Online business is the latest trend among entrepreneurs. But to succeed in the world wide web an enterprise has to adapt to changing technologies and platforms and ensure they are visible to browsers constantly. One effective way to do it is through search engines increasingly known as Paid search now.
Paid search does much more than an advertisement or marketing mailer. It has phenomenal value and with fantastic search engines like Google and Altavista in place the keyword search is bound to change the face of online marketing.
Submitting keywords to search engine, paying for preferential position in search results, will extend amazing benefits and exposure to your business. This is not just to those who do search but through the content on your pages which will get picked up by other search engines too. For any online business getting these eye views is vital, and these are not just page views but potential customers who will buy your products. Not on impulse but those who are searching for the products you are marketing.
Challenges of paid search.
Along with the benefits, paid search comes with its own problems, with a potential of disheartening online entrepreneurs.
It is will be difficult for online businesses to decide what words are to be used as keywords and key phrases and what not to. If the business deals with several products belonging to different categories, then the complication of these words gets higher. Browsers will get frustrated if they are faced with millions of useless options. The keywords should be picked carefully so as to enable the search engine to catch them at the first instance.
Another challenge is the lack of monitoring in an online keyword campaign. One can’t track how many hits/ business/ eyeballs etc a particular search engine/ keyword derived. The words used in an online keyword campaign is many times higher than the number used in print advertisements. Only few search engines such as Google, Yahoo and other big names offer fundamental reports about a particular keyword’s performance and how many responses a particular word is generating. The search engines can’t detect and provide data on whether the browser is a prospective customer or whether he purchased something from your site. This is essentially due to the fact that these can’t access and compute sales data.
There are some software applications which are exclusively created to do keyword marketing activities, these are known as campaign management applications (CMAs) and can do this monitoring of browsers. But for that one has to enter into agreements with search engine providers and then get the destination URL’s for each keyword mix.
The CMAs compile information from sales with their tracking technologies and provide a enterprise with data on profits derived, usefulness, return on investment etc on each keyword combination. For instance a furniture entrepreneur might be of the impression that ‘home décor’ may attract lots of visitors to his site, but most browsers may be searching ‘luxury sofa’ or ‘comfortable bed’ or ‘computer table’ etc. Though the businessman thought he covered all the categories of furniture by writing ‘home décor’ he will not get any visitors to his site because of a flaw in choosing the keyword combination.
Hence it is important that one has a CMA to centrally manage the data on keywords and combination so their campaigns are profitable.