When It Is Advisable To Use Paid Search To Market Your Website

December 2, 2010 by FTS
Filed under Internet Marketing SEO

If you have a website and want to attract traffic to it, you have two options as far as Internet marketing goes. The first option is to do search engine optimization (SEO) with the natural results a search engine produces or to take the paid search route known as search engine marketing (SEM). Internet marketing campaigns can be a combination of SEO and SEM but whether or not you need both in your campaign depends on the type of website you have and what you are trying to achieve.

Business owners with websites that they are using to advertise their business and bring in potential customers are probably in the best position to benefit from paid searches, although SEO will also work for them. Personal websites, on the other hand, tend to be heavily content based, particularly those in blog format, and are not advertising a product or business as such. Of course, the owner of a blog based website might also be selling their own wares such as jewellery that they have made, for example, so blog websites cannot be discounted as having a need for paid search. Ultimately, the need for paid search is linked to having a service or product that you want to sell, on your advertising budget (which we will not go into here), and on your aims as a business owner. It is a given that you would want paid search to help you sell a product or service because it shows results fast. You are paying the search engines to advertise your website in their indices as opposed to using natural search results which typically take much longer to take effect. However, there are other reasons why you might want to go the route of paid search.

Paid search can assist with building a traffic of a specific nature to your website such as a niche group of Internet searchers who are looking for websites like yours. It is easy to get lost on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), particularly if you don’t make it onto the first page.

You can use paid search if you really want to dominate the SERPs. To achieve this, you will use a combination of SEO and SEM techniques so that your website appears both in the list of results and in the paid side bar.

When you have a promotion or a special offer with an expiry date attached to it, then it is a good idea to use paid search. In cases like this, you want your promotion to be noticed and bring visitors to your site as a special offer is a tempting call to action. People find it hard to resist an offer where there is a financial benefit or some kind of reward and you will want to be able to take advantage of this.

Some websites are composed of templates and design features that are not friendly to search engines and the natural tendency would be to change the site components to make it more user friendly. If you have a website like this but you do not want to change it for whatever reason, then you can use paid search to offset any negative effects.

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