5 Ways to Save on Search Engine Marketing

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Category: Market Your Business , Advertising With Pay Per Click

For small businesses looking to boost their rankings quickly, a search engine marketing (SEM) solution like pay per click (PPC) advertising is often the obvious choice. The concept is simple: you select keywords relevant to your business, bid for positioning on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and see immediate results. You'll pay each time someone clicks your ad, however – and that's where the cost starts to add up almost as quickly as your results appeared.

With small business budgets stretched increasingly thin, it's understandably tempting to rely solely on the "natural" side of SEM -- search engine optimization (SEO). While SEO is a reliable way to boost search engine visibility, results typically take time that a small business may not have.

So what should you do in these uncertain economic times? Take a deep breath and don't give up on pay per click SEM. Instead, give careful consideration to the following five ways to save on search engine marketing:

Use free keyword selection tools

Once you've come up with a list of keywords that you feel represent the products or services you offer, it's a good idea to determine whether or not people are actually searching for those terms. You can do this by using one of the free online keyword selection tools. When you submit a keyword, the tool will produce a list of related keywords along with daily search volume estimates.

Find lower competition keywords

In search engine marketing, competition is measured by the number of people bidding for a given keyword. Such competition can drive keyword bids up to a point which excludes small businesses. Instead of getting caught up in a bidding war you can't win, choose highly targeted keywords, which tend to be longer phrases that are relevant yet low competition and low cost.

Bid for visibility, not #1 ranking

Sometimes that highly coveted #1 ranking is overrated. First, you'll likely have to bid high just to compete. And if you do ultimately gain the top spot, you'll be disappointed to know that the majority of searchers will check out the Web sites farther down the first page of results as well as yours.

Create clear, direct copy

When your copy is vague, you are likely to have a higher click-through rate followed by low conversions – which are the true success metric for search engine marketing. Talk to your potential customers directly and tell them exactly what they can expect when they click on your PPC advertising.

Create landing pages

Remember, anything that increases conversions will decrease your cost per click. Landing pages take a customer directly to their product or service of interest, with no additional clicks or confusion – in other words, they drastically reduce the likelihood that a customer will get "lost" along the way from your PPC advertising to your Web site.

Small business feeling the crunch of tough economic times should not feel forced to forgo PPC advertising. By taking some strategic cost-saving steps, you can make pay per click a valuable -- and affordable -- part of your search engine marketing campaign.