What Is Internet Marketing?

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Internet marketing encompasses any activity that businesses engage in online to produce sales or capture leads from people that visit their website while surfing the Internet.

There are primarily two ways of getting customers to visit your website. These are known as search engine optimization, or SEO, and pay per click advertising, or PPC. Each have very different requirements for success but they both share the same thing in common and that is - keywords. Keywords are what drive the Internet.

Once a searcher enters a "keyword phrase" into a search box, the search engines will return a list of two types of results - Organic (or free) listings and Paid Search Listings. Organic listings appear along the left hand side of the screen while paid search results appear along the very top and to the right.

(Image below) Example of Paid Search Results vs. Natural Search Results

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even though organic listings are technically "free", there is still considerable effort involved in promoting your site properly to gain good rankings. This process takes time and money. Anyone who tells you differently is either not being truthful or could be engaging in what are known as "black hat" practices. While such practices may work in the short-run, the long-term imapct of engaging in such activities could mean that your site loses its position in the search engines permanently.

Over the years, an entire industry has sprung up around the process of trying to get high organic rankings for keywords that companies believe will translate into sales or leads for them. As great as getting a top ranking can be, if the keyword that you are trying to rank for is not likely to translate into leads or sales for you, then spending time and money on it can be detrimental. The good news is that there is a way to test which keywords are likely to do well for you before ever spending a dime on SEO and that is what is known as Pay Per Click, or PPC, advertising.

As mentioned above, PPC advertisments are the results which are shown alongside of natural listings (on the top and right had sides of the page) when a keyword query is performed. Although everyone would prefer to have free traffic, the wise use of PPC can give the small business owner a very powerful weapon in their marketing arsensal. The PPC advertising approach is an auction system in which you specify the maximum amount you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on a keyword that you have bid on. When a searcher enters a keyword that you have bid on, your ad is shown and when they click on it, you are charged. In this way, search engines like Google make billions of dollars by offering up their "keyword real estate" to advertisers.

Ready to Start? CLICK HERE to contact us or call us toll-free at 303-715-8213 for your FREE CONSULTATION.