The Google Display Network can help you reach people with targeted Display ads while they’re browsing their favorite websites, showing a friend a YouTube video, checking their Gmail account, or using mobile devices and apps.

How the Google Display Network works

The Google Display Network is designed to help you find the right audience. Its targeting options let you strategically show your message to potential customers at the right place and the right time. Here are some examples of how you can approach targeting with Display ads:

Move people with Display ad images 

When Display ads show

While the Search Network can reach people when they’re already searching for specific good or services, the Display Network can help you capture someone’s attention earlier in the buying cycle. You can put your ads in front of people before they start searching for what you offer, which can be key for your overall advertising strategy. You can also remind people of what they’re interested in, as in the case of remarketing to people who’ve previously visited your site or app.

Measure your results using the Google Display Network

Google Ads lets you measure how well you’re meeting your goals. See which webpages run your ads, which ads deliver the most clicks, and which sites give you the most value for the lowest cost.

Plan ahead

Changes in the Display Network can take 12-24 hours to apply and may not show right away. Keep this in mind while creating a new campaign or making changes to an existing campaign. You may want to set up your campaign a few days before the launch and set the start date in the future.When there are multiple changes made within a 24 hour period, they may be applied outside of the chronological order of change history.

Deep linking

With app deep linking enabled, your app users will be directed to your in-app content from your Search, Display, and Shopping ads. If you want to enable deep linking for these campaigns, create App Links for Android and Universal Links for iOS, and enable Google Analytics for Firebase to track app conversions. 

Before beginning a search engine optimization (SEO) project, it is important to understand the process involved in an effective SEO campaign. To that end, we break the process down into the three steps shown below and describe the activities involved in each of these steps.

One word on search engine optimization in general first, though. SEO does not start and finish with these steps and the initial work that we do. In order to have ongoing success, it is important to monitor results and build meaningful content on a continual basis. I once read the perfect description of the SEO process:

1. Research
2. Reporting & Goal Setting
3. Content Building

RESEARCH

Keyword Research

Keyword phrase research involves identifying a group of keyword phrases that will be used in optimization. This step is critical and requires a considerable amount of time to find a good set of phrases that offer a balanced combination of two important factors: high usage by searchers and relatively low competition within the search engines.

Determining the most used phrase that contains your targeted keyword(s) is relatively easy. Online tools allow you to enter a particular keyword or words and will return all the ways in which that word(s) was used by searchers in the last month and in what volume. However, the most used phrase(s) is also likely the one with the greatest competition within the search results and may, therefore, not be where you would want to devote your optimization efforts. A more effective approach is to find a set of phrases (10 is a nice round number) that are heavily used by searchers but somewhat less competitive in terms of the total number of search results.

For example, assume you own a business that leases apartments in a particular metropolitan area, “Big City.” Your apartments are only located in one metro area, so you are not going to select general terms such as “apartments;” you are only interested in those searchers seeking an apartment in your city. The logical place to start is with the name of your city and the word “apartments.” You may find that the most used phrase is “big city apartments.” However, when you do sample searches in Google and Yahoo for that phrase you realize that the competition for that phrase is steep. If you go back to your findings from the keyword tool, you might find that a phrase such as “apartments in big city” is still heavily used by searchers but is far less competitive. Those phrases are the ones you will then target in the site optimization portion of the SEO work.

Competitive Research

Once armed with the target keyword phrases, we do a thorough competitive analysis of the subject site against its 7 – 10 biggest competitors (using both offline and online competitors).  We use a series of SEO metrics, including indexed content, Alexa rating, inbound links, domain age, and social media following among others.  Through this process, we are able to gauge the client site’s starting position against its competition and identify areas requiring priority in the subsequent work.  For example, if we see that relative to the competition, the client’s site has 50% less indexed content, then content building would be a priority in the goal setting that happens in the next phase.

REPORTING & GOAL SETTING

After establishing your targeted keyword phrases and starting position relative to the site’s competitive set, it is important to understand what the subject site’s starting position is within the search engines. Doing so ensures that you know the specific areas that need work and provides a baseline against which to gauge the subsequent campaign’s success.

Access to site traffic information is very important. These statistics show how searchers are finding and interacting with the subject site, e.g., which search engines, what keyword phrases are being used, bounce rates, most popular content, etc. Understanding the site’s traffic level and the source of its referrals can also be a critical tool in making other online marketing decisions.

After developing a complete picture of the site’s starting position, goals are set for the SEO plan.  These goals are measurable (one big advantage of SEO over other advertising options) and tied to the specific business objectives of the site.  In the ongoing progress of reporting and follow up, progress towards the plan’s goals are analyzed and reported.  Adjustments to the SEO plan can be made according to the findings of these progress reports.

CONTENT BUILDING

Content is king in search engine optimization. The search engines love text; high volume, high-quality content related to your business will serve you in a couple of important ways.

First, a site loaded with high-quality content of interest to site users will give them a reason to stay and a reason to come back. After all, the reason they came to your site was to find information. Second, you will receive the added benefit of serving up exactly what the search engines want – content. Search engines will have more information to store about your business and products; that information will translate directly into the ranking they give your site for related keyword phrases. For more information on content development and specific ideas about ways to expand your site’s content, read our, Content is Still King.

We often find in the Competitive Research phase that the client’s site is falling behind its competitors in the amount of indexed content.  In those cases, this phase of the process takes on additional importance.

The term ‘display advertising’ has many definitions, which makes it difficult – and perhaps even unnecessary – to define it precisely. Wikipedia gives us the following definition of display advertising: ‘advertising on websites or apps or social media through banners or other ad formats made of text, images, flash, video and audio.’ The difference, however, often lies in which types and formats are regarded as fitting in (or not fitting in) with the definition. For example, many marketing specialists regard videos as display advertising, but at Geomares we consider them to be content marketing because of the huge amount of content-related possibilities that videos offer. Therefore, we choose to use the term Premium Display Advertising in our propositions, and then break the options down into print formats and digital formats. On this page, we will dive deeper into the digital display advertising formats, i.e. banners.

Why use digital banners?

With the rise of ad blockers and the general trend around banners, it can sometimes seems as if banners are no longer an effective form of advertising. However, the opposite is true provided that you have appropriate and realistic expectations and goals. We will discuss a few common ones:

More awareness

Banners are extremely suitable for increasing the awareness of your brand or products. A high level of exposure is needed to raise your profile, and that is exactly where display banners can help you.

More sales
Banners can certainly help to generate more sales, but the results are often difficult to track and measure, especially within B2B where a purchase decision can take considerable time and involve multiple people. In addition, it is very important that the banner message is relevant for your target group.
These Adobe banners have a strong focus on direct sales

More leads
Lead generation through banners is a popular goal, and leads are also easier to measure than sales. In B2B, the end user is often not the one to make the final purchase decision, but you should not underestimate their part in the process. Banners with free trial periods, like Adobe giving away ten free stock images, will probably achieve more success among end users than purely sales-focused banners. Trial periods enable users to try out the product, often without having to ask for their manager’s permission. If they are satisfied with the product, they will probably submit a purchase request to their manager at the end of the trial period. Then it is up to you to nurture your leads and convert them into customers.

Staying top of mind
Many services and products are only purchased once in a while, and when that time comes you want your brand to be top of mind! Digital banners can help you to stay in the picture among your target group, but make sure that you keep varying the message and design to avoid ‘banner blindness’.

Measurability

One of the biggest advantages of digital banners is their measurability. Both the number of impressions and the number of clicks are monitored, so you can easily check the impact of your banners. Are clicks important to your campaign? Then you should certainly not forget to calculate the click-through rate (CTR) by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. This knowledge makes it easy to determine the effectiveness of your ads, which enables effective testing and optimisation for new campaigns.

How do you know which company can get you the results you need? Usually, the proof is in the pudding, but you can typically figure out a basic “Yes, I’ll contact these companies” and “Hell no, they aren’t touching my website” by reading SEO company reviews, case studies, and website content.

To help narrow your search, use the five tips below to help you find a partner right for your business. 

TIP #1 – CLEARLY DEFINE YOUR SEO GOALS

In order to find the right team for the job, you first need to figure out which areas of your online presence you want to improve. You might need a whole new website or you may just need SEO. If you’re not sure which areas you need to improve, then get a digital marketing analysis done. A good agency will have the data needed to prove which areas are most beneficial to focus on.

TIP #2 – FIND AN SEO COMPANY THAT TRACKS YOUR DATA

To find the best solutions for your unique business, you will want to use an SEO firm that can track and measure all of your company data. This includes phone calls, contact forms, site visits, click through rates, and more. To choose the right business strategies for your company, it’s important to make decisions based off of results and not gut instincts.

TIP #3 – GET SEO COMPANY REVIEWS, CASE STUDIES & TESTIMONIALS

The best way to get unbiased opinions about a company? Reviews! One of the best ways to find a reputable agency is to read through their testimonials and online reviews. You will often find these reviews by exploring the company’s site or searching for them on sites like Google, Yelp, or even Glassdoor (to see what their employees think about working for them).

For more thorough information, request case studies from the agency by calling them up or submitting a form online. This is one great way to see what the agency is capable of. Another great way to get a feel for an agency is by requesting a reference. A reputable agency should be able to put you in touch with a current client so that you can speak with them about their own experience and level of satisfaction.

TIP #4 – SCHEDULE A CONSULTATION

Whether you are a block away from the SEO firm or thousands of miles across the country, you can always ask for a consultation. Most likely, the agency will be happy to pull up some research on your industry and walk you through some strategies they have used on past clients. A consultation will help you get a feel for the type of people on their team and their level of passion and creativity.

It’s important to build a trusting relationship with your SEO agency, so use this as an opportunity to see how well you connect. Do you understand everything they are explaining? How is their attitude? Are they overselling it? Do they seem passionate about the work they do? This is your time to ask them specific questions!

TIP # 5 – DEFINE YOUR SEO BUDGET

Before you get invested in a service you can’t afford, don’t forget to plan out your budget ahead of time. It is a good idea to ask about package deals and price ranges early on to see if the service is in your price range. Most SEO companies will have a variety of monthly packages to choose from, which should make your life easier. When it comes time to choosing a package deal, refer back to your original goal to see which package will get you to your goal (Tip #1).

TOP RATED SEO SERVICES FOR BURLINGTON

We’ve worked on marketing campaigns for clients in a variety of locations, during which time our team has helped rank numerous businesses improve their growth opportunities and revenues. Our team never stops learning new strategies and processes to make sure your website steadily improves in its search result position. We combine these new tactics with proven methods to help your business get in front of your competition to attract quality traffic to your website.

1. You’re directionless

I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don’t have a clear strategic goal for what they want to achieve online in terms of gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And if you don’t have goals with SMART digital marketing objectives you likely don’t put enough resources to reach the goals and you don’t evaluate through analytics whether you’re achieving those goals.

2.  You won’t know your online audience or market share

Customer demand for online services may be underestimated if you haven”t researched this. Perhaps, more importantly, you won’t understand your online marketplace: the dynamics will be different to traditional channels with different types of customer profile and behaviour, competitors, propositions, and options for marketing communications. There are great tools available from the main digital platforms where we can find out the level of customer demand, we recommend doing a search gap analysis using Google’s Keyword planner to see how you are tapping into the intent of searchers to attract them to your site, or see how many people interested in products or services or sector you could reach through Facebook IQ.

3. Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share

If you’re not devoting enough resources to digital marketing or you’re using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!

4. You don’t have a powerful online value proposition

A clearly defined online customer value proposition tailored to your different target customer personas will help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal. Developing a competitive content marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations since the content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing and on your blog.

5. You don’t know your online customers well enough

It’s often said that digital is the “most measurable medium ever”. But Google Analytics and similar will only tell you volumes of visits, not the sentiment of visitors, what they think. You need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then address them.

6. You’re not integrated (“disintegrated”)

It’s all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that’s a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT or a separate digital agency. It’s easier that way to package digital marketing into a convenient chunk. But of course, it’s less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels. We always recommend developing an integrated digital marketing strategy and once Digital Transformation is complete digital marketing activities will be part of your marketing plan and part of business as usual.

7. Digital doesn’t have enough people/budget given its importance

Insufficient resource will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing and there is likely to be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.

8. You’re wasting money and time through duplication

Even if you do have sufficient resource it may be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.

9. You’re not agile enough to catch up or stay ahead

If you look at the top online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco, Zappos, they’re all dynamic  – trialling new approaches to gain or keep their online audiences.

10. You’re not optimizing

Every company with a website will have analytics, but many senior managers don’t ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them. Once a strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email and social media marketing. So that’s our top 10 problems that can be avoided with a well thought-through strategy.

So, the good news is that there are powerful reasons for creating a digital strategy and transforming your marketing which you can use to persuade your colleagues and clients. There is also now a lot of experience from how other businesses have successfully integrated digital marketing into their activities as explained in the example digital plans, templates and best practices in our digital marketing strategy toolkit.

SEO Mississauga – Are you looking for a reliable SEO company in Mississauga? We have been consistently ranking well for our SEO services. Mississauga is home to several businesses, corporate establishments, and companies. In a competitive market like Mississauga, it pays to have Adze Ybrant, the best Mississauga SEO agency, on your side. We also rank for keywords related to website design, in the GTA.

Any business owner dreams of seeing the name of their business on page 1 of Google – and with our SEO services Mississauga, this dream can become a reality. We help you put your mark on the online space in a big way, by offering you our Local SEO services. If you are interested in ranking high in the area of Mississauga, then we are here to help, with our personalized Mississauga SEO services.

WE’RE NOT JUST SEO MISSISSAUGA EXPERTS

At Adze Ybrant, we are not just experts at search engine optimization; we are experts at generating revenue for your enterprise. As an SEO company (Mississauga), we understand and adjust your sales funnel to maximize its efficiency, through conversion optimization, lead capturing and lead nurturing.

Our experience with dominating the online market can help your company’s web presence. We currently have a number of clients that are ranking #1 for their keywords on Google. Why take your chance with inexperienced marketers when your company can have the upper hand, immediately, by working with us – SEO Agency in Mississauga?

There is no doubt that our Mississauga SEO agency can help your business grow. Over 80% of consumers, who are interested in working with a company, check online first. So when people are searching for your industry and do not see your business on the first page, who are they seeing instead? Your competition is the one that is getting those phone calls and new customers.

If you are tired of the same mediocre results and want to increase your return on investment, fill out the discovery form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let your competition contact us first. As an SEO company in Mississauga, we only work with one organization, per industry, per city, to ensure that our clients get the best results.

SEO Services in Mississauga

Mississauga is the second largest city in the Greater Toronto Area and listed as one of Canada’s top 10 largest cities with a population of over 1 million residents. The city is home to all types of companies and small businesses ranging from Canadian based multinational corporations, sole proprietorship’s and entrepreneurial start-ups. Integration of digital devices in our lives has transformed the marketing industry, making online advertising more relevant than ever.

Search engines have become one of the main channels for marketing and advertising and Google is used by more than 80% of Internet users as their primary search engine. In a city that is so diverse with a booming population, organic exposure on Google for businesses by means of SEO in Mississauga is more important than ever. Studies and tests have proven that SEO yields some of the highest conversation rates for businesses in generating online leads, customer inquiries and sales.

This type of organic website traffic is obtained around the clock that does not cost the business any fixed amount per visitor in comparison to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) traffic. The region of Peel and Mississauga has a diverse portfolio of businesses that fall within the categories B2C and B2B. Businesses in both of these categories can benefit from SEO to grain organic exposure and rankings on Google. Downtown Mississauga, also known as Square One is home to many large and small companies that are predominately in the service sector.

These are mostly companies in financial services, consulting, engineering, law, accounting and other similar industries. The industrial belt of the city is more grouped together towards the North of the city that includes companies involved in manufacturing, warehousing and logistics as primary categories. SEO benefits all types of businesses and Adze Ybrant has immense experience in getting businesses listed on the first page of Google.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Most people do a poor job of nailing down the definition of digital marketing. The term is less vague than you might imagine from the outset.

What is digital marketing? Any type of marketing for products or services that use electronic devices.

If you can believe it, digital marketing is nothing new. Digital marketing came on to the scene as electronic devices entered our lives. People often assume that digital marketing is all about content marketing and social media. While these exist as types of digital marketing, they are not all encompassing. Digital marketing happens online and offline.

Why Digital Marketing Matters

The amount of time we spend connected to our electronic devices increases every day. In fact, Americans spend over 11 hours each day using electronic devices. I know what you’re thinking: “but there are only 24 hours in a day.”

This might scare you, but we’re so close to spending every waking hour on electronic devices, digital marketing is more important and impactful than ever before. Without digital marketing efforts, you stand to reach almost no one. As a result, your business will get left in the dust. Don’t get left behind. Consider the following types of digital marketing and think about which ones work best for your industry, your company, and your audience.

Types of Digital Marketing

We’ve arrived! It’s time to dive head first into 9 types of digital marketing. Types of online digital marketing include:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Search Engine Marketing and Pay-Per-Click Advertising
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Content Marketing
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Influencer Marketing
7. Email Marketing
8. Viral Marketing
9. Mobile Phone Advertising

Benefits of digital marketing

Digital marketing benefits businesses of all sizes by giving access to the mass market at an affordable price. Unlike TV or print advertising, it allows truly personalised marketing.

The main advantage of digital marketing is that a targeted audience can be reached in a cost-effective and measurable way. Other digital marketing advantages include increasingbrand loyalty and driving online sales.

The benefits of digital marketing include:

• Global reach – a website allows you to find new markets and trade globally for only a small investment.
• Lower cost – a properly planned and effectively targeted digital marketing campaign can reach the right customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing methods.
• Trackable, measurable results – measuring your online marketing with web analytics and other online metric tools makes it easier to establish how effective your campaign has been. You can obtain detailed information about how customers use your website or respond to your advertising. Web analytics can be set up to show you exactly how much money you make from each digital tactic.
• Personalisation – if your customer database is linked to your website, then whenever someone visits the site, you can greet them with targeted offers. The more they buy from you, the more you can refine your customer profile and market effectively to them.
• Openness – by getting involved with social media and managing it carefully, you can build customer loyalty and create a reputation for being easy to engage with.
• Social currency – digital marketing lets you create engaging campaigns using different types of rich media content. On the internet these campaigns can gain social currency – being passed from user to user and becoming viral.
• Improved conversion rates – if you have a website, then your customers are only ever a few clicks away from completing a purchase. Unlike other media which require people to get up and make a phone call, or go to a shop, digital marketing can be seamless and immediate.

Together, all of these aspects of digital marketing have the potential to add up to more sales.

Display advertising

Display advertising is everywhere online. Every website you visit has ads that showcase products for sale. But have you ever noticed you keep seeing the same ads on your social media feeds and the like?

That’s because display advertising tracks a user’s behavior in order to put the right ads in front of the right customers. Display ads are also sometimes known as banner ads.

Search advertising

Search advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is an easy, low-budget way to reach the right audience. You’re able to control who sees the ads with nearly instant results. The PPC ads are shown directly on search engine websites after a keyword or phrase has been searched.

Differences:

In digital marketing, two strategies to get advertisements in front of and interacting with potential clients are often discussed: Display Advertising and Paid Search Advertising. Without any more information about these two kinds of advertising, the difference between them might be confusing. However, they are unique from each other in a few specific ways.

While they are both forms of digital advertising designed to drive traffic to your website (which can be tracked through the impressions, click through rates, and conversion rates on ads and advertising campaigns) the advertising formats differ in placement and appearance. Paid Search Advertising works within popular search engines to make it so that your text-based ads appear within search results for specific keywords, typically at the top, bottom, or side of the page. Advertisers pay for specific keywords and then bid for placement on the page.

Display Advertising looks a bit different. Instead of relying on only the text to drive traffic, Display Ads use other forms of media like pictures, videos or sound. These forms of media are used to catch the attention of the potential customers who is not necessarily on a search engine looking for things related to your business

. These advertisements are also found in slightly different locations, like on specific webpages that have been selected because they relate to your business or are frequented by your target audience. In both cases, the purpose of the ads being created is to elicit clicks and drive traffic to your website. Differences in the appearance and location of these ad types means that each kind of advertisement might perform better for different kinds of businesses within different industries.

Bing Ads & Adwords Paid Search ads typically have a higher average CTR than Display Ads when all industry CTR averages are combined. Although, what is considered a good CTR is different for each strategy. A good paid search CTR is about 2% – 5%. Meanwhile, the average CTR for Display Ads is about .25% and anything above that is good. Taking this into account, when the average CTRs for each industry are compared, the variance in effectiveness becomes apparent.

Paid Search CTR for Customer Service, Dating, Education, Finance and Real Estate industries is significantly higher than their Display Advertising CTR. For example, Customer Service had a 2.40% CTR in Paid Search and a .20% CTR in Display Advertising while Dating had a 3.40% CTR in Paid Search and a .52% CTR in Display Advertising. Industries such as Legal and Advocacy have what are considered to be better CTRs in Display Ads and lower ones in Paid Search Ads. For example, the Legal industry had a 1.35% CTR in Paid Search but a .45% CTR in Display and the Advocacy industry had a 1.72% CTR in Paid Search and a .52% CTR in Display. Therefore, creating a successful advertising strategy for your business will rely heavily on your industry.

It might be more effective for you to use Paid Search, Display Ads, or both when attempting to draw more traffic to your business. At Direct Placement, LLC we have Google Certified and Bing Ads Accredited professionals who are ready to help you determine what strategies and campaigns would be most effective for driving relevant traffic to your website. Contact Direct Placement, LLC to find out more about what advertising strategy would be best for your business and begin transforming your business one click at a time!

Paid search marketing is known in the marketing and advertising industry by many different names (and abbreviations).

Search engine marketing (SEM, which can include SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), search engine advertising, sponsored listings… the list goes on. And that’s before you start to involve the names of specific advertising programmes and ad types, such as Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), Google Product Listing Ads, Google Shopping Ads, and Bing Ads.

Paid Search Marketing

Paid search marketing is a critical part of your pay-per-click (PPC)campaign strategy. There is no better time to advertise than when someone already has determined they want your product or service and is actively looking to buy.

In a nutshell, you bid on the keywords related to your business to get your ad in front of users and pay the search engine a small fee if your ad gets clicked.

If your campaign is set up right, this can be a very profitable way to get in front of potential customers who are actively looking for your solution. However, a badly designed campaign can waste a lot of money.

As you can probably imagine, running a successful paid search campaign requires a lot of time and attention. At Disruptive, we constantly monitor and optimize our clients’ accounts to ensure the best results possible.

Paid search marketing isn’t easy, but the results can redefine success for your business.

The key players in paid search marketing

Paid search marketing usually refers to a pay-per-click model where advertisers pay only when people click their ad and visit their website. Google is the 800 lb gorilla in the space; through their ad platform called AdWords, advertisers create text ads that appear on the search engine results pages.

There are many other players (Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, etc), and many types of ads beyond text (banners, video, sponsored email, etc).

How to be successful, and why reaching the right audience matters

Usually, advertisers have something specific they want you to do on the site (like make a purchase, or submit your contact info), but since they are charged by the click, they pay whether or not you buy, sign up, or just exit the site immediately.

Advertisers don’t want to waste their money paying for clicks where people aren’t likely to take action, so they set up targeting to reach a specific audience that’s more likely to be interested in their offer.

Targeting can include: only showing the ad to certain locations, certain languages, people who have visited certain websites, and most commonly – people who typed certain keywords into Google.

How advertisers decide what to spend

Advertisers can track just about everything that happens in paid search marketing – how often their ads were seen, how often they were clicked, how many leads and sales came from those visits, etc. This lets them know how valuable the clicks are, and helps them decide how much they’re willing to pay for clicks.

Using a tool like AdWords, advertisers set their “bids” for keywords. Most engines won’t charge advertisers more than their bid, and may charge significantly less.

How engines decide what to charge

Engines like Google use an auction and their own algorithm in real time to decide which ads to serve, and in which order.

They try to determine not only who’s willing to bid the most, but also whose ad is most likely to get clicked.

Remember, Google makes no money if the ad is not clicked, so they want to serve the best ads. 1st position goes to the best ad that’s likely to get clicked, not just the highest bid. The top ad may actually cost than other ads if the click-through-rate is strong.

What is SEO and How Does It Work?

Back in the days when people still used paper telephone books to look up local companies, there was an old strategy of giving your company a name that started with the letter “A”. That way, it would be your business that appeared at or near the top of the list.
SEO is about getting a company’s website to rank near the top of search engine results for specific keywords – but the strategies and tactics have become much more sophisticated than they were in the era of the telephone book!

Say for example, that you own a company that sells steel toed, safety shoes. It is very likely that there are people who are online right now who are not familiar with your company but are looking to purchase a pair of safety shoes. When they type the words “safety shoes” into the search field, the search engine will give them a list of results – ranking websites according to what programs called spiders deem to be the most relevant to the user’s search. Having a good SEO marketing strategy in place can help to ensure that your website appears near the top of the list, thereby increasing your odds of gaining a new customer.

What Makes For a Good SEO Marketing Strategy?

SEO should be considered less like a single tactic and more like a complete toolbox of strategies to help your website stand out amongest all the other “noise” on the internet.

SEO starts with website design and content. The search engine spiders of Google, Yahoo and Bing look for elements such as having the right keywords incorporated into the content, proper use of Meta tags, page load time and website responsiveness.

Adding fresh and engaging content at regular intervals will keep visitors coming back to your site. When your site receives return visitors who actually take time to read and interact with your content, search engine spiders take notice and rank your site higher.

There are also other elements of SEO that don’t take place on your website at all. Off-site SEO involves getting other websites – ones that are of a certain quality and authority – to link back to your website. The best way to do this is to have engaging and useful content that others will want to share.

Did you know?

• There are on average 3.5 billion searches on Google every day
• 97% of consumers have used the internet to research products and services in their local area
• 92% of searches only look at the first page of results
• More than 50% of searches on Google are on mobile devices.
• The website at position #1 in the search results gets 300% more clicks than the website in the #3 position!

So, what are the benefits of getting ranked higher in Google Organic Search?

If you get your business to rank higher in Google, then it’s obvious that you’ll get more traffic to your website and more enquiry and more traffic means more business.

Research shows that on an average, the #1 ranked site in search results gets 32.5% of clicks. The #3 site gets 11.4%. Whereas the #10 site (the last place on the first page) gets only 2.4% of clicks. The full results are shown in the table below.

92% of people only look at the first page of search results. So it’s important for your site to be on the first page. But that’s not the final aim. Getting higher up the first page will significantly increase the amount of search engine traffic you receive.

Research has shown that 50% of users who search for a local business on a mobile device visit or call that business within a day4.