search engines

As we wrote in our May 2008 blog post, there are some very good reasons and best practices for having your company name as keywords to trigger search engine PPC ads. However, there are also some potential “gotchas” that online advertisers and buyer of leads should be aware of. Essentially, you want to make sure your company is making the most of these tactics, but not unknowingly paying for search traffic on your company name, especially at a premium price or mixed in with new customer acquisition reports.

Internet Search Engines - Used Like Telephone White Pages

Many business owners are surprised to learn that a website can look good, contain many pages of original content, and still not be found by the search engines. Or even when it gets traffic, the same site may not be effective at converting visitors from natural or pay per click traffic to customers. Depending on the category, more than half the visitors “bounce off” the average website. This means they exited the landing page without going deeper or stayed less than a prescribed amount of time, usually 30 seconds for most web analytics programs.

Since pay per click (also known as PPC) ads on the top and side of a search engine results page appear simultaneously with natural or organic results in the center of the page, there is a lot of misunderstanding about them. The processes behind the two are very different, but both complex. The fact list below help you begin to understand PPC better:

• Focus on return on investment. Understand that fully before drilling into the details of how PPC works. ROI is the best comparison tool for all online or direct response marketing efforts.

From our experience with search engines, online ads, and local advertisers, we can say with certainty that searchers looking for products or services to be purchased locally often do not include the name of their city, town, or zip code in their searches. We’re talking a lot of the time…around half or more in some verticals. From the search perspective, this is significant, because including a city name usually triggers local natural search results as opposed to what we’ll call national results to contrast the two.