Search Engine Marketing: Making the Connection

There are a number of ways you can connect with your customers online, and if you want to get the best results you need to be take advantage of as many as possible. Because the internet makes it so easy for people to find the solutions they’re looking for, you can’t afford to hope they come to you – you need to meet them wherever they might be searching.

 

The most important place you need to establish a presence is in the search engines – specifically Google, Yahoo and Bing. Of the three, Google gets the largest percentage of searches (roughly 65% in April 2011, according to comScore) so it is the first place you should focus your efforts.

 

There are several aspects to having a presence in Google:

 

–      The search results

–      Google Places

–      Sponsored ads

–      Google Images

–      Google News

–      Google Video

 

These are all part of Google, but in many ways they are independent of each other. We’re going to cover them all in detail in this book, but it’s important to remember that each of them works separately from the others so you want to show up in as many as possible when your customers are searching for you. If you show up in most or all of them, it’s going to create a strong impression with your customers, and make them much more likely to choose you over another business.

 

And keep in mind that the other search engines have many of these same features. We’re going to talk about Google in most parts of this book because they are the largest, but virtually everything we cover translates over to Bing and Yahoo as well.