Search Engine Marketing FAQs

1. What is pay per click marketing?
Pay Per Click (can also be known as Pay Per Ranking, Pay Per Placement, Sponsored Search, Paid placement , Pay Per Position) allows you to list your website at the top of the search engine results worldwide by advertising on keywords you choose that describe your product or service that you provide. It is an ever changing marketplace, the more you bid, then the higher your website advertisement will be displayed in the search engine lists. We can use various tools to tell you how many people are searching online for your business or product, so you know exactly how big a market online your business is in, we can show you reports on what people are searching for in your field and how many times a month people are searching for it. You may need pay per click management to do this. You will pay only when a searcher or clicker clicks on your listing and visits your site. You don't pay to appear, you only pay for clicks or each click through to your site. Your adverts will appear alongside the free search engine listings, see image below for an example.

This way you only pay for the traffic to your website, there are no other surprise costs. Pay Per Click is now not only available on search engines. An example is say you decide the term "mother's day flowers" is one of the terms you want to target. The more you bid, the higher the spot in those sponsored results spaces you will be. Then when someone searches for "mother's day flowers ", if you bid high enough, your website ad will appear first in the sponsored results in search engines.

2. Is it expensive, how much does it cost?
It can be as expensive or inexpensive as you want, you pay for clicks and pay per click management if you prefer too but remember the way it works means you will only receive targeted traffic, ie people only looking for the services or products you supply, you can cap the amount you spend on each click, each day and each month , so you won't be landed with a huge bill, besides, it's all prepay so you tell us how much you want to spend and deposit funds with us. You set the price on how much you're willing to pay for each sales lead and you pay only when your customers click through to your own website. Research shows that advertisers receive the highest ROI from using Sponsored Search when compared to other methods of business advertising.

3. Where will my website ads appear?
You website advert will appear on nearly 95% of all UK search engines and reach over 90% of all internet users if you open pay per click accounts with the 4 main networks, these networks service Lycos, Yahoo, Google, MSN, Alta Vista, Orange, AOL, SKY, ITV, Alltheweb and many more UK search engines, they also service worldwide search engines including the USA, Australia, Europe and the Far East so if you have a worldwide service or product we can set up advertising for you worldwide too.

4. How quick does it take to set up accounts and appear in search engines?
It takes about a week to start seeing results and traffic, this is because we have to carefully work with you and research your website and business, then and only then can we develop a list of keywords to target, we will of course ask for your expert help as only you know your business well. So within 5-7 days you can be appearing in all UK search engines or worldwide if you need to be, and only for the phrases or keywords you choose, so you only receive visitors who want what you provide.

5. Once the pay per click accounts are set up then what?
Once your pay per click accounts are set up you have to constantly monitor your positions as other companies are competing against you all the time for the positions in search engine results. This means you have to increase or decrease your bids often, sometimes on a daily basis. Then there are the constant new listings and keywords to add as maybe your product range increases or you are affected by seasonal occasions, mother's day, Christmas etc and need to target these events as well. We can also track your accounts and see what keywords are converting into sales, applications or enquiries to your business. Times all this work by 4 as there are 4 pay per click networks and you can see why it's sometimes easier to let an established company do pay per click management and all this for you.

Pay per click is exactly that, you pay for each person that clicks onto your website. The way it works is this. You create an account and decide which search terms you would like your website to appear for. For instance if your website is about "green teddy bears " you can bid to appear in search engines when people type in the phrase "green teddy bears " bids start from 10p and there might be someone else bidding who pays 11p so they will appear above you in the results. Each time a person clicks through to your site you pay the amount you set. Between Overture, Google Adwords and Espotting you can be in the top 5 results of all major UK search engines within a week of opening the accounts, which we can do for you. The cost of the per click depends on how popular your search term is. You can bid on as many phrases or keywords as you like as long as they are relevant to your company. For example, some ringtone websites bid on over 1,000 different phrases.

We can also help you with choosing phrases for your bids using our professional copywriters with 7 years experience. We also provide a complete service for your account so we can set the account up and constantly check that your bids are in the top 3 and that nobody has bid more then you thus pushing you down the results. All this can be set up within 1 week and we provide an ongoing service to maintain your positions and add new keywords as and when required.


Click here to read FAQs about free search engine optimisation.