After years of taking for granted free search engine listings, many of us have grown to expect consistently flowing traffic to our websites. We knew that as long as we insterted a couple of meta tags in our HTML pages, our site would likely appear on the first or second page of the search engines.

Alas, things have changed. It has become extremely difficult to achieve a prominent ranking on every keyword we would like to associate with. Perhaps even more importantly, a website now has to wait months until it can achieve a good ranking. So, free traffic is still possible, but too much is left to chance and out of our control.

Good placement in Google's natural search results is major accomplishment, but it leaves you completely at the mercy of the search engine.

If tomorrow Google or Yahoo decide to change their algorithm-the criteria they choose to rank Web pages-your site could practically disappear from the search results! What would that do to your business?

Does that ever happen? It has, and when it did, it sent many businesses into a crisis that would reverberate for months.



Discover the Magic of Paid Search

Gain complete control of your online advertising campaign and watch your leads, opt-ins and orders pouring in. With a program such as Google Adwords, you can make long-term marketing plans, knowing you will always be visible to buyers who are searching for your products or services.

Here are some of the advantages Pay-Per-Click holds over a free Google listing:

Instant publishing of your ads
Pick a few dozen keywords, design your text ad, set the bid price and click "Submit." Your advertising campain is underway, instantly. Make changes, test alternate ads, adjust your bid, and your changes will be reflected within minutes.

Realtime auction for keywords and phrases
You determine your own advertising budget by submitting bids that make sense to you. You can adjust your bids on the fly to maximize your return.


Measurability
Adwords offers the tools you need to measure the effectiveness and costs of your advertising. See how many times your ad appears, how many users click on your ads and what they are searching for, your clickthrough rates (CTR), actual cost per click and more to help you monitor your campaign's performance.

Most importantly, however, is Pay-Per-Click's ability to measure your Return On Investment (ROI.) Get immediate feedback on how profitable your online efforts are and what your breakeven point is.

Target Marketing
The ability to target your ads to your specific audiences is unmatched by any other advertising medium. You decide who is going to see your ad and visit your site, what they are going to see, and when they will see it. By knowing in advance what a user is search for, you can fine-tune your message to easily meet the customer's need. And when they find what they want, they'll place an order. With you!

Unintrusive
The sponsored ads listed on the right side of Google's results page are not offensive, flashy or annoying. They are just there to offer your customer what she is looking for. When the customer seeks you out and finds you, he'll be grateful your ad appeared where he was searching. With Adwords, your ad is visible to the user only when they are searching and does not intrude on their surfing experience.