Each time a new business enters the online market, it inevitably faces competition that can be either moderate or severe. In order to compete online, businesses need very strong online presentation, which is often put into practice via:
Search engine optimization
One should have the website search engine-optimized to rank well for the target keywords and location, which includes such steps, as creating great content, building a user-friendly website, starting a link building campaign, monitoring Web traffic, etc. The optimization process requires on-going long-term activities to get good results. For better performance, you can buy (or download for free) some SEO research tools, which will show you the necessary information and will help to fix the problems with your website.
Advertising
Another option is advertising. Just as with other forms of advertising, with online ads you need to estimate your budget, identify the target audience, and work on the “creative” (text ads, banners, videos, etc.) Online advertising takes not so much time as SEO and may be practiced as a single-time campaign. In this article, I would like to share some tips that may be useful to you if you would like to implement paid advertising instead of SEO.1. Tips for Google AdWords Newbies
The pay-per-click platform provided by Google is considered the most popular and effective one, which is determined by the great traffic share Google gets worldwide. On the other hand, it is not that cheap to advertise on Google—as for some keywords the competition is so high (when a lot of businesses target the same keyword), that your bids (click cost) may reach 5, 10, and even more dollars. If you plan to use this ad platform, be sure to:
1.1. Have a very well-organized list of target keywords with traffic estimate. In order to work out such a list, you may use such tools, as Google AdWords Keyword tool, as well as professional SEO software, as WebSite Auditor.
1.2. Identify the target audience. AdWords lets you show your ads for the chosen location, user’s age/gender, days of the week and even exact hours. It’s better you know that search habits of your audience, as the more targeted your campaign is, the more cost-efficient it’s likely to be.
1.3. Create good-performing creatives (ads). Go to google.com, make a search for your keyword and analyze how your competitors sell their products and services. Pay attention to the top ads. Most probably, they have good results with clicks and conversions. After that, get down to working out your own texts and images.
2. Microsoft adCenter
Another popular pay-per-click platform is Microsoft adCenter. After Yahoo and Microsoft combined their efforts to create one PPC system, things started to get better compared to the previous poor performance of adCenter. The bids tend to be lower than in Google, but the number of clicks and conversions you get is fewer as well. If you decide to advertise on Bing and Yahoo, you should consider the following:
2.1. If the amount of traffic is critical to you, adCenter should be implemented together with Google AdWords. You can export your ad campaigns from AdWords and import them into your adCenter account.
2.2. Always consider the audience. If you are an IT company that provides development services, you may focus on Microsoft-related technologies (MS .NET Framework) for your adCenter campaigns.
3. Choosing Advertising Platforms Manually
Both Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter have certain limitation regarding your advertising opportunities, including the limited number of symbols you may use in your ad, the brands you can mention, etc. So in some cases it can be useful to find the websites you want to place your ads on. But how to find those good websites?
1. You can go again to Google and see who ranks in the top for your target keywords.If you spot any advertising on those websites, go ahead and contact the webmaster with an inquire on ad options.
2. You can use the Google AdWords Placement tool.
For that, you need to sign up for the AdWords account. Under the Tools and Analysis tab, you find the Placement tool. Learn about the ad platforms There may be different reasons for you to learn about the websites that place ads on their pages. For instance, you would like to set up your own Google AdSense account and have no idea how to organize the layout of your ad pages. Or it might be that you yourself would like to advertise, but hate being limited to the two lines of text (not even mentioning brand restrictions, if you are an Apple iPhone developer, you won’t be able to write that in your ad). So now, there’s a chance to learn which websites place ads on their pages. Again, under the Tools and Analysis tab, you find the Placement tool.Now you need to type in your keywords, pick the location and press Search. You will get a list of results with websites that are in the Google AdSense system. Analyze their stats and feel free to contact the website owner to discuss the ad placement options.
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Depending on your audience, budget, competition level, and many other things, you need to decide how your online promotion will be structured, and whether you need only free SEO tools to rely on, or to buy some good SEO software to boost organic results, or pay for immediate ads on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Just remember the rule of a thumb – do not forget to measure the results and focus on what’s working best for you!
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