How to Leverage Search Engines for Marketing

Posted on 24 March 2009 | by Ryan Battles

It has been discovered that as much as 80% of all web interactions begin with a search engine (www.pewinternet.org). On the search engine page, there are what are called "organic results", or those results that show up naturally, and "sponsored results", or those results that people pay to have placed at the very top or in the sidebar. Organic results show up where they do based on a complex algorithm that is unique to each search engine. These algorithms are secrets of the respective search engines, and are constantly updated to combat sites that exist simply to exploit their weaknesses (for example, allowing adult sites to appear when searching for "Mickey Mouse", etc.). It basically boils down to certain text phrases appearing somewhere in the code:

• Page Titles
• Keyword tag (this is hidden in the code)
• Frequency of occurence
• Links pointing to the site that use those keywords
• Volume of pages and content on the site as a whole
• Relevance of the rest of the site to the keywords

Sponsored results appear where they do based upon two key criteria: pay-per-click rate and monthly budget. The advertiser will set the rate that they are willing to pay the search engine every time one of these sponsored links are clicked. It is usually between $.03 - $.10, as these fees can add up fast. Fortunately for the advertiser, most search engines allow them to set a monthly budget. Once an advertiser's clicks end up costing them as much as their monthly budget, the ads get pulled automatically. Those advertisers with the highest pay-per-click rate and monthly budget will have higher returning ads, with more frequent appearances. There are beginning to be a number of new developments in sponsored ads, such as rewarding fast-loading sites with higher placement. For more information, read my article on how slow websites cost money. A recent study has shown that 60% of search engine clicks go towards the organic results, while 40% go towards the sponsored results. For this statistic alone, Jovia Web Studio pays careful attention to our own organic ratings, and we take action steps to bring us closer to the top of the search engine results page. The study has also shown that 2/3 of users follow links on the first page of search engine results, so being in that first page is critical. What does all this mean? Well, if your business receives only 10% of its leads through your website, and you have not been optimized for search engine ranking, you could effectively see that number multiply 200% or more. Adding some sponsored results to your marketing mix could add another 66% to your website-based sales on top of that. While of course we would want you to chose Jovia Web Studio to help you with your search engine marketing needs, it is certainly a wise investment to hire somebody who not only knows how to leverage search engines to drive traffic to your site, but also knows how to create websites that increase your marketing objective once people get there. However, that will have to be another post.