From Eveningsnews.com
Searching For A New Way To Market Your Business
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Sep 15, 2007, 23:18
Searching For A New Way To Market Your Business
(NAPSI)-When it comes to attracting customers, many small businesses rely on their annual Yellow Pages advertising buy. But these days, consumers are using the Internet more and more to search for local services and products, so being visible in search results is crucial for small businesses. But tackling search-engine marketing is still a bit of a mystery for many people.
What Is Search-Engine Marketing?
Search-engine marketing involves a variety of tactics to get a business listed within search results pages. Search engines typically display two types of search results-natural and sponsored. Natural results are generated by a search engine's own Web-scouring technology and are displayed in the main body of the page. Making changes to a Web site to help improve its ranking in natural search results can be a cumbersome process, which many companies choose to outsource to specialists.
Sponsored results, on the other hand, allow advertisers to pay to be displayed when people type certain words into a search engine. For example, if you own a restaurant in Portland, you would probably like your restaurant to appear in search results when people type "Portland restaurant" into a search engine. Sponsored results are usually displayed at the very top, bottom and right-hand side of the page and are labeled as advertisements. The process of getting into sponsored results is called search advertising or keyword advertising.
Achieving Positive Results
"We use keyword advertising and would not think about living without it," says David Knox of Lightstreams, Inc., a small business in California. "The return on investment with keyword advertising to date is over 25:1."
Indeed, keyword advertising is among the most cost-effective forms of marketing. The average search-engine lead costs just 29 cents, compared to 50 cents for e-mail, $1.18 for Yellow Pages, $2.00 for Internet banner ads and $9.94 for direct mail (U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, "The Golden Search," March 2003). Search ads can also be geographically targeted to reach the most relevant areas, thereby maximizing a budget.
Making it Work for You
Microsoft Office Live (http://www.officelive.com)-a service that helps small businesses take, promote and manage their businesses online-offers a simple, do-it-yourself tool called adManager beta for creating keyword advertising campaigns.
"Many small businesses feel that keyword advertising is a complicated and expensive process, but with adManager it can be simple and affordable," said Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft Office Live.
adManager allows users to create keyword ads, establish a monthly budget and track the results. Small businesses can have their keyword ads appear on both MSN and Ask Sponsored Listings to reach an audience of more than 150 million potential customers.
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