To be highly effective, a company needs to employ multi-marketing strategies, using a variety of approaches to reach their intended audience. An increasingly popular approach due to its low costs and large rewards is search engine marketing (SEM). With any other form of advertising, whether it is on a billboard, TV ad, or ad copy in print, there is a fee your company pays for a particular ad to be seen (referred to as “impression”.) There are two approaches to search engine marketing, both offering vast advantages over other forms of advertising.
The first is search engine optimization (SEO) which focuses on finding and integrating the most effective keywords and manipulating meta-tags to achieve high positioning on search engines. This is referred to as organic advertising because there is no cost for your website URL to be displayed.
The second approach is paid internet advertising, which ranks your URL and ad copy based on a combination of keyword relevance and a bid system that charges per click on your ad.
A company can utilize one technique or the other, or both simultaneously. Both organic SEO and paid internet advertising have high return and impression rates, if prepared and managed properly. Paid internet advertising is literally the only form of “waste-free advertising”, in that you are only charged by the search engine when your ad is clicked on and your website is seen. Using SEO on the other hand, exposes your website to your audience completely free of charge, but might not draw the same amount of traffic as paid advertising.