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Why Advertise Online?

Why advertise on the Internet at all?

These are some of the reasons why you would want to advertise your business or to advertise online.

• Increase sales
• Increase brand awareness
• So people talk about you
• So people don’t forget about you
• So you get ahead and stay ahead of the competition

Is Search Engine Marketing worthwhile?

• Many people are using Search Engines (e.g.: Google.com) as much as email now (91%). U.S. Internet usage is about 40 hours per month on average. (over one hour per day)
• You can reach a broad market 24 hours a day
• You can easily reach targeted customers. These customers are very interested in what you have as they have typed in specific search phrases.
• Many people are searching: Nielsen mentioned that just over 5 billion online searches were conducted across approximately 60 search engines in the U.S. in Dec. compared to 3.3 billion in Dec. 2004 – a 55 % year-over-year increase.
• Many people are advertising in this way: According to a Jan. 9 2006 report, U.S. and Canadian advertisers spent $5.75 billion on search engine marketing last year. That number is up 44% compared with spending in 2004.
  

What does it cost / how does it usually work?

In a nutshell, it depends on how much competition you have and how many pages you want optimized. I generally recommend three pages to optimize as a start.

Below is a really basic layout of how it works so that you can get a feel for what is involved.

What is Search Engine Marketing – (2 major categories)

A) Web site optimization and promotion ( Organic )

One-time setup fees.

• Initial web site analysis
• Initial Keyword research
• Setup baseline to track web stats
• Initial optimization of home page and other important pages
• Submit website links to non-spammy online directories and other websites

Optional Monthly – recurring costs

1. Find and submit web site page links to online directories and other websites
2. Examine web page rankings and make web page optimizations
3. Modify existing pages for 'refresh' factor and create new quality content pages based on keywords in web access logs if required

B) Pay-per-click advertising

Learn more in our Internet statistics section and find out why pay-per-click advertising is beginning to fall out of favour versus organic search engion optimization.

Pay-per-click advertising is when you pay so many cents per mouse-click for each of your link ads a person clicks on. It usually resembles a text ad or image link and when clicked their web browser is redirected to your web site. Your ad may be on another web site, or may be included in the “sponsored links” section in search engine results page of Google, for instance. This gives instant traffic and visibility for a price, and for as long as you have money in the account.

• Pay-per-click costs depend on how competitive the keywords are. It may start at 4 cents per click plus labour rate.
• You can set a daily or monthly limit for pay-per-click advertising to $100 for example, and it automatically will stop and continue however you set it up.

Screen-shot of the Google Search Engine, and the pay-per-click section on the right-hand side.

Compare costs to other forms of advertising

Pay per click costs are much more cost effective then mail-out advertisements when you consider the price of a stamp and printing and that you are generally mass-mailing. The potential clients for pay per click advertising can be very targeted. The best conversions are when you advertise on an appropriate web site and for the appropriate search terms.

• A 4-line boxed plain text ad in the yellow pages printed book for Hamilton Ontario costs about $50 per month
• A link to your website in the yellow pages directory costs from $39 per month per city
• Some Search Engine Marketing consultants charge $150-$300 per hour ( we don’t :)

If you are interested in affordable search engine marketing please contact us and feel free to read more in the search engine optimization pages in this website.