Enhancing Your Site’s Search Engine Visibility with Paid Search
by Dan Klyn
Fact: 93% of links visited [via search engines] were within the first 10 results.2
The quest for prime placement on the first page of search engine results has spawned at least two multi-billion dollar industries: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search. I’m going to focus on Paid Search for this installment of Dan’s Basement because anybody can implement a Paid Search marketing campaign – there’s no programming required. Also, recognizing the fact that overall spending on Paid Search in the second quarter of this year was up 90% over the same period last year,3 there’s a good chance that your competitors are already using this fairly new-fangled marketing channel.
Rudiments of Paid Search
The basic concept behind Paid Search is this: let’s say your company provides 3D/CAD prototyping services to manufacturing and automotive customers, and the “keywords” that you’d like to associate with your website are:
- CAD rapid prototyping
- Rapid 3D prototyping
With Paid Search programs such as those offered by Google and Overture, you can buy your way to the top of the first page of results that the user sees when she searches with those keywords or key-phrases.
How much does it cost? It depends on a number of factors:
- how many other businesses are interested your keywords
- how much traffic your keywords tend to generate
- how prominent on the page you want your link to appear.
Most Paid Search programs are set up as auctions, where the price paid per click is determined by a competitive bidding war between all of the companies who want their link or text-based “ad” to be associated with a given set of keywords.
Here’s an example from Google AdWords showing a summary of the bidding and traffic for three related sets of keywords:
Note that “rapid prototyping” gets a lot more clicks per day than “rapid 3D prototyping.” So even though the cost per click for each of these keyword combinations is around $6.50, the more general keyphrase “rapid prototyping” tends to garner a lot more traffic than when we include the thing about “3D.”
Please also note that subtle differences in the combination of your keywords can have profound effects on the cost and scale of your Paid Search campaign. Choosing the optimum keyword combinations for your product or service can be a semantically sticky situation: choose wisely!
Paid Search Can Make A Big Difference
The best thing about Paid Search campaigns is that they bring highly qualified traffic to your website. Your text-based Paid Search ad will only appear along side of or on top of search results that include key words that pertain narrowly to your company’s service or product. Depending on which programs you participate in, varying degrees or reporting are available to help you shape your overall search engine marketing strategy and to better understand who’s coming to your site via Paid Search and where they went after leaving your site.
You can learn more about Paid Search by visiting Google AdWords and Overture. Or, write to Derek Mehraban (Derek@qltd.com) to schedule an appointment with Q to talk with our expert staff of technical writers and information architects about how we can help shape your search engine marketing strategy.
- Tedeschi, July 19, 2004 New York Times
- Eysenbach & Kohler, 2002
- PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2004
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