Why Businesses Need to Advertise on Search Engines

If you own or work for a business that is not taking advantage of search engines to reach potential customers, you need to read this. The opportunity is enormous and it is only going to get bigger. Name someone who doesn't use search engines to find what they need online. That's right...you can't do it. Google alone receives well over 400 million searches every day(the exact number varies depending who you ask). As a business, you can't afford not to get some of this action.

So what's the big deal with search engines? For starters, they represent the most targeted marketing opportunity you are ever going to find. Forget about wasting money on TV, print, or even online display media. With those channels, the best you can do is target your key demographics, but even then you end up serving your ads to plenty of people who have no likelihood of ever becoming customers. What's worse is you are trying to get their attention while they are watching TV or reading a magazine. They could care less about what you are trying to sell. On the other hand, advertising on a search engine allows you to serve your ads only to people who are searching for terms related to your products, and you are reaching them at exactly the moment they are interested.

I haven't even mentioned the best part yet - if no one clicks on your ads, you don't pay a dime. Advertising on search engines is typically done on a cost per click basis, meaning you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and is sent to your website. Yet another reason why search advertising is so much more efficient than any other channel.

The ability to measure and optimize everything about your campaigns is one more aspect of search engine marketing that businesses love. When you advertise on TV or in print, you know how much you spent, but it is very difficult to know how effective it was. This is something advertisers have always struggled with. When you advertise on search engines, you get data on how many people saw your ad, how many people clicked through to your website, and you can even see how many people performed a desired action on your site (and in the case of E-commerce, how much they spent)! With all of this information, it is very easy to calculate whether your campaign has been worth the costs, and even to see which of the keywords you are bidding on are worth your continued ad dollars.

To make it easier for businesses to attract customers, Google offers tools to help you identify keyword opportunities that you may have overlooked. They even help you project out the potential audience size based on the keywords that are related to your business. To further entice people, Google is almost always running promotions to give you some free money to work with to get your account started.

As you can tell, I think the creation of search engines is the best thing to happen to advertising since the written word. But don't take my word for it. Try it out for yourself. You won't regret it.