Our marketing manager is suggesting we include something called Google Adwords in our search marketing budget. Is it really necessary to pay for search engine traffic?

Adwords,
Portland, OR

A: Dear Adwords,

Hey, is it really necessary to pay for parking tickets? You might be ok if you ignore them. On the other hand, you might end up spending the night in jail.

Google is currently the most popular search engine on the Internet. You’ll simply get better rankings, more qualified traffic and faster results when you include an Adwords campaign in your search marketing spend. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad, and you control the maximum amount you’re willing to spend on any given day.

If you’re already using email as a marketing tool, investing in an Adwords campaign is also a smart way to address some of the challenges anticipated by Gmail, Google’s free email service.

Aunt May

I’m the VP of Marketing for a national distributor of nuts and bolts. We’ve just launched a new consumer ecommerce portal where the home-handyman can order specialty hardware at great prices. I know that search engines are still a solid way to build traffic to a new website and I found a service that offers automatic submission to hundreds of search engines for only $9.95. Do you think I should try it?

Searching,
Seattle, WA

A: Dear Searching,

Honey, you’re looking for traffic in all the wrong places.

Look, those services aren’t geared towards big, successful companies like yours. And they aren’t going to get you the results you’re looking for. You need high rankings - top ten results in the major search engines, or at least top 30. You want to think about some really targeted keyword bidding programs, a presence on some targeted portals, maybe even an affiliate program.

You don’t have to face this yourself. Get some professional help! Marketing Sherpa has a great guide to SEO services, or visit our links page for a starting list of SEO vendors to talk to.

Aunt May