Is free search engine traffic enough?

With the search world continually changing, we don't advise any of our clients to solely build their online marketing campaigns on free search traffic. Not even on search engine marketing alone. Just as investors suggest diverse portfolios, we suggest developing a marketing campaign that combines both the free and paid search engine marketing along with alternate online marketing strategies.

Are you a small business with limited resources? Are you apprehensive about investing in online marketing? Our advise to you is quite simple: take it one step at a time.

The first and most important step is to have a well designed, well optimized site that has good rankings within the major free search engines. Now this can take some time - up to three months and at times even longer. In this case you may want to consider paid inclusion, however, understand that you are paying for inclusion. This does not cover placement. Depending on how well your site is built, it could rank #1 or #100000. Good optimization is critical in order to achieve top placement even within paid inclusion engines. So is there any benefit to paid inclusion? Sure. Speed! The benefit of paid inclusion is that you will see the results of your optimization efforts quickly (within 48 hrs.) and can make any necessary tweaks to improve ranking.

Limited Pay Per Click Programs can be an effective method of bringing qualified traffic to your site as many searchers believe these ads are relevant to their search query and tend to click. While PPC campaigns can be fruitful, there is an expense to reaping such rewards. Pay Per Click Programs require a considerable amount of time to manage the bids, not to mention each click will cost you and once your money runs out you'll loose all the PPC traffic.

Well known PPC programs demand relevant listings so you need to produce pages that are on topic and well optimized. Google PPC Program (AWS) also requires relevant ads.

But the most important factor, above all others, is to provide relevant content to the users! You can't expect to attract your target audience, much less expect them to come back, if your site is not on topic and don't provide the information or product features users are searching for! So, above all, be sure your website is well optimized for users.

Both paid inclusion and Pay Per Click Advertising can be a great benefit to your business. However, your site must be relevant, well optimized and achieving high rankings in the major free engines. Otherwise, it may not be worth the time or money.