Search Engine Marketing

Frequently Asked Questions

A: PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click (Paid for Adverts). That means every time somebody clicks on your Sponsored Links you pay. A Sponsored Link will show up at the top of page results on Google and on the right column of the same page. In practice, to create Sponsored Links, you need to create an account with Google for example and you have 95 characters to make an impact. Thats 25 for the headline hyperlink, 35 each for the first and second description line and a further 35 characters for the URL, as shown below in Figure 1.

PPC is the fastest way to get traffic to your website. PPC is essentially about making your product, services, or brand highly visible on search engines by buying Sponsored Links that link to search queries. Most importantly you can control what you are willing to pay for someone to click on your website.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process by which a website is prepared and optimized for the search engines to achieve the greatest visibility and highest ranking in an organic search. Once you have optimized your website, SEO involves working on bringing people to your website via various routes, for example links on other sites or forums from articles, from social media, from blogs, etc ... SEO is about getting your website to show up on the left-hand side of a search results page without paying for it. SEO requires patience and a long term approach.

Doing both PPC and SEO at the same time will give you a good balance of near-term and medium to long term success in attracting visitors to your website. The aim is to reduce the PPC side as your SEO success increases, ultimately resulting in a cost free presence in the search engines results pages.

Q: What will I get if I do just PPC?

A: If you choose to do only a PPC campaign, you will get the quickest method to bring visitors and potential clients to your site however, you will always have to pay to keep this stream of visitors (see our PDF price offer for more specific examples of PPC campaigns).

Q: What do I get if I do just SEO?

A: If you choose to do only a SEO campaign, do not expect tangible results for at least 4-6 months. Success in SEO requires good content that will inform and be shared in order to bring people to your website organically (free traffic). It is fundamental to understand that SEO will involve a greater time commitment than PPC by the client. On the other hand the achievements of SEO campaigns are long term as long as you continue to have good content (see our PDF price offer for more specific examples of SEO initiatives).

Q: If I have to prioritize due to budget constraints, how will I get the most bang for my buck?

A: Depending upon which initiative you might have already implemented, either on the PPC or SEO side, to answer this question it is best you have a conversation with our SEM consultant. Some work you might have already done can be leveraged in any new campaigns. However, generally speaking, PPC is going to get you the fastest results, but we strongly recommend that we do an audit of your website and your marketplace in order have the most effective PPC campaign.

Q: I have heard Search Engine Marketing is very expensive, too much for my limited budget, is that right?

A: No, thats not correct. From our own experience doing SEM, we know you can control how much you spend on your online advertising budget per day, per month and per campaign. We here at Styleexpo aim to remove the unknown variable cost from the equation. Thats the reason why we have made our best effort to simply the price structure. And thats the reason why we offer 3 packages designed to meet most budgets.

Q: I already use AdWords, why would I need Styleexpo?

A: Every time somebody types a search query into Google search engine, Google AdWords (or Yahoo Search Marketing or Bing adCenter, or whatever PPC platform)runs a live auction, where all the advertisers interested to bid on the a particular phrase. The 10 highest bidders win the instant auction and appear on the paid search results (called Sponsored Links) of a Google results page, in positions #1 to #10 according to the price they were prepared to pay. Normally the highest 3 bidders show up on the top of the page, and 4 to 10 show up on the right-hand side of the page. Until now, theres no payment. If the searcher clicks on any of those positions, then the advertiser pays a fee to Google, up to the maximum bid amount they listed on AdWords.

To maximize the value of your PPC campaign, this process has to be closely monitored:

• We bid on keywords and review reports showing clicks, total cost, average cost per click and position; a summary of this is prepared for you, the client.
• Along the way, we may raise or lower a bid to see the impact of that change on the results.
• The bid changes not only affect the performance in auctions we already entered, but it also makes the keyword eligible for more or fewer auctions.
• If you bid on keywords to match a phrase, you might be hit for a similar, yet irrelevant search query. We monitor the search queries actively and exclude words that are irrelevant to your business so that you only win auctions for search queries you care about.
• If you care about specific terms, you need to monitor bids because you could be outbid anytime; its our job to ensure the bids are competitive to get the keywords you want.

An effective PPC campaign with an initial set of keywords and expands from there, to catch as many opportunities as possible, at the lowest cost possible. All of this is what we call active PPC monitoring and is much more effective than a passive approach where you create the campaign and let it go on autopilot.

Q: What is Styleexpos Search Engine Marketing offer?

A: We at Styleexpo will develop and deliver an effective and cost efficient online marketing campaign to increase quality traffic/visitors/buyers to your site. This includes initially an audit of your website, an audit of your market/sector and the use of either Paid Search (Sponsored Links) on the main search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) or organic search optimization or a combination of both.

Q: What can Styleexpo do for my website?

A: We at Styleexpo will work with you to develop a strategy for your website to be found by your potential customers. This will consist of deciding to use either Paid Search or Organic Search (or a combination of both).

In the case of Paid Search, we will start by reviewing your business (products and/or services) and your main competitors, in order to identify the right keywords/keyphrases to buy on Google AdWords. We then will implement the findings by creating a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign on one (Google) or more (Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, MIVA, etc..) of the search engines. Once this has started, we will continuously monitor your Paid Search campaign, actively manage it (ie. keeping to your budget, looking for new keywords/keyphrases as needed) and also provide a report with the evolution and results. Because it is a live auction for the keywords you are to be found for, active monitoring is essential.

In the case of Organic Search (SEO), the first part of the process is going to be the same, we will start by reviewing your business (products and/or services) and your main competitors, in order to identify the right keywords/keyphrases and then we will agree with you the best organic tools (see point 4 of the PDF file) to implement this strategy. If you have offline premises, we will submit your business to the main Local Business directories; if you have video content, we will optimize if for the main video channels (ie. YouTube, etc...), if your business has a social nature, we will optimize your presence on all the social networks and also conduct online PR activity for your business (ie. Scribd, PR Newswire, Ezines Articles). Achieving top organic search results is difficult, especially in a competitive market, and you can expect a timeframe of 4-6 months for the first results to kick in.

We would normally recommend a combination of Paid and Organic optimization as the most effective way to lead your Search Engine Marketing, as this combines the short term result of Paid Search and the long term results of the Organic Search.

Q: And if I pay for Search Engine Marketing, how do I measure if its successful and not a waste of money?

A: You are paying Styleexpo to bring visitors and ultimately customers to your business/website. It is important to make clear we can only influence via our campaigns getting visitors to your site. If they do not buy (convert) that is outside of our control, as we are not responsible for the pricing, design or appeal of your products/services. We will send you a report with the main results of the PPC campaigns (either on a daily or weekly basis) to show the number of visitors coming to your website, the price you are paying for each visit, the average price, the location of the visitors but only you will know if your sales has increased.

Q: Ok, sounds interesting, what would this cost me? And how long to see first results?

A: Regarding cost, please refer to out 3 price options. Regarding results, we are confident with our PPC campaigns you would get quality traffic from day 1. For SEO we reckon 4 to 6 months, and it also very much depends on what kind of SEO initiatives you might have already put in place, as well as your time commitment (this might vary between two and eight hours per week).

Q: If you recommend to me to make changes to my website, is that included in the SEM price?

A: No, the fee to perform any technical change to your website is not included in our SEM price structure.

Q: What do you need from me to begin the 1st step? What is my time commitment because I hear SEO is very time consuming.

A: Once you have chosen which package you want, we will arrange a consultation with our SEM consultant to create a strategy for your SEM campaigns. This consultation will take less than an hour of your time and can be either via email or on the phone. A follow up consultation will occur once the consultant has your strategy in place and in a position to review it with you before going live. These two steps can transpire within a week of choosing to proceed. If you choose to do SEO, that will involve further communication with our consultant and can be scheduled on a weekly basis.