Marketing and advertising for new clientele has always been one of the hardest and most elusive aspects of running a business. Online marketing is taking on a more central role in any business marketing plan. Even local brick and mortor businesses and mom and pop shops need to pay attention to Search engine marketing and optimization.

First, let’s talk about where the internet was just a short time ago, and what has changed to make it the most effective tool in history for marketing your local business.
Just a year or two ago, If you owned a local, brick a mortar Italian restaurant for instance, and you had dreams of putting up a web page to drive new customers to your location, chances are you would have failed miserably… The internet or more specifically; the search engines were not configured to favor local businesses, the chances of anyone finding you was pretty slim, more importantly though, no one used the search engines to find your local businesses for the same exact reason it didn’t work.
The trend has shifted over the last couple of years and with the advent of geo targeting algorithms developed by Google and others. The search engines have developed a technology that maps your business and also maps the location of the searching party, by using their IP address and returns results based upon their location. If you’ve used google or yahoo I’m sure you’ve seen those maps on the search results page that show all the businesses near you. So if you search for the term Italian Restaurant you’ll now find all the Italian Restaurants listed, on that map.
So now the search engines really are an effective tool for your local business, but once again, most importantly, consumers are using it, they overwhelmingly choose an internet search when looking for your business. The old paper yellow pages are a thing of the past… even Yellow Pages themselves know this and have been focusing most of their resources on branding their new online directory in hopes of maintaining their dying revenue stream. How quickly marketing trends can change.

Search Engine Marketing or (SEM), as you can imagine has become a very competitive environment. It has fueled the growth of a feverish new industry promising to get your business to the top of the search engine rankings and as with the birth of any new industry, it’s frocked with less than honest individuals waiting to take your money on a promise that never delivers.
On the brighter side, a growing number of highly skilled companies have emerged, who study the search engines, understand what makes them tick and they’ve have developed strategies based upon best practices to move their clients up in the rankings. The only drawback is these successful SEM companies charge an understandably high fee for their services typically $1500 to $3000 per month. They understand the value of their knowledge. Plus the way they achieve their client’s goals costs them a great deal of money in man hours as well, adding to the cost. They pay link farms to post your website URL, they have bloggers that create content that points back to your site, they post articles and manage social networking posts. All of these strategies are best practices and combine to effectively move you up in the rankings.

Be sure to get references from anyone purporting to be an SEO or SEM firm, check the rankings of their page as well as their reference pages. Remember, you typically get what you pay for.

Tags: Marketing ideas, NetCom Interactive, SEM, SEO