Search Engines — An Introduction
Audience: Small Business Owners
Purpose: This article provides an overview of the value of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to small businesses.
Author: Jonathan Bailey — © Bailey & Hall 2006 Article Date: 2006-09-14
Last Updated: 2007-03-08
You can think of search engines as the highways of the internet, directing people to major hubs before they turn off onto side streets.
I'm proposing this analogy as a way for you to consider how (and if) search engine marketing can help your business.
All your marketing efforts should flow directly from your marketing plan and its analysis of your target audience. Take for example two restaurants: McDonalds and The Zippy Diner. Zippy's audience is highly constrained by region. Customers are unlikely to come from more than 30 minutes away. McDonalds, on the other hand, is completely unrestricted by geography.
It makes sense, therefore, for McDonalds to locate a store right next to highway where a high volume of people familiar with the brand pass every day. Zippy's on the other hand finds its best location on the edge of a high-density residential area where it can build its brand with a clientele that is much more localized.
In other words "Location Location Location". The same applies to the search engine highway. If your business is essentially local (say for example in the case of most accountants and lawyers) then any dollars you devote to SEM should pursue the local market. However, if you can as easily make a sale to a person in Savannah, Georgia as Ketchikan, Alaska then you should be seeking to be visible on every possible "highway" that leads to your website.
Apart from pure internet etailers like Amazon.com, most businesses fall between these two extremes. For them SEM needs to be one component of a more comprehensive Internet Marketing Strategy that takes into account other aspects of your marketing plan. The point is that search engine marketing like any other kind of marketing is not free, either in terms of time or money. There is no magic bullet. You have to make choices about how to spend your time and money and those choices should be made based on your marketing plan.
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