Canonball Creative (Dallas Based Interactive Firm) - Search-ing for help in a Search Engine World

In these days of economic hardship, people know what they want; and for marketers, it’s important to make it fast and easy for them to find what they want. Search Advertising is probably the best way to do this. The most common and effective strategies include paid search, contextual advertising and paid inclusion. While these strategies are valuable, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is another important strategy that is growing in popularity for its ability to increase a website’s key word relevance and decrease barriers to search engines.

Paid search (extremely similar to contextual advertising) utilizes keywords in search engine queries to place advertisements on the search engine pages of target individuals most likely to be interested in a certain service or product. Paid search is by far the most popular search engine marketing strategy, with $7.7 billion spent in 2008. This strategy will be especially important during hard economic times as people become more specific and scrutinizing about their spending. Paid search also has the benefit of being one of the most measurable tools used by marketers, who can monitor the number of clicks, bounce rates, etc… of their ads. Of course the disadvantage of paid search is that it can be costly to keep up over a long period of time.

Paid Inclusion is another good search strategy for online businesses, although it does not apply to all search engines. Paid Inclusion is when a website pays a fee (usually either by click or time period) in order to be included in a search engines catalogue. This can be very useful for obtaining a good search ranking on most engines; however a few engines, such as Google, do not provide paid inclusion. Paid Inclusion is certainly a necessity for businesses at the top of their industry, but it might not be worth it for smaller businesses who can’t keep up with the spending of their larger competitors.

While paid search and paid inclusion are both excellent for targeting demos, Search Engine Optimization is probably cheaper and better in the long run. SEO is a marketing strategy that involves using certain tools and strategies to improve a websites search ranking and direct traffic to them. This technique is ideal for businesses who cannot expect to keep up with big corporations pay methods. It is also effective since Google, the most popular search engine, does not use paid inclusion.

Even though Search may seem like a bland advertising choice, it has proven itself as one of the most successful and cost-effective methods out there; and regardless of whether or not you want search ads, you need SEO just to make sure that people can find you. If an online business is going to be successful, it will be (mostly) because of Search.