Why Is Search Engine Marketing Important to Small Business?

For business owners who are not familiar with “search engine marketing” (or pay-per-click advertising), in essence, it’s the text and image ads that are displayed both on search engine pages, and within the pages of most websites.

These two types of ad placements are referred to as “search network” and “content network” targeting, respectively.

Why search engine marketing is incredibly important to (small) business

• it’s amazingly effective both in performance and cost-effectiveness,
• it’s accessible to anyone with any budget,
• results are immediate, and
• if your competitors aren’t doing it yet, they will be

The power of search engine marketing lies in several factors:

Demographics Targeting

Your search engine marketing ads are not displayed indiscriminately to every internet surfer, they are displayed based on criteria you define, allowing you to focus on your target customer and market. This is accomplished through:

• keyword-targeting – (example: “show my ad only when a user searches for ‘landscaping services’”),
• geo-targeting – (example: “show my ad only to users located in Haddonfield, New Jersey”), and
• advanced targeting – (example: “show my ads only at certain times of day, on certain days of week, to females between 30 and 40 years old”)

You Pay Only For Performance

You don’t pay for your ads simply being displayed, you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and is brought to your website. (sidenote: this isn’t true for CPM or “cost per thousand impression” ad delivery; CPM is an optional delivery method)

Measurable Return On Investment

Furthering the benefit of search engine marketing, is the ability to track the performance of your advertising campaigns with unprecedented precision. A properly implemented campaign’s data plainly illustrates which campaign elements are providing a positive return on investment and making you money — as well as those elements that are not (which are then quickly eliminated).

For instance, if one of the purposes of your website is to collect leads by having visitors fill out a contact form, through properly implemented tracking, you can determine how many leads a given search term (or given ad) generates, and the cost of each lead down to the penny. Taking this example further, knowing the value of a lead (example: you know one in ten leads turns in to a customer; each customer is worth $1000 to your business; therefore a lead’s break-even value to you is $100), you are now able to adjust your advertising spending to maximize return on investment — either by increasing your budget to generate even more leads or by lowering the cost per lead — whatever makes more sense.

Don’t worry, we take care of all the technical details and analysis, but after reading the above, we hope you better understand the incredible opportunity search engine marketing provides. Given nearly any budget and a viable market, search engine marketing provides an opportunity to grow your business.

Contact us today to start growing your business through search engine marketing.