Pay-Per-Click Advertising Search engine optimization is one choice businesses have when they decide to elevate their Internet presence. Pay-per- click advertising (PPCA) is the other.
With PPCA, companies pay search engines such as Google or Yahoo for each visitor they send to the companies’ Web sites. Pay-per-click sites, also called sponsored links, appear prominently on search results pages, either at the top or at the side of the organic listings on those pages. (The organic listings you see first on the search results pages have successfully used search engine optimization to get up there.)
Be advised, though: PPCA isn’t cheap. “The price fluctuates, and it’s extremely costly,” Wood says. Some estimates put PPCA costs at tens of thousands of dollars a month for a top position on a search results page.
McMahen agrees. “My contention is that SEO is still the best bargain. It’s a very effective return.”
The advantage of PPCA is the immediacy of response. If your site has a premium position on a search results page, you’ll hear from more potential customers more quickly.
It takes longer for SEO to work your site up into the first organic listings, simply because it takes time for the search engines to lock on your keywords, ascertain your link popularity, and calculate the overall popularity of your site, according to the number of persons interacting with it. However, McMahen says that if you can be patient, SEO is the way to go.
Trend Lines McMahen says that localized search, the principal Internet marketing benefit for home improvement businesses, is big and getting bigger. “Google, Yahoo, and FindWeb have all come out with some plan on how to better deliver local search results,” she says. New tools add value to your investment in Internet marketing, too. McMahen encourages all her clients to have the kind of software —she cites Analog (www .analog.cx), WebTrends Log Analyzer (www.webtrends .com), and Urchin (www .urchin.com) — that records every action on their servers, collecting and organizing information for later analysis. “The traffic report will tell you what search engines your visitor came in on, how long they stayed, what pages they viewed, and, most important, what search words they used to find you.”
Understanding what people are searching for can accelerate business development as well, McMahen says. “Yahoo’s Overture and Google all have tools that allow you to see in the last months what queries people have been putting in. This can help you analyze demands for products or services you might not even have thought about.” —Sheila Gibbons, a freelance writer in Colton’s Point, Md., specializes in the subject of marketing.