Specialized Search Engines: Finding the Right Niche - Advertising with Niche Engines
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When search engines began convincing businesses to advertise with them, they had a hard-to-beat pitch. Most other forms of advertising interrupted the user’s experience. With radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines, users were there for the content, not the ads. So right away you’d start off annoying your potential customer, who just wants to get back to enjoying the content.
Search is different. The searcher is actively looking for something related to what the advertiser is selling. As long as the ad is relevant to the key word, it’s not quite the same kind of interruption. Instead of being annoyed, the searcher is given another piece of information to consider, along with the other information for which he or she was already looking.
Niche search engines take this to the next level. If you’re advertising on a niche search engine, you’re reaching a market that you probably couldn’t reach as easily with Google or Yahoo or the other major search engines. Since niche search engines cater to specific needs, if you have a product or service that is aimed at filling the same needs, you might want to consider this advertising venue.
You might find yourself with a smaller pool of prospects, but since your ad is appearing in an area that affords it even higher relevance than Google, you could see a much better conversion rate. Chris Copeland, director of search at online advertising company The Digital Edge, notes that one of its retail clients gets 17 percent of all its search traffic from smaller search engines.
This will matter more as time goes on and the niche search engines continue to do an excellent job of branding themselves. There are already some that stand out in one’s mind: Shopzilla for shopping, for example, or YellowPages.com for businesses. If you feel you’ve already done all you can with the major search engines, or you seem to have hit a plateau in your search engine marketing, you might take another look at niche and vertical search engines that cater to your market.
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