Search engine marketing vs. traditional offline marketing. Most often, traditional offline marketing such as TV and radio ads cater to the masses. Out of the tens of thousands of TV viewers or radio listeners, there may only be a handful of prospects who are interested in your services or products. Sometimes, having spent thousands of dollars on these advertising channels doesn’t produce effective targeting at all! It all comes down to ROI and target marketing. Search engine marketing produces high conversion rates. Research has also shown that search engine campaigns produce more purchases, catalog requests, newsletter subscriptions, and software downloads compared to banner ad and email marketing campaigns.
Although many firms perform SEO in-house, research shows this may not be the best option. Most marketers spend less than 1 percent of their budget on SEO, even though optimization can increase site traffic 75 percent or more. A search engine optimization expert can get you better rankings quickly. That’s because the experts spend all day submitting and maintaining listings so they can offer a range of choices in methodologies and pricing that result in the right strategy for your business, product/service and industry. Search engine optimization is a specialized field.
There is a steep learning curve to search engine optimization because every engine and directory has a different relevancy formula, and these change continuously. Search engine optimizers have to be able to tune your site to these search giants. Outsourcing gives you better time utilization so you can focus on your core business.
Selecting the right keyword phrases is the key to a successful search engine marketing campaign. Industry statistics indicate that as many as 85% of all initial Website visits begin with a search engine query, and according to researchers NPD Group, more online purchases originate from search engine listings than from any other source. It’s no wonder, then, that search engine marketing campaigns – which include organic search engine placement, paid inclusion, and pay-per-click, among the major elements – are a centerpiece of every online marketing strategy. A marketer’s first step in developing a successful search engine marketing campaign is optimizing each page on their website with a set of relevant keywords.