Using Search Engines for Marketing
The internet is a powerful medium for marketing and commerce, but it does not always work in quite the same ways as traditional marketing media, like printed ads in publications. For one thing, search engines govern the way most people interact with the internet. When most people are looking for products on the internet, they will use search engines to find them. Taking advantage of the way search engines find and rank pages is cost effective passive marketing.
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is one way of doing this. Since it was founded with a few gigabyte hard drives housed in some LEGO bricks, Google and other search engines have grown into one of the main directors of traffic flow on the internet. Most search engine algorithms, like Google’s influential “PageRank” algorithm (named for cofounder of Google, Larry Page), use keywords input by users to find pages. Search engines then rank the pages they find by (in significant part) the amount of times that the search keywords appear in the text of the pages, with those having the highest occurrence of the keywords ranking highest. About 75% of people never even get past the first page of their search engines’ results, so taking steps to boost your webpage’s search engine results rankings can greatly increase its visibility, and thereby its traffic and sales. Now that around 65% of people use mobile internet capable devices like smartphones to search for local businesses and products, this has become more important than ever.
SEO is a reasonably effective technique. About 60% of B2B marketers claim that SEO has the greatest impact on lead generation for them. SEO tends to generate higher returns per dollar spent than even a lot of other internet marketing techniques, like banner ads and click through advertisements.