This Might be Painful But…

Is there anything more frustrating than NOT seeing your business come up on the first page of Google?

Yes, there is… paying for advertising that doesn’t work anymore.  I’m thinking Yellow Pages or newspaper advertising.

The fact is that everything is going online and if your prospective customers cannot find your site your business is – for all intensive purposes – invisible.

The good news is that getting onto the first page of Google is easy for most businesses.  You can pay to be there (call ‘Paid Search’) or you can promote your business in such a way that Google will believe that your site is one of the best alternatives for people searching for whatever it is that you sell.  In this case, Google will send you traffic for free (called ‘Organic Search’).

Paid Search

One of the fastest ways to get exposure online is by advertising on Google.  In this case, you can bid on any number of search terms and when someone types one of your terms into the search box, your ad will appear.  The nice thing is that you only pay per visitor i.e. when someone clicks on your ad.

The upside to paid search is that it is quick and you only pay for results.  The downside is that it can be expensive and for most local businesses it isn’t likely that you will get a great deal of visitors using paid search exclusively.

Organic Search

In this case, your site appears in the natural or ‘organic’ search results on Google. You don’t have to pay to be there and you don’t have to pay per visitor.  The majority of searchers will click on the organic listings first so you will get more visitors by being listed in the organic section than you would in the paid section (all things being equal) and you’ll also gain a great deal more credibility.

The downside is that there are only a few sites listed on the first page of Google and it isn’t always easy to get there.  You need to understand what Google is looking for and you must put in the time and effort to promote your site to the point that Google does see it as one of the best alternatives for their visitors.

Fortunately, we can help you on both fronts.  In a perfect world, you want to dominate the first page of Google.  You can have your paid ad show up and have as many of the organic listings as possible being filled with your content.