Why You Need SEO - Keeping up with the Newest Approaches
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You may have heard of all the services I mentioned above. But search engines are constantly changing; they have to, to keep up with the Internet itself. As a consequence, not only do their listings change, but they frequently come up with ideas for new services to offer. Some of these include new advertising options. You might not be aware of them, but it is the job of a good SEO to be on top of what the search engines are offering.
For example, take pay-per-call. This fairly new service was started by Ingenio very early in 2005; AOL began offering the service in April 2005. Google began limited testing of a pay-per-call service in late November. The premise behind pay-per-call is that some “high touch” products and services benefit from personal contact. Advertisers bid for phone call leads. With the Google service, searchers see a phone icon next to the company’s sponsored listing. A click on that icon lets them enter a phone number and click a “Connect for Free” button to be linked with the other party. At this point, Google calls the search user, then dials the company and connects the two.
As you might expect, pay-per-call is more expensive than pay-per-click. But there is a lot of room for growth here, and the potential that companies who wouldn’t normally think of advertising with search engines might consider it. It emphasizes local search and is supposed to help small businesses. Some think that eBay might start to offer pay-per-call advertising, thanks to its recent purchase of Skype.
And then there’s the behavioral approach, revisited. In the last few months, Yahoo! made a change to one of its advertising programs. The change widens the time window during which advertisers can drop behaviorally targeted banners after a search term is entered from one hour to two days. This change was made after some research Yahoo! did indicated that the purchase window was longer than the company previously thought. It reflects the fact that people are using the Internet differently from the way they were using it three or four years ago. As Yahoo! continues to work on better understanding online behavior, it’s likely that the search engine will come up with more ways to make advertising work smarter to reach its target audience.
Which of these approaches, or combination of approaches, would be best for your business? It can be hard to sort out. But this is the sort of thing that an SEO does every day, for a large number of businesses, many of them similar to yours.
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