In Part One of “Ingredients for Internet Marketing for Jewelers,” Internet Marketing Consultant Vedran Tomic explained the importance of web design, social media and local search to your Internet marketing campaign. Now, he explains how organic and paid search helps build your web traffic and increase your customer base.
To have a decent return of investment (ROI) on your Internet marketing efforts, you will need to get traffic to your website. More specifically, you will need targeted, qualified traffic. In the case of local brick-and-mortar jewelers, this means web traffic from people in your area interested in jewelry.
Web traffic can be acquired in many ways. In this guide, I will concentrate on traffic from search, because search is arguably the most important channel of traffic acquisition. There are two types of search traffic: organic search traffic and paid search traffic. No search marketing strategy is complete without both of these models at work. However, it’s important to understand each method’s advantages.
Organic Search Traffic
Organic, or natural, search traffic comes from search engine results that are not prompted by web ads. In Google, these results appear in the left side of search engine result page, below the block of results labeled "Sponsored Links." Nobody can pay Google or any other search engine for their site to appear in the natural, organic results. The content of your website must be relevant to what your perspective customers are searching for in order to appear there.
Things to Consider:- Organic search offers more traffic potential: most people, by some estimates as high as 85%, click on the organic results. Consumers often trust organic results more so than web ads or “Sponsored Link” results.
- Organic search traffic is nominally free: you don't have to pay search engines for visitors resulting from organic keyword searches.
- To do well in organic search, your website has to be optimized for the search engines: you have to research and choose the right keywords for your website (keywords that best describe your products and services). Your website should be built in a search-engine-friendly way, and you need to have external links for your website featured on other websites directing people back to your site.
- Search Engine Optimization is complex and may require a professional consultant: If you cannot optimize your website content – through the words on the page, image tags and meta tags – you should hire an SEO professional to accomplish this for you. Therefore, more often than not, the organic traffic will not come for free. However, when it's done properly, search engine optimization can be a gift that keeps on giving.
Paid Search Traffic
Paid search traffic is the traffic that results from web advertisements. You pay for these web advertisements based on a pay-per-click (PPC) Internet advertising model, where you pay a determined rate for every visitor who lands on your website after clicking your web ad. Your web ad appears on search result pages when a consumer has searched for your desired keywords, like “jewelry in Kansas City, MO” or “custom gold jewelry.”
All major search engines use the PPC model as a source of revenue. As an advertiser, you bid on the specific search keywords for which you want your web ad to appear. The price per click will vary depending on a search engine, the competition from other businesses for that particular keyword, and other factors. You pay per visitor and not per purchase. The average cost-per-click for jewelry-store related keywords ranges from $.05 to $3.
Things to Consider:- The Paid search method is less complicated than organic: The results from paid search are almost instant after you start your PPC campaigns. In addition, when your keyword(s) is searched, you will appear on the first page of the search engine.
- It is extremely measurable: Through web analytics, you can see who clicks on your ads and when they click, and what keywords are most popular. The return on investment is simple to calculate as well.
- You have to keep paying for every visitor who clicks on your ads: Your traffic from paid search will go away when you stop paying for ads. To illustrate the difference between SEO and PPC, we can use a real estate analogy. Investing in PPC could be described as renting the space on the front page of search engines, whereas when you invest in SEO you lay the foundation to “buy” the space on the front page of search engines for your desired keywords and audience.
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