions and improvements to your web assets in ways that are noticed and appreciated by the search engines.

There are two ways to get search traffic to your website:

  • Pay for it.

  • Attract it organically.

Despite what you may see or hear, neither of these methods is generally superior to the other. They each serve different purposes and, as with many advertising techniques, work better when combined with other strategies. But in either case, the secret to getting the traffic to your site is by understanding how search engines assess the quality of your ad, site or landing page and then by giving them more of what they are looking for.

Generating traffic by ranking well in the organic (i.e. FREE) search engine results is a great goal to pursue for any company. Even though it’s not always realistic to assume that you can leapfrog all your competitors and go straight to the top of the page, the things that you do to improve your rankings will have a halo effect on your overall business. This practice is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Sometimes, it makes just as much sense (or more) to pay for traffic than to rely solely on organic search rankings. In these cases, pay-per-click marketing is the most efficient way to step in front of the crowd of consumers looking for things online and direct them to your site.  This practice is called Search Engine Marketing or SEM.

Contact Media provides search engine optimization and search engine marketing services that enable your business to capitalize on the tremendous potential of online marketing. We put you on the map and, more importantly, show you how to generate more revenue from your online presence.

You’ll learn that optimizing your site for search engines is not all that different from making it more appealing for actual human visitors. The plan we provide for you will include a detailed assessment of your current online assets as well what we’re going to do to take them to the next level. The process is transparent, informative and the results are clearly measurable by tracking things like search rankings, site traffic, click-through rates and other easily accessible metrics.

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