Search Engine Marketing

Where Are the Paid Search Opportunities?

Maybe you've heard about paid search but you're not so sure what it is. Or maybe you've used some kinds of paid search but don't know what else is out there. Either way, most businesses can benefit from exploring the whole range of paid search opportunities.

• Directories. Directories are the oldest form of search marketing, starting with Yahoo! in 1994. Directories are quite simple, but also very powerful. Any business can submit their site to be considered for a listing under one of Yahoo!'s many categories. If the human editor for that category accepts, you're in—as long as you pay the $300 fee. (Non-profits are free.) Yahoo! isn't the only game in town. Open Directory is free to all comers. And there are hundreds of specialty directories in every industry and on every niche subject. Directories bring attention for your site, because visitors to directories may then visit your site. But organic search engines also pay attention to directories, because those human editors have high standards, allowing only high-quality site to be listed.
• Paid inclusion. Some Web sites have trouble getting their pages indexed by organic search engines. Or their content changes frequently, so perhaps they need their pages re-indexed every few days. For those sites, paid inclusion is the answer, at least for Yahoo! Search. For small sites, URLs can be submitted to Yahoo! one by one to be crawled with 48 hours, but large sites use trusted feeds, where an XML file containing the data for your page is submitted directly to Yahoo!. Yahoo! charges an annual fee and also a per-click fee each time your result is clicked by a searcher. Paid inclusion does not help you rank higher in organic search, but can ensure that your pages are in the index and are refreshed frequently.
• Paid placement. Pioneered by Goto.com (which was later renamed Overture and then bought by Yahoo!), paid placement is what most people think of as paid search. At its most basic, paid search allows you to bid on any search keyword the amount of money that you're willing to pay for a click to your site. The marketer that bids the most is the #1 result. Google's AdWords program varies the formula slightly, so that your site can be the #1 paid result if its ad has high clickthrough rates even if you weren't the top bidder. But the basic premise is the same. Most search marketers find paid placement to be very profitable, but some are beginning to complain that rising per-click fees and click fraud are draining more of the profit away each year.
• Contextual ads. Paid placement soon begat contextual advertising, where search marketers also bid for the highest per-click fees, with the winner getting ad space on content sites, such as Petplace.com (check out the right column of their home page for ads served up by Google's AdSense program). Some search marketers find contextual ads to be almost as good as paid placement, while others find that they get far lower clickthrough and conversion rates. In response, Google has introduced Smart pricing, where marketers get a discount on per-click fees for keywords that convert at a low rate.
• Shopping search. For some search marketers, nothing beats shopping search. You attract searchers ready to buy and can direct them right to the buy page for that product on your site. One study showed that searchers at shopping.com are twice as likely to buy and they buy twice as much as searchers at traditional search engines. Yahoo! Shopping is the market leader, with shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and Shopzilla also major players. If your Web site sells a product line offered by shopping search engines, you may find no batter way to spend your marketing budget.

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